This case was about Harvard and UNC. Two elite schools. AA is NOT important for most lesser schools as their admittance rates are wide open and people of color are not excluded in any sense. So I have.a question for you: My wife is from the Chilean middle class. Our daughter's last name is Vargas. She is identified a Latina/Hispanic in most places. Her father -- me-- is Jewish and upper middle class. AA sees here the same way and would grant her the same privileges as the son of a Guatemalan gardener. That's the problem with race based AA. Where does the race begin? Or end? It was the slavemasters and the So Africans who insisted ob "blood quotas" to see if u were really back or white. Absurd. Also, in the last 100 years literally millions of BLACK people from the Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and of course, Africa have immigrated here. Many are quite successful. Do u think they should also be given considered special attention? And the real victims here are Asians who -- collectively-- do better than white men and more easily qualify for elite colleges. But many do not get in as those seats are allocated to AA recipients. You think that's ok? I don't.
The problem is that qualified kids have to enter into brutal competition with each other to get an education the state should guarantee to all. We all thought AA was tokenism when it was introduced, a way to siphon off the top kids and ease their way into the elite without helping the rest. That was wrong, AA turned into something far better, but did nothing to increase opportunity for everyone. As to your specific situation, ours is the same with half Chilean middle class, half Ashkenazy Jewish upper middle class. Stanford had an interesting twist on AA -- it excluded Latinos from the Southern cone and made it about Latinos from Mexico and Central America.
I also would like to say i really enjoy reading The Coop Scoop. I'm glad i found it! I especially was fascinated by your writing about Chile. After seeing the film, Missing, which devastated me, I've been really interested to see how Chile has "moved on" since Pinochet. And surrounding Latin American countries that went through similar experiences. And what our role was/is still. Thank you!
Thank you Francie. Much appreciated. I have a BIG interview with a historian friend of mine about the precise CIA role in Chile and what the US did and did not do about Charlie Horman, my friend in the film Missing. It will be out in a week or two and a link will get promoted in my newsletter. Yes, undoubtedly AA has done some good for many people, but I would say probably when it first started as it helped to lower the traditional color bar overall. But it does NOT accomplish deeper goals: i.e. by amplifying oppty for the more disadvantaged. I read KJB's dissent and was not impressed. She conflates racial skin color with degrees of oppression. Sorry but the world does not work that way. First and foremost race is socially constructed and as we become a more tolerant and mature society we have rapidly increasing race mixing so in many cases a young person could claim two or three different racial identities...as my daughter could but does not. Most poor people in this country are White. Not percentage wise per race but rather by sheer numbers. Many have NO chance of getting into any good university as their poverty as has already set back their social and educational process. And deBoer sez is right on the mark: the elite universities and corporations who employ AA do so not to give poor people a better chance in a society run by elites...but rather they support AA for what in Chile they call La Foto. The photograph, Can we show off a racially DIVERSE student body. Yes, to a degree. But that's all they care about. We have also come to a time when diverse means ONLY racial and perhaps gender diversity. Great! Does zip for poor people of all races. What about economic diversity? What about class diversity? Age diversity? Nobody gives a damn. And all the liberals who support AA are mum on the Asians. why is that? It's because they have no good answers for why a Chinese American student with a 1600 SAT and a 4.2 GPA can't get his or her phone answered by Harvard or Stanford? Inside the halls of academia I have heard very ugly things on this score. Putatively liberal profs in private saying such ASININE things as "Well, the Asians dont suffer discrimination like Blacks. They are more like White people." Hmmm? Having been a full time prof at what is laughingly called a Tier One Global Research University I can attest that the ONLY real interest that university leaders have is always and only raising MORE money. Those $4m a dollar football coaches squeeze the budget!
I very much look forward to your interview re: Chile. I wish more Americans understood the US's role in Central and South America. We have so much blood on our hands. Again, thank you for this information and your opinions (even if i don't agree 100%)! -francie
I didn't know AA was only for elite colleges and universities, as your friend DeBoer kept saying? Also, he says he believes that AA works for the wealthy black or hispanic students, but then he says he doesn't have evidence to back this up because the universities won't release the data. This makes no sense. How can he make the claim without the evidence? I think many of his other arguments are weak, as well. I respect the opinions of the justices who dissented. Their opinions make a lot more sense to me than deBoer's statements.
