Wed 11 Oct 2017
Students Simply Self-Stratify
Posted by David Dudley Field '25 under Admissions at 6:43 am
Interesting comment:
As a current student, I’m tired of the narrative that the kids who are pulled in largely through “other” factors are equally as academically qualified. This has been demonstrated to be empirically false- statistics do not lie. The validity of the op-ed thus rests upon whether or not other highly nebulous factors should supersede this lessened academic qualification. I would like to think that this could be the case- but it seems to me that the vast majority of students simply self-stratify, so that diversity based benefits are minimized. Additionally, the constant threat of being lampooned for mis-speaking makes it simply not worth it to engage on controversial issues. I would love to have discussions about what white privilege is and about the extent to which it pervades our society, for example. I think that’s really interesting. But why would I ever do that? The benefits are dwarfed by the risks, especially for the people who would benefit the most!. This is why, ironically, things like uncomfortable learning would make campus in a way safer for minorities- there would be a culture that made white people’s “cost benefit analysis” differently weighted, so that they might be willing to engage and might learn something from discussion! Additionally, this would go a long way towards increasing the actual benefits of diversity, as is discussed above.
Good points. I miss the WSO discussion section! Ten years ago, a student would have left this comment there, and started off a thoughtful discussion among Ephs with a wide variety of views. Now, nothing.
There is a great senior thesis to be written about self-stratification among Williams students.
Here [Data removed by request from Williams.] is Williams housing data for this year. Do you see much self-stratification? Should we spend time going through it?
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32 Responses to “Students Simply Self-Stratify”
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anonymous says:
Creating “studies” departments that exist outside of traditional disciplines (history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc) was a big mistake that exacerbates this problem. When the adults self-stratify, getting students to do any different is just wishful thinking.
October 11th, 2017 at 10:21 am3 billion says:
kids with top SAT scores will do better than African Americans, athletes and local kids with lower SAT scores.
Why does the Alt left Keep denying this fact. I think it is so that they can discriminate against White women and the Asian kids who are better qualified in many ways?
October 11th, 2017 at 12:14 pmabl says:
I’ve written some version of this post in numerous threads and yet nobody has responded. I’ll keep it short this time.
Let’s just assume for a second that intellectual ability is/should be the only relevant factor considered by the Williams admissions office. If Williams is selecting for ability, why shouldn’t it take factors like privilege into account? Do you think that a student who gets a 1450 SAT score after a full year of one-on-one private tutoring has the same ability as a student who gets a 1450 SAT score with little-to-no studying?
October 11th, 2017 at 3:02 pmTom Foolery says:
These comments are exactly right in that it is not worth it to be honest about some of these statistics. Too much pain and suffering for the students who do.
And why would anyone assume everyone who scores highly on their SATs has been tutored or that it makes one iota of difference-most studies indicate those prep courses are a waste of money but succeed with their brilliant psychological marketing to parents.
October 11th, 2017 at 3:25 pmJCD says:
Wouldn’t the benefits of diversity be maximized if we required low scoring black and high scoring Asian students to interact with each other for a certain number of hours per week?
Perhaps they could both clock in at a certain time and place and be encouraged to interact with each other – ideally in a small room with little distractions.
This activity could be supervised by an administrator or perhaps a peer. This observer could rate the quality of the interaction between the black and Asian students and then assign them some sort of reward, or perhaps even punishment (minor electrical shocks) if the benefits of diversity were not accruing quickly enough.
Students who refused to participate in their required diversity hours would, of course, be expelled and replaced by others who were more tolerant and understanding of the extreme importance of mandatory diversity experience.
To maximize the benefits of this arrangement, we might pair up students so that the lowest scoring black students would be paired with the highest scoring Asian students under the assumption that the greatest possible diversity will result in the most profound levels of increased tolerance and appreciation.
Some might object to this arrangement, but these will only be the racists, the evil bigots who shouldn’t have a place at the college anyways. Just a thought.
