I almost prefer honest, outright, mathematically incontradictable racism to the American variety, where considerations favoring a diverse student body counsel holistic evaluation of candidates such that a Goldberg or Tanaka might, despite being a superior student of math, might be less the student the university needs than certain other students
I understand your point about honesty being preferable if you're going to discriminate - although I'm not sure if I agree - but why do you think that what Soviet universities did was in any way honest or open?
Soviet laws did not allow any discrimination based on origin - there was no dispute about that. (Strangely enough, there is a dispute about whether the US law allows it). So a group of people to carry out the dirty work needed to be selected, and secret directives needed to be given to many others. A variety of subterfuges had to be used - first, to break the blinding on the written exams (typically, they would assign specific seats to Jewish students as they came into the auditorium and gave their names; the exam papers would then be marked in some way when they handed them in; but there were many other stratagems). Then, they'd send grown men to intimidate, bully, and humiliate school students during the oral exam, to try to "bury" them with questions that they couldn't possibly answer, and finally, if they got some uppity gold medalist from the Math Olympiad who would answer them, or someone as strong as Frenkel (who went on to teach at Harvard at age 21), just start lying to their faces.
The atmosphere that all this created at MSU and several other institutions was absolutely poisonous. Just the fact of having people in charge who would do all this was demoralizing to the faculty; it was also demoralizing to the students, who could plainly see what was done to their Jewish classmates in the application process, and to all the regular examiners. The application process - which was supposed to be objective in the first place, and not "holistic" - was defiled. The greatest irony of the situation is that the mathematics department of the MGU, whose status was mythological, and which these students believed was so indispensable to them, was not even very good during this period. The curriculum had stagnated since the 1950s, and the research was much weaker than it used to be.
Incidentally, the lying goes on to the present day - the MSU has never admitted to anything, let alone apologized. Some words were apparently said to Frenkel and some others in private, but for the most part, everyone involved just plays dumb.
Holistic evaluation is legitimate. I'm not sure why people think raw SAT is all that should matter.
Universities basically function to stamp kids as "qualified for the middle class". Inasmuch as the USA is increasingly multicultural, it cannot have its university system exclude entire races from the middle class simply because they on average score X points less on the SAT. That's not politically tenable.
The underlying problem here is growing population and not proportionally growing seats at brand-name universities. There is really no reason that e.g. Harvard can only produce X number of "Harvard degrees" per year. I realize scarcity is part of its value, but it can still increase production and remain "proportionally scarce".
I totally think that admissions councils should strip ethnicity data when considering individual applications (versus the demographics as a whole). But I also think doing so would still result in "discriminatory results" where say the Asian kid with perfect SAT and facility at piano and violin is rejected in favor of the Black kid with a hundred points less than perfect SAT but wrote an eloquent personal statement on how he taught a Kenyan village how to code (or whatever).
I don't really like the assumption that SAT should be the sole determination in admissions.
Holistic evaluation is legitimate. I'm not sure why people think raw SAT is all that should matter.
You don't need to use strictly SAT to have an objective system in which racism is honest. Before Grutter, that's exactly what U-Mich did.
They gave you points: 20xGPA + SAT/100 + 1 for a good essay + 1-5 for extracurriculars + etc + 20 if black + 5 if woman in engineering, man in nursing.
They only dropped this system after the supreme court said they couldn't use objective systems and be racist at the same time.
Remark: After reading your points system I've recognised how happy I am for not having ever in my life to participate in any sort of that bullshit. Not having to pass (or worry about) any entry exams: priceless.
If they had stopped accounting for race, the number of black students would have dropped greatly. I remember that court decision, and it made absolutely no sense, it was something like "You can consider race as a factor, but it can't be the deciding factor for picking a student" which is nonsensical to anyone who has even a basic grasp of math.
The issue is that we've (we as in humanity) committed some great injustices that have left certain groups at a major disadvantage. The only viable solution, for now, is to give those groups an unfair advantage at the cost of some efficiency, lost opportunities, "white discrimination" and so on. Hopefully, this strategy may one day level the field enough that it's not needed.
Anyway, it's still probably statistically better to be a white male who went to a "less than Harvard" college than a minority from Harvard.
Could you explain your moral philosophy in a bit more detail?
Specifically, individuals in group A performed injustices back in the 60's and earlier against individuals in group B. Therefore, different individual members of group A (and other unrelated groups [1]) should be discriminated against in favor of different individual members of group B (all of whom were born after the 60's)?
So following this logic, should we discriminate against the children/relatives of criminals in favor of the children of crime victims?
What if group C disproportionately commits crimes today. Should non-criminal members of group C be discriminated against? Does it matter how group C is defined? I.e., is the statement true if group C is {x : x.race = REFERENCE_RACE}, but false if C is { x : x.ssn % 100 == 3 || x.isCriminal }?
