Yesterday we had to sit for two hours and stare at a list of drop-fail percentages in our large intro courses. Calculus 1, Intro Bio, English 101, Intro Chem, Intro Psych, Intro bloody Theater.
The percentage of black students who drop or fail them is 85-90%. The percentage of all students taken together (including African-Americans) who drop / fail them is around 45%.
These are 25 large courses in very different disciplines, and the result is the same in all of them.
We were asked to explain why this happens. A Middle Eastern professor tried to venture an explanation but everybody was too horrified for him to continue.
We were sent home to think about our racism that makes us fail these students for bigoted reasons.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is the case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes!” Where’s the little kid who will bring everyone to their senses???
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We are all behaving like crazy people.
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“behaving like crazy people”
Modernity in some places (like the US) means having to lie, all the time, about almost everything….
Did Bauman actually see the near soviet levels of loudly and proudly denying reality that so characterize the ‘modern’ world… I wrote ‘modern’ because it seems like a regression…. decades of progress being thrown away to maintain public lies….
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Back in 2000 and 2003 when Bauman wrote his most important work, nobody could imagine this and neither could he. As we probably can’t imagine now where it will all get in 10 years. But the trend is very disheartening.
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I’m also amazed by this premise of wokes that all groups should have the same outcomes across all human endeavors.
On one hand, they say that their [chosen subgroup] is distinct enough from the rest of the population that they need a thumb on the scale by the state to help them with admissions and jobs. But if you’re defining yourself as distinct and separate, then it stands to reason that the particular cultural practices, habits, traditions, of your community will be determinative of your outcomes.
So, they need to pick one:
1) You’re a distinct category of people (ergo, you need to accept that different categories will have different outcomes, violating your fundamental premise ).
2) All categories perform the same (which means you have no case for being different, so go ahead and compete with everyone else on a level playing field).
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There’s also a simple math at work here that our Middle Eastern professor tried to explain, freaking everybody out.
Everybody currently wants to pad their “anti-racist numbers”. Black students who can succeed in college are in demand. African Americans are only 13% of the population, so fancy colleges are fighting each other for every qualified black student.
In order to win over Princeton or Cornell in this numbers game, my university removed all admissions requirements. We are taking everybody in to make up our numbers. And since all college-ready black students have been taken by fancier places, we end up taking kids who simply shouldn’t be in college.
We are trying to create an “equitable” 50% representation for a group that’s a dramatically smaller minority in the population. As a result, we hurt these black kids whom we lure into college under false pretenses, knowing that they’ll never graduate. And now we have to lower our standards of instruction to make this scam less evident.
This is immoral and wrong.
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My alma mater is doing the same. It managed to survive and thrive for more than a century without any diversity coordinators or any of that b.s., but now they are obsessed with diversity and I’m pretty sure it will be the death of them.
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It will be. People have absolutely lost their minds with all this.
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Preach. I keep trying to make these points in various committees at LRU. I don’t get shouted down, but I do get ignored . . . although a few not-innumerate people (in practice, men in STEM fields) start looking thoughtful when I try talking through the numbers. Cat only knows what people think of me, but they aren’t saying it to my face yet. This being the Midwest, possibly they never will.
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Good point about the Midwest. :-)))
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The way it’s always worked in SA is that the bureaucrats want the outcome they want and will attempt to enforce it regardless of any rational considerations.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2023/07/10/employment-equity-acts-echoes-from-the-past/
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