October 11th, 2017 at 3:44 pmabl says:
Tom Foolery:
1. I’m not assuming that “everyone who scores highly on their SATs has been tutored”–although, without a doubt, a substantial number of Williams admits have received assistance from SAT tutors, classroom tutors, and even admissions tutors.
2. SAT tutoring doesn’t always help. But, without a doubt, it often does–and significantly. I’ve personally taught/tutored numerous students and it’s common, and even expected, to see approximately 100 points of improvement in students enrolled in the fancier programs who start off scoring in the ~1200-1400 range (enough for a student who wouldn’t have been competitive at Williams to be competitive at Williams). I wouldn’t put much money on the big industrialized programs–Kaplan and the like–helping to a similar extent students who are already scoring on the edge of the range necessary to get into Williams. (Although I can’t imagine that their impact is 0.) Private tutoring and the more expensive options, however, do work–maybe not as well as parents would like them to, but enough to make a difference in elite school admissions.
3. Classroom tutoring just about always helps. I’ve done this also, and although I make no guarantees, I’ve rarely worked with a B student who hasn’t had their grades improve by 1/3-2/3 of a letter grade on average. (The improvement that I see with C students is even bigger, but that’s not super relevant for this conversation because few C students can improve enough to get into Williams once they get more than a handful of Cs on their transcript.) Again, the difference is usually enough to make the students I work with competitive for schools like Williams when they wouldn’t have been otherwise.
4. You neatly dodged my question. I’m going to re-ask it, with a slight modification: do you think two students with 1500 SATs and a 3.8 GPA from Deerfield have similar academic abilities if the one student achieved these scores without any tutoring and the other student had separate private SAT and academic tutors, each with a long history of success stories? This isn’t a trick question.
JCD:
Is that a real question?
October 11th, 2017 at 4:54 pmTom Foolery says:
Yes (assuming they took they same classes)
SAT is a point in time so tutoring is just prep to make the student more confident in the process. I doubt there is any ability to know the material better-way too many PhDs (whatever that’s worth) at ETS to overcome their ability to neutralize knowledge based pure effort and innate intelligence and ability to reason. No data suggests scores are higher from tutoring for this test-your experience is too anecdotal and you have a self selected group. Perhaps they are just more motivated and that has nothing to do with tutoring.
Tutoring for classes and GPA can be helpful but kids anywhere can get that-not just at Deerfield. But again, is it the tutoring or the self selection of those who sign up, or their parents, and their own determination,desire for success, more confidence in the subject so they talk to the teacher more who then likes them and gives them better grades?? Black, white, suburbs, ghetto — this is available to everyone with ambition and motivation.
Would white kids from the suburbs have more players in the NFL or NBA if they were tutored in those sports?
Cause and effect are extremely difficult to connect and, of course, as soon as you start to study something, it changes.
Keep collecting that money for tutoring and enjoy it but the results ulitimately depend on the individual you are teaching.
October 12th, 2017 at 11:44 amJCD says:
I could have used “tutoring” in football and basketball myself. It is sad to think of how much fulfillment I might have enjoyed as an NFL or NBA player if only my parents had been wealthy enough, or privileged enough, to give me the extra boost of confidence I needed to do as well in professional sports as I did as in political science. Sigh.
October 12th, 2017 at 12:28 pmabl says:
Tom Foolery —
You are badly misinformed about how tutoring and test-taking work. 90% of what I teach (and, in fact, 90% of what all tutoring programs teach) is test-taking. There are numerous tricks that allow one who doesn’t know the answer to nevertheless narrow it down. Students who I have taught test-prep to have rarely leave my classroom with a better substantive understanding of the underlying material than what they brought to my classroom. These students are no better at math, reading, or writing — because I teach no math and teach very little reading in my class — and yet they leave the classroom scoring higher on the math/reading portion of the SAT. (Writing is interesting because test-writing requires students to take a number of measures that usually result in their writing becoming *worse.* And, so, ironically, my test-taking writers generally score better on tests as they become worse writers.)
