6 ms·

I almost prefer honest, outright, mathematically incontradictable racism to the American variety, where considerations favoring a diverse student body counsel h

by patio11 14y ago

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

trhtrsh 14y ago
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"
- patio11 14y ago
  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?"]
  - doctorpangloss 14y ago
    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. [0] http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.ht...
    - kryptiskt 14y ago
      > They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0] Which is little comfort if you're asian and have to live up to an insane standard to get in.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      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.
  - calibraxis 14y ago
    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.
yaakov34 14y ago
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.
dasil003 14y ago
Modern American racism may be more subtle and seemingly intractable, but that is inevitably the case as it lessens over time, political correctness notwithstanding.
reader5000 14y ago
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.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  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. [edit: Fixed numbers, here is the actual sheet: http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif ]
  - polymatter 14y ago
    Wait, so they had a choice between using an objective system and being racist and they dropped the objective system?
    - 14y ago
polymatter 14y ago
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.
flyinRyan 14y ago
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.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  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.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    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.
pdog 14y ago
Can you clean up your post (if you still have edit capabilities)? It's rather difficult to parse what you're trying to say.

by patio11 14y ago

trhtrsh 14y ago

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"

patio11 14y ago
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?"]
- doctorpangloss 14y ago
  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. [0] http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.ht...
  - kryptiskt 14y ago
    > They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0] Which is little comfort if you're asian and have to live up to an insane standard to get in.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    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.
- calibraxis 14y ago
  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.

yaakov34 14y ago

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.

dasil003 14y ago

Modern American racism may be more subtle and seemingly intractable, but that is inevitably the case as it lessens over time, political correctness notwithstanding.

reader5000 14y ago

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.

yummyfajitas 14y ago
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. [edit: Fixed numbers, here is the actual sheet: http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif ]
- polymatter 14y ago
  Wait, so they had a choice between using an objective system and being racist and they dropped the objective system?
  - 14y ago

polymatter 14y ago

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.

flyinRyan 14y ago

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.

yummyfajitas 14y ago
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.
- king_jester 14y ago
  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.

pdog 14y ago

Can you clean up your post (if you still have edit capabilities)? It's rather difficult to parse what you're trying to say.