I guess my fundamental question is this. You seem to implicitly hold some conception of group rights, and believe that certain groups are worthy of moral consideration. I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration?
[1] I.e., asians should be discriminated against because whites were mean to blacks (and asians) in the past.
First of all, it should noted that institutional racism and oppression exists and is executed today against people of color, esp. black folks, in the US. Therefore, any examination of policies that seek to address race imbalances need to be considered in this context.
Second, crime and race are related in a major way, esp. in regards to institutional systems that keep black folks economically depressed and include them as prison population component of the industrial-prison-complex the US currently runs.
I can appreciate you want to abstract these thoughts out, but that is a very difficult exercise. Instead, it is much easier to talk about the actual reality minorities in the US face in regards to political and social systems and how those systems affect their existence. Such systems and policies that continue to keep economic opportunity and education out of the hands of people of color need to be addressed, and a race related policy like affirmative action is just one such tool to address those problems.
> I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration?
All members of the human race deserve moral and ethical treatment and consideration. However, many different groups of people in the US are not treated in such a way, both on personal levels and systemically. As a society, different approaches and tools must be employed to correct that mistreatment, and yes that means the most disadvantaged and screwed over people will need tools that empower them and help them to no longer be considered a second- or third-class status in society.
I can appreciate you want to abstract these thoughts out, but that is a very difficult exercise.
The fact is, the post I argued against was implicitly assuming that certain subsets of humanity are morally entitled to harm certain individuals, based on acts done by other individuals to other members of the same subset.
Until you can explain to me why your grouping of humanity carries moral validity, I can't see any reason to take such arguments seriously, particularly when the exact same arguments lead to ridiculous results when they are applied to slightly different groupings of humanity.
I'm beginning to think that many proponents of AA haven't really thought things through.
I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. Are you saying that you feel policies like affirmative action harm some people? If so, what kind of harm are you talking about?
Ultimately no group of people is entitled to harm others, but it helps to be a bit more specific when talking about the flaws of existing or proposed policy.
This is a bit of a misconception that I hear a lot. Affirmative action policies generally fall into one of a few categories, but most policies usually either take race or gender into account for 1) equally qualified candidates (scores and qualifications are the same are almost exactly the same) or 2) qualified candidates where one candidate may perform slightly worse than another (say a student that has a few dozen fewer points on an SAT score compared to another). Affirmative action policies in which an unqualified candidate be selected over a qualified candidate are very rare, if not outright illegal in many places.
Keep in mind the limitations of calling an individual qualified or not. In some scenarios, the metrics of qualification do not match the goal of the organization looking to hire or admit a candidate, or the metrics fail to measure other factors that are relevant to a given job or a seat for a student. Generally speaking, affirmative action recognizes these shortcomings, esp. as they originate from systemic problems in society that keep certain groups excluded or in minimal participation in such jobs and schools. Further, most of the issues that affect those that do not get additional consideration due to affirmative action come from outside of affirmative action policies: economic inequality, reduced access to funds to attend school, outsourcing and economic downturns, increasing job automation, the loss of some kinds of consuming manufacturing jobs, de-unionization efforts, etc.
Suffice it to say affirmative action policies are useful and are not the overriding problem in keeping people out of work or unable to continue their education. Rather, affirmative action policies are a kind of band aid policy that can be ended when larger social inequalities are reduced or fixed entirely.
Your contention about AA policies is simply false. The boost given to minorities is typically quite large, +1.0 on GPA at U-Mich (i.e., black + 3.1 > asian + 4.0).
And again, you still have yet to explain why I should give your preferred grouping of humans ({x : x.race == REFERENCE_RACE}) moral weight over my preferred grouping ({x : x.ssn % 104 == 7 || x.isPoor}). Why are you unwilling to help out people in my group, which is also statistically disadvantaged?
I don't know a lot about UMich when it comes to entrance requirements, but what information I could find shows that a GPA of 3.1 would meet the entrance requirements, so in such an example both the higher GPA student and the black student with lower GPA both are qualified (at least by GPA standards) to attend the school. Even if there was no affirmative action policy at UMich, these two hypothetical students would continue to be evaluated with additional metrics beyond GPA. It should be noted that most universities do not have a mission to educate only the best performing students that exist, so a comparison of just GPA alone isn't enough (not too mention the issues with how GPAs are measured in the US, which is heavily intersectional with race and class).