SATs/ACTs and grades are used by schools because they are signals of underlying ability/knowledge. The problem is that there is some flex in these signals. My test-prep students have the same reading/math abilities and knowledge before my prep classes as they do after. And yet, their abilities–as reflected by the test–have substantially improved. Put another way, in my class, I take a bunch of students who have the ability necessary to exceed at schools like Bates and turn them into students who appear to have the ability to succeed at schools like Williams. Their level of ability hasn’t changed–only the signal reporting their level of ability.
And sure, I want to be clear, much of the credit to this improvement goes to my students (and to their families for being willing to shell out top-dollar for an effective service). They “earn” every point on the SAT that they gain. The problem is not that their SAT scores are the product of luck (they aren’t) or that they didn’t have to work for them (some amount of effort is required) — it’s that the signal being provided by their SAT scores has been distorted relative to the signal provided by students’ SAT scores who don’t have the wherewithal to take my class or one like it. The difference between a smart rich kid who can and does sign up for my SAT prep class and a smart poor kid who cannot is rarely ability or desire or work ethic — it’s money and access. If you want to admit the most academically talented group of students, you need to take this (and other similar factors) into account.
Let me put this another way. I believe that most true ability of most students is best represented as a range of test scores. A student’s raw ability creates both a test-taking floor and ceiling: you can be horrible/clueless about test-taking but if you’re brilliant, you’re still likely to score 1300 or so. So, a student’s substantive “ability” might be best represented as “1300-1450.” Such a student will score a minimum of 1300 if she is horrible/clueless about test-taking and a maximum of 1450 if she gains a perfect understanding of the test. She will not be better able or smarter–at least in respects material to Williams’ admission–when she scores a 1450 than she was when she scored a 1300. The question is: should we accept this student if she scores a 1450 (the top of her range) over another student with a range of 1400-1600 who scores a 1400 (the bottom of his range)? And if the answer is that we should accept the test-maximized but less-able student, I’m really curious as to why?
October 12th, 2017 at 2:55 pmHealthy Eph says:
Yes, if you have been coached in football and basketball, you improve vis a vis if you just go out and play football or besketball on your own. That someone would raise this demonstrable example of something that is coached as a way to try to indict the very real fact of privilege reveals a great deal of the caliber of thought at work here.
October 12th, 2017 at 7:55 pmJCD says:
You’re just making me feel worse and worse about our evil, unfair society.
If only my white working class parents had had enough money to give me the best sports tutoring/coaching, I wouldn’t have allowed the sizest discrimination I experienced because of my 5’7″ height to cause me to give up my dream of playing in the NFL or NBA.
With the right tutoring/coaching I would have learned that I could play any position I wanted and score as many points as I pleased only if I believed in myself, practiced hard, set high goals, and took advantage of all the social justice programs designed to increase my self-esteem.
In fact, I would have added massive value to any NFL or NBA team that hired me because I would have given them the powerful advantage of having someone my size adding my two cents to every inspirational discussion.
I would have been an amazing NFL or NBA player.
I would be in a different world right now. I’d show off my Super Bowl ring and thank, with all my heart, the high school and college football tutors who made my dream into a reality. If only my parents had enough money, I would have been an NBA great and an award-winning political scientist. Sigh.
October 12th, 2017 at 9:21 pmHealthy Eph says:
You are doubling down on a really, really dumb argument full of non-sequiters and false equivalencies.
October 13th, 2017 at 9:55 amTom Foolery says:
I have not been misinformed since I was 6 years old. Sorry to break down your tired arguments on race, gender and privilege but grit and determination have more to do with success than any tutoring (says anyone but the tutor, of course). Anyone can go to the library or online and self tutor any of these standardized tests. I hate to burst your inflated self congratulatory bubble, but holding their hand while teaching someone and whispering words of encouragement is a sales pitch to the parents and does nothing for the students test score they couldn’t get on their own if they really, really wanted it.