I will also add.... I was on the faculty of the USC journalism school for 15 years until I retired in 2015. I had many Black students. I do not believe a single one was from the working class or anywhere near it. I met their parents: doctors, lawyers, professors etc etc. The elites want their kids to continue the tradition of elite. They dont give a rats ass about the other 150 million people of all races who stand NO chance of getting in. I almost passed out when we inaugurated our new university president in 2010....a corrupt little bastard who had to resign but still is on the faculty making $1m per year. Anyway, he laid out his vision of glory for USC: it had an 18% admittance rate. He said he wanted to get it down to below 10% as Stanford was 5%. Good luck to him trying to pretend the University of Spoiled Children is Harvard West. That's the great vision of our educational leaders: admit fewer people cuz that makes us MORE elite. My daughter went to Santa Monica college for undergrad and loved it. I saw the curric and met the profs and they were top notch. She transferred to elite UCLA for upper division. Many of the profs just plain sucked. So worried about diversity and PC they forgot how to teach anything worthwhile. In her class on West African History her teacher mostly played a lot of folk songs. She graduated Magna from UCLA thanks to her great prep in junior college. Though she meets all the markers as an AA admit, we completely ignored that process.LOL.
From my personal experience, which is just anecdotal, there are good and bad professors at all kinds of institutions. I went to Cornell for a few years and had some great profs there and some really sucky ones, too. I also went to a small private college, Russell Sage College, and had a wonderful experience there. Then i moved on to a state school, SUNYAlbany, for grad school, which, again, good and bad. Do you think that Affirmative Action has helped minority students at all? Would our country have been better off without it? What should we do to make higher ed more available to everyone? I don't have the answers, that's for sure.
I don’t agree with that commentary about the end of affirmative action. I find the claim of discrimination against Asian students untenable or a hard stretch. Visit UCLA, UC Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, U-Michigan for those populations. African American percentages in elite colleges is ridiculously low & declining. The Baake decision has long been regarded as a regressive move & a setback in an effort to integrate & overcome centuries of racism & exploitation. The new decision merely confirms the machinations of a thinly veiled white backlash
This case was about Harvard and UNC. Two elite schools. AA is NOT important for most lesser schools as their admittance rates are wide open and people of color are not excluded in any sense. So I have.a question for you: My wife is from the Chilean middle class. Our daughter's last name is Vargas. She is identified a Latina/Hispanic in most places. Her father -- me-- is Jewish and upper middle class. AA sees here the same way and would grant her the same privileges as the son of a Guatemalan gardener. That's the problem with race based AA. Where does the race begin? Or end? It was the slavemasters and the So Africans who insisted ob "blood quotas" to see if u were really back or white. Absurd. Also, in the last 100 years literally millions of BLACK people from the Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and of course, Africa have immigrated here. Many are quite successful. Do u think they should also be given considered special attention? And the real victims here are Asians who -- collectively-- do better than white men and more easily qualify for elite colleges. But many do not get in as those seats are allocated to AA recipients. You think that's ok? I don't.
The problem is that qualified kids have to enter into brutal competition with each other to get an education the state should guarantee to all. We all thought AA was tokenism when it was introduced, a way to siphon off the top kids and ease their way into the elite without helping the rest. That was wrong, AA turned into something far better, but did nothing to increase opportunity for everyone. As to your specific situation, ours is the same with half Chilean middle class, half Ashkenazy Jewish upper middle class. Stanford had an interesting twist on AA -- it excluded Latinos from the Southern cone and made it about Latinos from Mexico and Central America.
I also would like to say i really enjoy reading The Coop Scoop. I'm glad i found it! I especially was fascinated by your writing about Chile. After seeing the film, Missing, which devastated me, I've been really interested to see how Chile has "moved on" since Pinochet. And surrounding Latin American countries that went through similar experiences. And what our role was/is still. Thank you!