When it comes to admissions for universities, class (as indicated by the x.isPoor) is a big deal, not only from a standpoint of acquiring funding to attend a university, but also how classism affects primary and secondary school students in the US. Those folks do deserve help in getting education and attending university of they so desire, just as much as racial groups that have historically and currently excluded from the same things. These things are not mutually exclusive, there are strong links with class status and race that can affect people of color differently than non-minority poor folks. Ultimately both issues should be addressed and attempts made to make up for the societal shortfall in getting these people access to the kinds of education they desire. The existence of a racial affirmative action policy is not a blocking thing for tackling other inequalities in society (in fact, due to the links between classism and racism, affirmative actions policies do take on class and poverty issues).
I'm not sure what you are referring to with the x : x.ssn % 104 == 7 bit, as social security numbers are strictly meant for the social security program and I find their use outside of such contexts to be inappropriate, but I'd be interested to hear what you mean by it.
Black folks have been and are on the receiving end of many institutional oppressions that keep them excluded from accessing higher education. People with those SSNs or gene patterns you mention are not discriminated against on the basis of those numbers or gene patterns and have no need for a program like affirmative action. The fact is that is that racism, sexism, ableism, etc. are alive and well and are perpetuated by US society in many respects, and we as a society need policies that will work to change this and provide a opportunities that are available and accessible to the oppressed.
You didn't read what I wrote. Group A is defined by an OR clause - some people in group A have SSN % 104 == 7, others are disadvantaged but don't have SSN % 104 == 7.
Statistically, group A has been and is on the receiving end of many institutional oppressions that keep them excluded from accessing higher education. We can tweak the definition of A a bit if it makes the analogy easier:
Group A = people who are either victims of racism directly OR people with SSN % 104 == 7.
Some members of group A have suffered racism, others have not. Just like group B. Both groups are statistically more likely to be racism victims, but plenty of people in those groups have not suffered racism in any significant way.
How do you distinguish between group A and group B? None of the criteria you have stated here actually differentiate between them.
I'm not sure you understand how institutional and systemic racism works, but that kind of racism affects all people of color. That some individuals receive worse treatment than others in such systems doesn't mean that the lesser affected individuals aren't affected by that racism, nor does it mean that if you have other privileges (say, class) you are protected from the effects of those systems.
When it comes to implementing policies to address that, you look at who the systemic problems are affecting and you make choices to help address those effects. I'm sure some people with some arbitrary SSN are a person who is affected by institutional oppressions, but people are not targeted for inclusions in those systems based on SSN, so that's not a metric worth targeting when implementing policies (although if it can be demonstrated that there is a significant link between SSN and institutional racism, that's another story).
Things like racism (and other related -isms like sexism and to a lesser extent, ageism) are considered bad because they can be, and typically are, exercised against people based on largely uncontrollable aspects of their outward appearance. Everyone subconsciously creates associations between appearance, race, and social status throughout their entire lives, whether they realize it or not, and then makes judgments about new people they meet in light of those associations. Those judgments based on outward appearance are part of an initial impression then taint other subsequent judgments (and actions), such those as about a person's character or intelligence. Also, people learn that it's socially acceptable and generally expected to treat (say) a black person is with less respect than (say) a white person. And entrenched ideas about what people's social status ought to be cause a feedback loop that tends to impose these ideas on subsequent generations.
There are lots of other external properties that people are generally prejudiced for or against, such as weight/height/build, (dis)ability, posture, voice/speech properties, dress sense, and so on; but these (a) are considered to be more under an individual's control, (b) aren't inherited, and (c) historically haven't caused anywhere near as many social problems as racism in the US. No doubt people who are discriminated against based on their voice (say) don't like it, but it's not considered to be a systematic, self-reinforcing, widely-observed, entrenched social problem.
A hypothetical prejudice against "SSN % 104 == 7", where the property is not even outwardly observable (so can't genreally taint initial impressions), nor subject to this ongoing reinforcement, nor passed down through generations (neither the prejudiced property, nor the prejudice itself), is completely different from race, even moreso than the other examples.
>Specifically, individuals in group A performed injustices back in the 60's and earlier against individuals in group B.
No, it has nothing to do with that. This isn't about punishing people for wrong doing, it's about correcting a the fallout from previous mistakes.
Further down you talk about "punishing" people. We aren't talking about punishing people, we're talking about giving a push to groups that are at a disadvantage as fallout to our previous behavior.
No, I don't hold anyone today accountable for what our forefathers did. However, what they did caused a spiral of disadvantage to certain groups and the only way we know to counter act this is to give these groups an "unfair" advantage.
Realize that just doing nothing is going to leave the same groups disportionately poor indefinitely. If you know a better way than AA (should be doable) then go for it. But we have to do something.
You are making the major assumption that getting into a school that you are not really qualified for is better than not getting into it.