October 16th, 2017 at 4:58 pmabl says:
Tom Foolery,
Saying you broke down my arguments isn’t actually the same as breaking them down. I made a specific claim that I supported with ample personal experience (and common sense): that the value added by SAT tutoring is greater than zero. Your response essentially amounted to “no it’s not.” You didn’t support your response with any evidence–not even a personal anecdote–or with logic. The fact that “anyone can go to the library or online and self tutor any of these standardized tests” does not mean that the value added by good private tutoring is zero. (It’s also not true that anyone can self-study: students who have to work a job through high school to support their families may not have the privilege of having time to self-study–but this is a separate point.) Nor does your (mis)characterization of tutoring (as “holding their hand while teaching someone and whispering words of encouragement”) provide any support for your point. Nobody–including, I suspect, you–actually believes that this represents the literal extent of what I, or other tutors, do in the classroom. And even if it did, if it added value–which, incidentally, I am confident it would–then my point would stand.
I look forward to seeing some future post of yours that attempts to “break down [my] tired arguments” (what makes them tired?). Until then, I suppose I’ll just have to look forward to more unsupported and uncritical insults.
JCD —
I don’t follow your analogy. Nobody has argued that with enough tutoring, any kid could excel in a PhD program in physics at MIT. My previous post pretty clearly (or so I thought) set forth my beliefs that there is a relatively minimal (but nevertheless meaningful) impact of tutoring. It seems really obvious to me that the same is true for sports. If you had a private soccer coach, you would almost certainly get better at soccer than if you didn’t have such a coach. Would you get good enough to play for the USMNT? Probably not. (If you’re me, definitely not. If you’re currently an MLS star, then maybe.) But if you were a high schooler on the wrong edge of making varsity, the added benefit of having some private coaching could potentially push you over the edge. That is the analogy here–except where a private soccer coach is going to help you improve in the skills necessary for varsity soccer success, the skills you learn in SAT classes are not particularly relevant to the sort of college performance/contributions that adcoms do or should care about.
October 16th, 2017 at 5:39 pmJCD says:
— abl
Please. You and I both know you follow my analogy perfectly. If you do not have the genetic inheritance necessary to succeed in a certain field, no amount of money or tutoring will ever get you over the threshold.
It is silly to punish those who are talented enough to get the most out of a Williams College education by implementing the ideology of the extreme left and hammering them with reverse discrimination.
If affirmative action isn’t evil, nothing is evil.
October 16th, 2017 at 8:10 pmHealthy Eph says:
There are lots of things that are evil. Affirmative action is not one of them. It is laughable to assert as much. But then, racists gonna racist.
October 16th, 2017 at 8:14 pmabl says:
JCD —
I don’t follow your analogy. One reason why is that we’re not talking here about the “gimmes” here. Someone like LeBron James is going to make it to the NBA irrespective of what sort of coaching he gets. Someone like me will not. We are essentially irrelevant to the conversation — the “LeBron James” of college admissions are going to get into Williams under all possible admissions policies, with or without tutoring. The “abl”s of college admissions aren’t going to get into Williams under any possible admissions policies, with or without tutoring. Your analogy only makes sense insofar as it illustrates this very obvious point (that not a single person has ever made on this board).
The reason why your analogy is inapplicable is that the kids impacted by the policies at question are the marginal applicants. These are mostly folks who fall in the top 10% of their classes with SATs in the 1300-1400 range. They are undeniably smart and talented, but they aren’t admissions no-brainers. Some of them will succeed at Williams, but they won’t all. Some of them will succeed post-Williams, but they won’t all. Some of them will contribute to the Williams’ community–but they won’t all. To the extent that an academic “LeBron James” is ever impacted by an affirmative action policy, it’s only because that person is a diamond in a rough–a student who, on the face of her application, doesn’t appear to be a “LeBron James.”
