President Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College will earn an honorary degree from the University of Ottawa because she favors discrimination on the basis of sex and race.
They won't word it that way, of course.
The Ottawa Sun recently wrote that President Klawe won the award because she is a "'tireless advocate for women and minorities' pursuing careers in engineering, science and mathematics."
What they really mean is that she favors quotas for minorities and women at Harvey Mudd College.
For every seat she gives to an under-qualified student, she denies to a hard-working, qualified student. I've already written about how often President Klawe has spoken on behalf of quotas and affirmative action at Harvey Mudd College. You can read what I've said about it here and here. On one of the posts, you can even listen to her podcast about that very subject and hear it straight from her mouth. She makes no secret of her desire to downgrade the quality of a Mudd education by bringing in people with politically preferred pigmentation.
Of course not everyone wants to recruited into a college for which they do not feel equipped.
One girl I recently spoke with who was admitted to Harvey Mudd, but chose Scripps instead. She told me that the college did everything within its power to get her to come there. They even offered to fly her free of charge just so she could check out the campus. In the end, she turned down Harvey Mudd. They were just "too relentless" about "trying to get [her] to come."
Friday, June 6, 2008
University of Ottawa Awards Klawe's Discrimination
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10 comments:
You, sir, are ridiculous. In both of your previous posts that you linked to, you put forward absolutely no evidence that Harvey Mudd was enforcing any type of quotas, or even that they were practicing affirmative action. The best evidence you put forward is that Mudd's class of '11 is 43% women. This at best is a testament to the fact that the administration has gone through a lot of effort to encourage women and minorities to apply to HMC. There is a stark difference between affirmative action and trying to encourage underrepresented groups to merely apply to their college.
And your suggestion that HMC's actions are getting students into a school for which they are not equipped is laughable at best. The only evidence you give is one encounter with a girl who ultimately chose Scripps over Harvey Mudd because they "were just 'too relentless' about 'trying to get [her] to come.'" She didn't turn them down because she didn't feel well enough equipped.
Yet again your arguments rest on baseless assumptions.
Bravo Charles! Politically preferred pigmentation -- I love it! Studies have proven over and over that affirmative action and quota systems have done more to deny minorities (who by the way on their way to becoming majorities, but that's another topic) true motivation to improve themselves to compete on a level playing field. You know it and I know it - preferential treatment due to skin color is demeaning crap.
Considering most top colleges refer often to the fact the 80% of their applicants are qualified, I really doubt these people are unqualified for admittance. If you compare 2 people that are equally qualified, and one increases your appeal to other applicants(that would be the woman in HMC's case, or the man if it was Vassar or a college that is overwhelmingly female) you take that one. It's the free market. What you actually are proposing is communistic in theory, rather that free market. Colleges act as they do as that is what the market demands. If you want a 'fair' admissions system, look to China, or the USSR 40 years ago, or someplace like that.
Your claims are not conservative, they are idiotic.
Jordan,
Why do you think the add drop length has been extended?
Several of my good friends were waitlisted at HMC simply because they were not a politically preferred color or gender.
There's nothing Communist about treating people equally, without regard to their skin color. When I buy an architect's skills, I don't care whether or not he's black or white. I simply want him or her to be the best.
When colleges accept public money, they ought to not discriminate against students on the basis of skin color or race.
"Several of my good friends were waitlisted at HMC simply because they were not a politically preferred color or gender."
There you go again making completely baseless claims. Did you ever stop and think that maybe it was because their applications weren't as good as the applications of the students who were admitted? Did you see all the applications going into HMC? Did you see every detail of your friends' applications?
What proof do you have that they got waitlisted simply because they were white males? Short of a letter from HMC saying "your space was taken by a less qualified minority," you have no proof.
Lets see some actual evidence that HMC is practicing affirmative action, or is enforcing quotas. Unless, of course, you have none.
Patrick inadvertently refers to the reason why Jordan's reasoning is total B.S.