This assumption has been studied. Evidence says that getting into a school you are not prepared for results in worse outcomes than getting into a worse school that you are prepared for. Read http://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Affirmative-Students-Intended... if you want to see some of that evidence.
The question that I have is whether getting underprepared by highly able students into a good school AND giving sufficient assistance would result in better outcomes still. But at present there is no question that universities are not doing this. And therefore affirmative action programs are generally hurting the very people that they are trying to help.
I agree. Or perhaps even better than 'mathematically incontradictable' racism (but not quite as good as no racism) is having a more sort of standardised racism.
I heard from a Chinese friend of mine that some Chinese universities wanted to increase attendance from non-Han ethnic minorities. They did this by giving them +3% on the entrance exam.
This makes it clear racial discrimination, but on a fair and standard basis. Nobody is going to pass the exam just relying on that 3%. But the university gets more minorities accepted than they would otherwise too.
patio, You are usually a clear writer, so the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason.
There is a difference between "promoting diversity and inclusion of many social/economic/ethnic groups" vs "singling some out for extreme exclusion"
There is no difference between "No Jews in Moscow U!" and "Jews at Harvard but not too many, please" as experienced by the first kid told "no" purely because he was born to the wrong parents.
>>
the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason.
>>
No. I am perfectly comfortable in saying "I desire a world in which no university discriminates against any student on the basis of race." The linguistic contortion is a result of accurately repeating the arguments of e.g. Harvard University, because Harvard University desires a world in which some students are discriminated against on basis of race but prefers to lie about that.
[Edit: I'm not being unfair to Harvard, by the way. They tiptoe around it quite a bit in their amici briefs, but the Supreme Court will eventually get a little irate if you meticulously avoid saying what you're actually petitioning for, so they have committed on paper to positions like:
"[Harvard and the peer institutions signing this brief] accordingly urge the Court to interpret
the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to
continue to allow educational institutions to structure
admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity as single factors within a highly individualized,
holistic review process. "
Stripped of all euphemism: "We discriminate by race and want to continue doing so. Please don't illegalize that. It would be very inconvenient for us."
Arguments advanced as to why it would be inconvenient include "Students perceiving that they were discriminated against, resulting in non-admission, would sue us, and we would not prevail in their lawsuits, because to avoid getting sued to bits for racial discrimination we don't keep objective records of which students we denied for racial reasons versus which were denied for non-racial reasons and we purposely keep our admissions criteria vague and non-objective. Accordingly, illegalizing racial discrimination would cause us to lose suits over some cases where we were not discriminating in addition to those cases where we were discriminating. That's monstrously unfair, don't you think?"]
I'm not sure that they lie about diversity driven admissions. They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0]
But that's beside the point. Is Harvard the only place a student can go to school? For Frenkel MGU essentially was. It looks like there are a lot of differences between Harvard and MGU.
I'm not defending МГУ in any way (in fact I'm gonna troll people from there with this article to the rest of our lives), but МГУ is hardly any more unique than Harward in the USA.
Moscow had dozens of universities and "institutes" (approximate equvalent of college) and most Jews diverted to one of those after being brickwalled by МГУ.
Of course, I consider that the pure mathematics education was a pretty rare thing in USSR which had considerable aptitude towards applied sciences and engineering.
Why is discrimination even illegal in private universities? What part of the law makes it illegal, for instance, for a group of Koreans to create a private entity in Columbus OH, where the get together and teach each other things?
I've seen many Black people made to feel inferior by comments like this, which have the result of implying that the reason they probably got in was because a "superior" student didn't. But for one thing, those of privileged races who didn't get in were obviously extremely marginal candidates anyway, who even failed to capitalize on their racial privileges.
(And of course, a Black individual who happens to agree with affirmative action is less likely to publicly offer their perspective here, since ironically doing so may hamper their careers, as some future investor or employer googles them. It's much safer to hold the ideology which appeals to these gatekeepers, regardless of skill.)
Those who are truly concerned about racism have different criticisms of the (mostly private) system of expensive elite universities, as well as the US imprisoning by far more of its population than any other country. Such things affect education far more than affirmative action ever has.
And there are different kinds of affirmative action programs, with different attributes. But such subtleties seem not to matter to those who want to end them in principle.
I've seen many Black people made to feel inferior by comments like this, which have the result of implying that the reason they probably got in was because a "superior" student didn't.
This is true in many cases. If true statements about a policy cause people to experience negative feelings, that is a problem with the policy, not the people speaking truth to power.
By the way, here are the stats. The majority of black students at elite schools (at least as of 2006) didn't even get a 1400 on their SAT:
Modern American racism may be more subtle and seemingly intractable, but that is inevitably the case as it lessens over time, political correctness notwithstanding.