I’ll make the question, which I have repeated many times to no avail, as simple as possible for you. If there are two students alike in every material respect (1450 SATs / 3.8 GPAs at the same school with comparable resumes), and you know that one student achieved her SAT scores after working with a private tutor with a long history of success stories while the other student did not have that opportunity — who would you accept? I honestly don’t see how any rational, clear-minded person can say that they aren’t going to accept the student who achieved her score on her own. That’s not because we are prejudiced against the student who got help: it’s that we don’t (or, at the very least, we shouldn’t) believe that her 1450 represents the same level of accomplishment and potential as the 1450 of the student who took the test cold.
There strikes me as being a reasonable debate to be had about how and whether admissions officers should take these sorts of advantages into account in the admissions process. There is no reasonable debate to be had about whether or not privilege plays a role in student achievement as measured by SAT scores and by GPAs.
October 16th, 2017 at 10:24 pmJCD says:
As a former faculty member at “the number one liberal arts college in the nation,” I think you are so convinced of the marginal benefit of tutoring that you are missing key elements of the larger picture.
For example, even if tutoring did make a marginal difference, it would be harmful to do what you suggest, that is to gather information on who does and does not access tutoring and then to punish the students who access tutoring. If anything, we ought to be encouraging more people, not less people, to try out tutoring to see whether or not it makes a difference for them. To do what you suggest would be expensive, impractical and harmful.
To allow, as an alternative, admissions decision-makers to assume some people have benefited from tutoring without any evidence at all would inject a new level of unfairness and arbitrary discrimination to the admission process. This assumption would inevitably be used to harm the chances of white and Asian students.
Finally, you seem to be blind to the larger point in this discussion which is that tutoring will never close the mean test score gaps between Asian and black students. In the same manner, coaching would have never turned me, or any of my four younger brothers, into an NFL/NBA athletes.
Ironically, a complete lack of tutoring – and a heavy dose of low income – did not prevent me or my brothers from being college professors, school principals, NASA engineers or multi-millionaires. It did not, moreover, keep my uncle – who never even attended college, from having a grandchild graduate from Harvard.
October 16th, 2017 at 10:57 pmabl says:
I’m not actually terribly concerned with tutoring — my point about tutoring was intended to be a reasonably uncontroversial illustration of one type of privilege. (I’m still baffled by the pushback that it received. I suspect Tom Foolery and others saw through the purpose of my post and chose to fight a ridiculous battle over tutoring rather than conceding a fairly obvious point and drawing the line somewhere more meaningful.)
Privilege manifests in a variety of complicated ways. It does not strike me as being much of a stretch to acknowledge that privilege plays a role in high school success in general and in things like the SATs more particularly.
If we can agree that some applicants’ SATs and GPAs are higher because of their privilege than they would have been otherwise–again, not a particularly earth-shattering point–then the next question we need to ask ourselves is what to do about it. Would you agree that if adcoms had perfect information and could perfectly account for the role of privilege in applicants’ undergraduate success, that adcoms should so account?
Incidentally (shifting a bit), the fact that some folks (like you) are able to succeed in the face of some adversity isn’t an indication that adversity never impedes or limits potential.
Finally:
Now we’re getting somewhere more productive! Are you saying that if African American students had the same educational benefits from infancy through high school graduation, came from families with similar accumulated wealth belonging to communities with similar accumulated wealth, and faced the same prejudices in society, they would achieve mean SAT scores on par with Asian American students? How could you possibly know this to be true? There are such enormous differences between the way these two populations are and have been treated that it strikes me as being impossible to speculate how they would perform in a hypothetical parallel universe in which children in each population were afforded truly equivalent opportunities.
