As I explained in great detail previously, affirmative action in college admissions is a non-issue. It’s invented to keep simpletons on both sides occupied and inflamed. One of such simpletons decided to send in this question.
The overwhelming majority of colleges in this country never used affirmative action because they don’t have any standards of admission. Everybody gets accepted. Even people who don’t apply get accepted. You’ve got to be every kind of stupid to blether on excitedly about Yale (where, unlike me, you never studied or taught) instead of concentrating on what’s happening at the community college in town or the public university next door.
What the bloody ef do you, incredible doofus, care about Harvard? What is it to you which wealthy kid gets to memorize neoliberal mantras there? How does that impact your life what race that kid is?
I just can’t with these people who wouldn’t be bothered to notice what’s happening under their noses. The public education is getting destroyed as we speak. Forget bloody Harvard and its stupid race-mongering. These are rich people with their rich-people problems. They don’t care about you. Why are you so sore over their imaginary problems?
Also, would it be so hard to enter “affirmative action” in the search box of the blog and see what was the most recent thing I said about it instead of making inane assumptions?
Clarissa's Blog 
Hmmm, I do not dislike AA, I detest it and anybody sufficiently ignorant or immoral to even attempt to support it.
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One thing that did help is that we are no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and sex in hiring or scholarships and awards. That’s a good development that I welcome.
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Well, as you might well know, in Canada, not only is discrimination on the basis of race and sex allowed, it is actively encouraged. There is a hole in our Charter ;-D
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Not condescending at all.
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Never got to see it in action, in college.
Where I did see it was in business, which was just dumb. Business loans were biased toward businesses headed by women. So everybody I knew who was trying to start a business… put their wife on the paperwork as CEO, even though she had little or no involvement. But it was easier to get startup money that way.
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“we are no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and sex in hiring or scholarships and awards.“
But you are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and sex in hiring or scholarships and awards.
In fact, you wrote recently that at your university you must now hire a person of colour or a woman, and even better if it is a woman of colour. No white man stands a chance. Of course, according to anti-racism ideology that is NOT racist, but that’s another story.
I’m sure that’s not a good development that you welcome.
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Yes, I should rephrase. We aren’t allowed openly to put it in job ads and scholarship descriptions. But the discrimination still goes on, of course. You can’t legislate what’s in people’s hearts. People honestly believe that this is good, so they do it.
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“affirmative action”
My experience from a few decades ago: One of the tasks of the office I worked in was distributing biweekly minority graduate scholarship checks (or paystubs since most had direct deposit).
IIRC it was a program for African American students and they were all (like the African American students I knew from undergraduate classes) pretty obviously middle class.
There were other programs that we took into account for some things and there were a few Hispanic and Asian and a very white seeming student who had membership in a non-federally recognized American Indian group (there are a few scattered around the US Southeast).
Similarly when there was a job opening in the office (career path not student employees like me) our supervisor had to interview a certain number of minority candidates. That wasn’t a problem either as the campus workforce was very integrated (this was the time when African American women were getting into the Civil Service the traditional path to the middle class in the US). Black men were very scarce on the ground in offices (heavily represented in physical plant).
AA was honestly not that big a deal then, something that helped some people, maybe not those it was supposedly created for but not a malign dysfunctional thing either. But at some time…. (1990s? 2000s? after that?) My hypothesis was that at some point the neoliberal agenda began shrinking rather than growing the pie but I don’t have the access to have any more detailed theories about when and where and how…
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It’s gotten to the point where the only professor of statistics one would be allowed to hire must be black. But black professors of statistics have no reason to settle for our school with its crappy pay and constant budget upheaval. Such professors are very few, and all big, famous schools need to make their quota as well. So we lose. How can we possibly compete? As a result, we can hire no one and are left without a math professor.
Trying to explain to the administration that zero black professors have applied for the job is a waste of time. It’s still considered our fault in some way.
I have no problem with interviewing minority candidates. What kills me is that when there are zero applications from minorities, it’s somehow evidence of my inherent badness.
We are badgered for not hiring people who never applied. That’s the maddening part of it all.
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Discussion of higher education in the US is always focused on the elite institutions and the edge cases.
Certain politicians in my state will rant about the state universities being indoctrination factories because we have five students majoring in women’s studies and gave the LGBTQ kids an otherwise unused room to hang out in and called it a “center”. At the same time there are thousands of students enrolled in the business programs being taught that their only purpose in life is to ruthlessly extract every penny possible in every situation. And thousands and thousands beyond that who are on track to be teachers and nurses and dentists and all sorts of other things society needs.
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We work with kids from East St Louis, Chicago Southside, the opioid townships around the region. That’s real affirmative action, in the best sense of the word. And we are being wiped out by state disinvestment. It benefits everybody to have these kids integrated into society. But it receives zero coverage and, consequently, zero money. It’s impossible to attract attention because people are obsessed with Harvard like it’s the only school in the nation.
Last semester I put in a lot of time into helping a black male student who got into a quagmire of bureaucracy that he couldn’t resolve. We are tragically short-staffed so there was nobody capable of helping him. He would have dropped out because I saw that he was losing hope. It took me literally yelling at a bunch of people to get things moving.
He’s now my best student, a high achiever, very motivated. It isn’t getting accepted that causes obstacles. Everybody gets accepted. It’s the collapse of advising, of every university service that’s supposed to help. This student was lucky because I discovered the problem by complete accident. But how many will fall through the cracks unfairly and needlessly because we can’t hire people? We bleat endlessly about anti-racism but the actual reality is the opposite. I’m permanently pissed off over this.
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I see what you’re saying but I still think it’s important to have qualified people in ivy league schools because the unfortunate truth is that the elite of this country is selected from that pool. Be it supreme court justices, high ranking officials in the state department, health officials who make policy, etc. These people have tremendous power over us.
I wish that were not the case, but as long as it’s happening I’d rather low IQ POC retards be kept away from these institutions.
Stringer
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No, sadly, there is no best sense; whether the term is AA, quota, or set aside, all such programs operate by cheating superior applicants out of their opportunities, while nicely camouflaging their nasty intent. Not every deserving applicant born on the wrong side of the track is gay. handicapped, black, brown, red, or female. The only way to be fair is to measure by merit alone. Period. Full stop. ;-D
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