response 61 of 232:

Jan 18 15:21 UTC 2003

Re #51:  It's also hard to get the sheepskin if your skills are up
to swimming ten laps in the pool but the program requires crossing
the English channel.  If the objective is to have doctors, lawyers
and businesspeople, isn't it important that they *graduate*?

response 63 of 232:

Jan 18 19:54 UTC 2003

I just think people's biases are showing when they insist this issue be
separated from athletic and legacy preferences.  It's pretty blatant
hypocrisy IMHO.

response 65 of 232:

Jan 19 02:23 UTC 2003

fag.

response 67 of 232:

Jan 19 18:02 UTC 2003

Re #64: So preferences are okay as long as they benefit you personally?

response 69 of 232:

Jan 19 19:42 UTC 2003

The fact is, all resources available within a limited timeframe are 
limited, and allocation of them is going to make some people feel left 
out no matter how they are allocated.  The goal of these programs is to 
mitigate the societal damage done by always choosing the same groups of 
people to leave out.

response 71 of 232:

Jan 19 20:09 UTC 2003

re resp:68: Asserting that affirmative action benefits everyone does 
not convince me that it really does so, or really will do so.

I don't think affirmative action ever really benefits anyone, except in 
the very short term.  It gives an unearned bonus -- based on race; it's 
called "discrimination" -- to an individual.  The individual then has 
to accomplish the same from the opportunity as others, who have not 
been given a bonus, and can be expected to be more qualified.  The 
benefitting individual is then at a disadvantage, making him more 
likely to fail.  Also, everyone who is ever in that same position 
again, and who *might* have benefitted from that bonus, is suspect as 
well.  Meanwhile, a more qualified individual who didn't receive a 
racial bonus is left out of the opportunity he otherwise would have had.

Where's the benefit?  That society has "done something"?

response 73 of 232:

Jan 19 20:52 UTC 2003

Many employers only look to prestigious schools when recruiting new graduates.
Many graduate schools calculate the difficulty of the undegraduate program
into their weighing of an applicant's GPA. Having a lower GPA at a more
prestigious school isn not necessarily an impediment to future success - and
in many cases it can create a multi-generational advantage (as lesser
intellects descended from graduates are given bonus points as the children
of alumni.) The Republican Party has given us a couple of interesting cases
in point - Dan Quayle, admitted to law school on a "color blind" affirmative
action program, despite a dismal undergraduate performance, and GW Bush,
admitted to Ivy League undergraduate and graduate institutions as a legacy.
But for the preference, would either have achieved the same level of success?
(And this, despite Quayle's being described as "vapid" by a former professor,
and Bush's admitted "Gentleman's C" average.)

Further, for a variety of reasons, schools across the board seem to be
turning out students who are less suited to college performance than past
generations. Colleges are spending ungodly amounts of money on remedial
education, and not just for "affirmative action" students. There's
something more than a bit racist in the assumption that students who are
admitted through "affirmative action" are academically inferior and
undeserving, when associated with the expression or implication that those
who came in as legacies, or through less visible diversity programs, are
deserving. 


With regard to Texas, while the "10%" formula has led to a bounce-back in
enrollment of minorities at the undergraduate level, the same cannot be
said for Texas graduate schools.

Something that I find interesting is the Republican call for a
"color-blind" society. Prior to 1964, the factions of the Republican party
which are most obsessed with race weren't making that call. They seemed
perfectly content to let the Constitution make color-based judgments, to
their own benefit. Should we be surprised that their new demands for
"color-blind" laws *also* work to their advantage?

response 75 of 232:

Jan 20 22:26 UTC 2003

Re: 73 - that doesn't do you much good if you flunk out.  The article I quoted
above reported that in some cases, black drop-out rates were twice those of
white students.

response 77 of 232:

Jan 21 03:11 UTC 2003

Maybe legacies only get 4, but athletes get 20, the exact same number as
affirmative action students.  So if we rephrase aaron's statement to
talk about athletes, instead of legacies, I think his point still stands.

response 79 of 232:

Jan 21 05:10 UTC 2003

I've taught a couple football players.  Failed one.  One struck me as being
in over his head, the other struck me as quite smart, but short of time to
study adequately.  I'm inclined to think that football players don't, as a
rule, get much in the way of an effective education in their classes.  I don't
particularly get upset about this, because presumably they are getting a
chance to excell at football and open up some pretty good opportunities.
They are getting something out of the college experience - just not what most
other students are getting.

Note also that stereotypes about dumb football players abound on campuses.
This is not particularly accurate, but if you encounter a football player in
the classroom, you might easily get that impression.  I think some of the
same artificial factors that encourage stereotypes about dumb football
players can function to encourage stereotypes about dumb blacks.  I consider
the latter much more socially harmful.

You don't particularly see stereotypes developing about "dumb students whose
parents attended this college".  I think that's because unlike blacks and
football players, legacy students aren't easily identifiable to other students.
So whatever problems are being caused to individuals, the social group is
not being much harmed.

response 81 of 232:

Jan 21 07:56 UTC 2003

Even Affirmative Action supporters don't tend to be terribly excited about
it, because its opponants are right that it's a lousy system.  It's just not
a lousy system in the way the opponants seem to think.  Just as nobody should
get sick and need medical care, nobody should be discriminated against and
need Affirmative Action.  But at least in the cases of sociallly acceptable
diseases, we don't withhold medical care because it's an unfair disadvantage
to the healthy people.

Taking that discrimination as a disease a step further, if we were to instead
consider the case of an applicant who had spent their childhood battling some
debilitating disease and instead ended up with an A- average instead of an
A average, we'd probably consider them far more worthy of adulation and
admission than a healthy A student.  By that thinking, if we can acknowledge
that discrimination makes life harder for some students than others, perhaps
a more worthwhile debate would concern the number of bonus points to award,
rather than whether to award them at all.

The stigma is of course a concern, but we are talking about educational
institutions here.  Perhaps that could be addressed with better teaching about
these issues.  Then again, I'm not convinced the stigma has any real
relationship to Affirmative Action at all.  This country has hundreds of years
of history of racial discrimination.  Blaming that on the last few decades
of desegregation efforts seems a little simplistic.

response 83 of 232:

Jan 21 14:56 UTC 2003

re resp:79: "Legacy" students, children of previous graduates, offer a 
small benefit to the university, of building up multi-generational 
loyalty to the school.  They're from families who have demonstrated 
they can succeed at the university, and so they get a small benefit 
from the university.  And yes, they probably do, as a group, donate a 
lot more money to the school than the general populaton.  Money talks.

Athletes, similarly, bring money into the university.  They bring in a 
lot of it; millions of dollars if it's the U-M and the athlete is a 
football player.  They bring prestige, too.  More people know of 
Michigan's championships in football and basketball than they do about 
the new life sciences initiative.  More people know Michigan by their 
sports department than know that Michigan has a graduate school.

re resp:81, Interesting analogy, medical care and affirmative action.  
It doesn't fit, though.  With medical care, we treat the individual 
people who need it.  Not everyone gets heart surgery.  With affirmative 
action, we apply it to entire segments of the population.

When you talk about addressing it with "better teaching about these 
issues", what it really means is indoctrinating students with different 
political beliefs.  I think universities should not be doing that.  
They *do* do it, but they shouldn't.