And I want to again point out that your NFL/NBA analogy is wildly off point because we’re talking about exclusively marginal students here (students who aren’t obvious rejects or obvious admits). There are many, many students who will not get into Williams no matter how many privileges that they are afforded. Much the same way that there are many, many athletes (like you and your brothers apparently–and me) who will never play in the NFL/NBA. These students are not relevant to the debate.
A proper version of your analogy would ask whether a talented college walk-on at a school, who lacks the technique but not the physical attributes of a pro player, who nevertheless statistically profiles as a borderline pro player, could or should play pro with sufficient coaching. And, if we’re comparing the “raw” athlete to a polished athlete (polished because he’s received great coaching since a young age), how much should we discount the well-coached athlete’s marginal statistical performance advantage due to his relative polish rather than his underlying talents? Let’s further assume in this hypothetical that the principal purpose of the NFL/NBA was not to make money (or even to win games), but to benefit the athletes–and therefore NFL/NBA teams choose the athletes who would perform the best after a significant period of additional coaching that, in quality and quantity, far exceeds anything that had previously been made available to these athletes. Clearly, the answer in this hypothetical is not to take the walk-on talent in every circumstance. Nor, however, is it to always take the well-coached athlete simply because he’s registered slightly more sacks over the course of his career. Instead, which athlete we take is going to be based off of a complicated and multifaceted consideration of how much each athlete’s past performance and future potential is the product of their underlying talents as opposed to the coaching that they have received.
October 16th, 2017 at 11:57 pmJCD says:
Why do you assume that higher SAT scores are primarily the result of “privilege”?
You seem to think that you have the only possible explanation and that those who disagree with you are missing some sort of completely obvious, self-evident justification for affirmative action programs.
I suspect you are too used to asserting you vague, undefined, unsupported ideas in an atmosphere where you are not properly challenged to address more efficient and elegant contrary explanations.
I’m glad that you are at least on this site where you have the opportunity to be “baffled” to learn that normal, highly intelligent, gainfully employed professionals find it completely acceptable to “pushback” against your assertions.
October 17th, 2017 at 12:40 amFendertweed says:
Maybe the diversity anti-strata push can compel listening to JCD’s bilious screeds for 30-60 mins./week.
Worse than a cold shower?
October 17th, 2017 at 9:25 amabl says:
JCD —
1. I think I’ve been pretty clear that I do not believe that SAT scores are primarily the result of “privilege.” If, for whatever reason, this is still a point of confusion for you, I’ll make things easy: I do not believe that privilege is the primary determinant of SAT scores.
2. I think there are a number of different ways to support affirmative action programs. I don’t think the point that I’m trying to make–that if your goal is admitting the best possible class, some amount of adjustment for privilege is likely necessary–is the only or even the best justification for affirmative action (it, in fact, may not even support affirmative action in its current iteration). That to me feels like a point worth exploring. I would much rather work on exploring that point with you (and others here) rather than simply fighting about ridiculous things like whether or not SAT classes help students get better SAT scores (they do).
3. I’m not sure why you think I only engage with people with whom I agree. I don’t. I know what it feels like to be challenged and I know what it feels like to be proved wrong. I spend most of my day engaging with highly intelligent, gainfully employed professionals who push back against my assertions. To be clear, that’s not what’s happening here. I wish it were. But it’s not.
October 17th, 2017 at 2:07 pmHealthy Eph says:
abl — What you need to believe is that JCD is so delusional that he honestly believes he is winning this argument, as opposedto getting his head handed to him; that he is actually making good arguments, as opposed to spewing random nonsense; and that he is some sort of intellectual giant speaking truth to power, as opposed to a bigoted non-entity trying to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.
October 17th, 2017 at 3:24 pmJCD says:
abl
Here’s why I think you are baffled by the pushback you are receiving here.
The only reason your argument even has a superficial plausibility is that you fail to define privilege. Even worse, you fail to mention how we might measure privilege except to suggest that one, relatively minor element of it would be the existence of a vaguely defined tutoring experience.