Thank you Francie. Much appreciated. I have a BIG interview with a historian friend of mine about the precise CIA role in Chile and what the US did and did not do about Charlie Horman, my friend in the film Missing. It will be out in a week or two and a link will get promoted in my newsletter. Yes, undoubtedly AA has done some good for many people, but I would say probably when it first started as it helped to lower the traditional color bar overall. But it does NOT accomplish deeper goals: i.e. by amplifying oppty for the more disadvantaged. I read KJB's dissent and was not impressed. She conflates racial skin color with degrees of oppression. Sorry but the world does not work that way. First and foremost race is socially constructed and as we become a more tolerant and mature society we have rapidly increasing race mixing so in many cases a young person could claim two or three different racial identities...as my daughter could but does not. Most poor people in this country are White. Not percentage wise per race but rather by sheer numbers. Many have NO chance of getting into any good university as their poverty as has already set back their social and educational process. And deBoer sez is right on the mark: the elite universities and corporations who employ AA do so not to give poor people a better chance in a society run by elites...but rather they support AA for what in Chile they call La Foto. The photograph, Can we show off a racially DIVERSE student body. Yes, to a degree. But that's all they care about. We have also come to a time when diverse means ONLY racial and perhaps gender diversity. Great! Does zip for poor people of all races. What about economic diversity? What about class diversity? Age diversity? Nobody gives a damn. And all the liberals who support AA are mum on the Asians. why is that? It's because they have no good answers for why a Chinese American student with a 1600 SAT and a 4.2 GPA can't get his or her phone answered by Harvard or Stanford? Inside the halls of academia I have heard very ugly things on this score. Putatively liberal profs in private saying such ASININE things as "Well, the Asians dont suffer discrimination like Blacks. They are more like White people." Hmmm? Having been a full time prof at what is laughingly called a Tier One Global Research University I can attest that the ONLY real interest that university leaders have is always and only raising MORE money. Those $4m a dollar football coaches squeeze the budget!
I very much look forward to your interview re: Chile. I wish more Americans understood the US's role in Central and South America. We have so much blood on our hands. Again, thank you for this information and your opinions (even if i don't agree 100%)! -francie
I didn't know AA was only for elite colleges and universities, as your friend DeBoer kept saying? Also, he says he believes that AA works for the wealthy black or hispanic students, but then he says he doesn't have evidence to back this up because the universities won't release the data. This makes no sense. How can he make the claim without the evidence? I think many of his other arguments are weak, as well. I respect the opinions of the justices who dissented. Their opinions make a lot more sense to me than deBoer's statements.
I will also add.... I was on the faculty of the USC journalism school for 15 years until I retired in 2015. I had many Black students. I do not believe a single one was from the working class or anywhere near it. I met their parents: doctors, lawyers, professors etc etc. The elites want their kids to continue the tradition of elite. They dont give a rats ass about the other 150 million people of all races who stand NO chance of getting in. I almost passed out when we inaugurated our new university president in 2010....a corrupt little bastard who had to resign but still is on the faculty making $1m per year. Anyway, he laid out his vision of glory for USC: it had an 18% admittance rate. He said he wanted to get it down to below 10% as Stanford was 5%. Good luck to him trying to pretend the University of Spoiled Children is Harvard West. That's the great vision of our educational leaders: admit fewer people cuz that makes us MORE elite. My daughter went to Santa Monica college for undergrad and loved it. I saw the curric and met the profs and they were top notch. She transferred to elite UCLA for upper division. Many of the profs just plain sucked. So worried about diversity and PC they forgot how to teach anything worthwhile. In her class on West African History her teacher mostly played a lot of folk songs. She graduated Magna from UCLA thanks to her great prep in junior college. Though she meets all the markers as an AA admit, we completely ignored that process.LOL.
From my personal experience, which is just anecdotal, there are good and bad professors at all kinds of institutions. I went to Cornell for a few years and had some great profs there and some really sucky ones, too. I also went to a small private college, Russell Sage College, and had a wonderful experience there. Then i moved on to a state school, SUNYAlbany, for grad school, which, again, good and bad. Do you think that Affirmative Action has helped minority students at all? Would our country have been better off without it? What should we do to make higher ed more available to everyone? I don't have the answers, that's for sure.
I suggest u speak with some Asian student groups. They will not believe. Ur belief.
I don’t agree with that commentary about the end of affirmative action. I find the claim of discrimination against Asian students untenable or a hard stretch. Visit UCLA, UC Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, U-Michigan for those populations. African American percentages in elite colleges is ridiculously low & declining. The Baake decision has long been regarded as a regressive move & a setback in an effort to integrate & overcome centuries of racism & exploitation. The new decision merely confirms the machinations of a thinly veiled white backlash