Everyone knows that no two applicants are equal. There will always be differences in scores, grades, academic rigor, achievement, or essays. I mean, hypothetically, if every quantifiable number were the same for a vast amount of applicants, how in the world could you say the quality of their essays were "equal"? Every single one is different and you can rank them.
I stretch this point to the absurd only to remind everyone that affirmative action cannot somehow be the process of picking between two "equal" candidates based on their color/gender (and even if this insane abstraction were somehow realizable, it would still be unjust). This is a complaint you hear all the time from ignorant apologists. The reality is that affirmative action is a way to look beyond merit to color/gender. And the results are pretty damning. Minorities tend to do much worse in colleges they are not prepared for, which negates the whole benefit of the hand-out education they were supposed to receive. So much for the whole "everyone is equally qualified" crock. No matter how much liberals want to deny it, the possibility of making judgments based on individual excellence is still very possible and necessary.
But Patrick, if you want to believe that Mudd somehow doesn't practice affirmative action, I'll suggest you too are living in fantasy-land. Go up to the admissions office, and they will happily correct your misinformation.
Dan,
We as conservatives seem to always get into debates with liberals over the theory of affirmative action. Rarely do we look at the actual evidence of affirmative action. We ought to.
Here's a book to get that conversation started, Affirmative Action Around the World.
In its pages, you'll find that everywhere quotas, "standardization," affirmative action, or whatever else you want to call it, it leads to ethnic and racial balkanization. In the case of at least one country, Sri Lanka, it led to civil war.
Worse yet, even when these programs are implemented, they often reward the richest or most-politically connected minorities who once they receive the minority set asides demand still more classes, more "resources" to help blacks or whatever group, "feel comfortable."
Of course affirmative action's proponents have learned the lessons elsewhere by making the process of determining the value of a degree very difficult so as to raise the cost.
In large part, this process takes care of itself. When you establish curriculum like "black studies" or Chicano/Chicana studies, many minorities take those classes where their odds of doing well increases.
There's much more ink to be spilled on this issue, but I think that just about does it for the moment.
"But Patrick, if you want to believe that Mudd somehow doesn't practice affirmative action, I'll suggest you too are living in fantasy-land. Go up to the admissions office, and they will happily correct your misinformation."
Wow, what a cop out. You guys are the ones who are asserting that Harvey Mudd is practicing affirmative action. The burden of proof doesn't rest on me to prove you wrong, you're making the assertion. It's your job to show that Harvey Mudd is actively practicing affirmative action, or is enforcing quotas in their admissions process. As of yet, neither of you have given any evidence of either of these assertions.
First of all, Patrick, as an informed citizen, you should understand that as long as an elite school does not explicitly reject affirmative action (like Hillsdale), it practices it. I am not going to give you "evidence" for something so well-known and obvious. Would you like proof that the sky is blue?
These schools are not ashamed of the fact, and that's why it's always telling when liberals are and they want to deny it. It's also bizarre that some liberals want to deny this as being the case. The schools are proud of their policies!
I remember when the CI published the admissions stats by race at CMC and a bunch of people were outraged. A sizeable portion convinced themselves that there was no affirmative action, just that the average black or Latino is 2-3 times as qualified as the average white or Asian who applied to the school. So to put this insane claim to rest, I went to the Dean of Admissions, who was not the least bit embarrassed to admit that we--like everyone else--practice affirmative action.
Second, you should know that Charles and I are aware that the schools don't have quotas de jure. They only have quotas de facto, which is the overall effect of practicing affirmative action under the guise of promoting diversity. Explicit quotas went out of fashion after the Court found them unconstitutional for public schools in the Bakke case.
Let's take a gander at the overwhelming stupidity of the phrase "politically preferred color or gender."
Percentage of US Woman Presidents: 0
Percentage of US Woman Senators: 1.85
Current Percentage of Blacks in the Senate: 1
Percentage of Nonwhite Presidents, History: 0
I haven't finished the math on Governors/Mayors/etc., but I'm relatively certain they're pretty similar.
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