Worst of all, you never give us your strategy for enforcing the information gathering that would be required to measure the level of privilege enjoyed by each applicant. For example, will you fine or blacklist those that do not provide you with complete information?
If you really think through your vague, seemingly innocuous idea that we should take into consideration privilege, then I think you will find it to be a truly frightening, expensive, and dangerous proposition.
I think you would be a better tutor if you grasped why your idea seems so dangerous to others, particularly those who have been treated cruelly by liberal do gooders who are willing to steeply discount the pain and suffering they cause others.
October 17th, 2017 at 9:31 pmStefan Muellenboecker says:
@JCD: Wow, that might be the most unintentionally honest characterization yet of your own psychological aversion to those who fight racism, classism, etc. — it’s all driven by the fact that your feelings got hurt decades ago because you just couldn’t make the cut in academia. Emotions truly are a powerful thing to keep you around here for so long rehashing the same tired points like a broken record (though in this metaphor you’re a record no one even wanted to hear playing in the first place, even in its unbroken form). I hope one day you find what you’re looking for, for your own sake and for this blog’s.
October 18th, 2017 at 12:48 amJCD says:
Don’t be a bore. What happened to me as a young, Republican assistant professor at Williams College is so common these days that Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. wrote a book about it. See, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University.
Passing on the Right
When I spoke with Shields last year, he indicated that their research found that the mistreatment of conservative professors is absolutely the worst among the New England liberal arts colleges. At this point, your weak attempt to shame me looks pathetic.
October 18th, 2017 at 1:18 pmabl says:
Wow — full of insults, cheap shots, and little else. What happened to you, JCD? You presumably are an incredibly intelligent guy.
First, none of the pushback that I’ve received (until your latest post) has touched on the difficult question of how to define privilege. Defining privilege strikes me as being a helpful–and important–question to admitting the best undergraduate class. To what extent are the sorts of privileges that confer SAT/GPA (and other similar) advantages tied to race–and how much does racial identity matter versus than the way one presents? (So what sorts of privilege are experienced by an applicant who presents as African American as compared with an applicant who is racially African American but presents as White?) What role does income play in the process, or having parents who graduated from four-year universities? There are so many interesting and important questions here. We haven’t approached exploring them in this thread because, in large part, I haven’t received much substantive pushback–and I haven’t received any pushback on the question of what constitutes “privilege.” Is it that you genuinely believe that there is no such thing–that in a parallel universe in which Baron Trump was born to homeless drug-addicted parents, he would be as likely to go to Harvard/Wharton/etc as the Baron Trump in our universe? That, to me, beggars belief.
Second, you’re right in pointing out that enforcement strategy is an important question in all of this. It’s not enough to recognize that some students have relatively benefited from certain privileges as compared with other students (and therefore have SATs/GPAs/etc. that don’t equivalently reflect their underlying abilities). From an admissions standpoint, it’s also necessary to figure out how much of an adjustment to make and for which students. This is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer without identifying what sorts of privileges should be considered by admissions officers. And, like its predecessor question, we didn’t get to it because the pushback that you and others here have provided has been remarkably non-substantive. Had you pushed back on my post in the way that I think we both wish you had, we would likely be discussing this now rather than having petty fights about your ridiculous NBA analogy.
Third, I’m curious to hear how a proposal to take privilege into account (to some relatively minor extent) in the admissions process is cruel. I understand that admissions is a zero sum game, so any policy change that advantages some students over others has “victims.” But if we’re moving to systems that do a better job of admitting the best class, I’m confused how the result could be described as cruel (as opposed to fair or equitable or meritocratic). Maybe we need to make further progress in defining what sort of privilege we’re discussing, and how privilege could or should be taken into account, before it’s possible to answer this question. But you were the one to jump to making conclusory statements about the presumptive results of the broad outlines of my proposal, not me.
Look, I don’t spend my time on this board because enjoy calling others names. There are numerous other fora that I could frequent if all I wanted to do was engage with reflexive conservative trolls. I’m posting here because I believe that the right-leaning (or hard right) posters on this thread are–or at least should be–capable of much more. I think that these are interesting and important questions without obvious answers. I suspect we’d both be happier if we were addressing these questions rather than sniping back and forth in pursuit of scoring ultimately meaningless argument/rhetoric points. But maybe I’m overly idealistic about what sort of dialogue is possible online.
October 18th, 2017 at 1:20 pmDDF says:
Agreed! I apologize for not having addressed your (subtle and difficult!) privilege examples. Hope to address this next week. It is an important discussion.
October 18th, 2017 at 2:34 pmHealthy Eph says:
It’s worth pointing out that “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University” was published by a university press.
It’s also always worth pointing out that JCD was hired by Williams, so he could not have been a victim of affirmative action despite what he claims. Then he didn’t publish anything. Then he didn’t get renewed (and this is an important point — he didn’t NOT get tenure; he didn’t even get that far. He did not get close. In an era when other white male junior faculty received tenure he got booted after, what, two, three years?)
Oh — and he is now going to tell us that he was one of the great political scientists of his generation because he won one of the several dissertation awards that APSA gives out every year, as if grad student awards are actually whole profession awards. So then someone will counter that he didn’t publish anything while at Williams. Or after. And then he’ll somehow claim that publishing at Williams is harder than publishing at other places. Which will somehow explain why he both published nothing since and also could not parlay the job at Williams to any other academic job of any sort at all.
Have I hit all the marks, or am I missing something?
October 19th, 2017 at 8:30 pmJCD says:
– Healthy Eph
I’m so bored with defending the quality of my academic work. By any objective measure, I was a precocious scholar with enormous talent and remarkable achievements.
Williams College dismissed my dissertation as sub-standard. However, it turned out to be good enough to win the highest possible honor in my field from the American Political Science Association. More significantly, it remains one of the extremely rare doctoral dissertations which still gets cited by other scholars 30 years after its publication.
http://anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com/2017/03/forgiving-my-enemies-remembering-my-old.html
I should point out that you are quite wrong about my subsequent career. I have published articles and taught at other schools since I resigned from Williams College. If you took the time to review my LinkedIn profile you would understand how silly you look when you are trying to shame me.
FYI: Passing on the Right was published by Oxford University Press. It is, without a doubt, one of the top five most prestigious academic presses in the world.
October 19th, 2017 at 9:25 pmWilliams Alum says:
Cool story, bro.
October 19th, 2017 at 10:14 pmHealthy Eph says:
The fact that the book was published by Oxford was my point — it is likely not just a top five academic press it is probably number one. And so how can they claim that conservative academics are being excluded fro the academic converssation when they are publishing with the best academic press in the world?
Williams did not dismiss your dissertation and then it won an award. You won the award while you were at Williams but a winning dissertation is grad student accomplishment. You did not publish while at Williams. And it was one of multiple dissertation awards given out that year by APSA. Meanwhile it resulted in neither a book nor in any articles. That you subsequently published a couple of things in a fifth tier management journal that was effectively a proceedings publication is fine, but hardly a sign of excellence.
The fact that you are worrying about citations of your thirty-year old dissertation is sort of sad. How many citations do the ARTICLES stemming from your dissertation have? Give, say, three examples.
And which schools have you taught at since Williams? Because you tend to be pretty snobby and elitist on these boards from what I can tell. I think inquiring minds want to know, say, the second best school you’re honored with your presence, and are equally curious if you have had another tenure track job. Because what’s listed on that Linked-in profile is, well, not impressive. Basically you’ve taught at the equivalent of California Upstairs Christian College, which also happened to publsh the two articles you seem to have published.
October 23rd, 2017 at 8:44 pm