Genetics and Affirmative Action and Opportunity
There’s a lot of fraud at major universities. That can't stand up to scrutiny.
Without delving too much into the meat of the Supreme Court decision I have to say that I am feeling a bit overwhelmed with excitement by the moment we are in.
A major reason I was a Republican was affirmative action, which I have long viewed as both anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination. It's nice to see the rest of the world catch up to me even if I now have mixed feelings about the Court’s decision. Here I am in July 2011 writing about anti-Asian racial preferences.
As years have gone by the sting has lessened as all slights do. I’ve come to believe that maybe the problem is the way we assess and process talent in the first place.
As you know I was rooting for the Asians who have seemingly vanished altogether from the public discourse. I believe that “muh meritocracy” is a lie and the best way to reveal a lie is to show its limits and expose its adherents as the ethnic or class nepotists they actually are.
I said at the time:
One of the ways to limit the power of a lot of cultural institutions is to make them so Asian that they don’t matter anymore. It happened to Berkeley. It happened in Silicon Valley. It happened to CalTech and, I suspect, it’ll happen to the Ivy League, especially Chisraeli U — Harvard University. And I, well, I simply can’t wait. Call it The Reject’s Revenge.
I’ve been writing about and predicting this stuff for a long while so it’s nice to see how this go down.
But I’ve come to think that I got a lot of it wrong. We are a commercial republic veering on an empire. We aren’t a bunch of test taking mandarins.
Much of the focus on standardized tests really gets down to who makes the tests and whether or not the tests are fair or good measures of anything other than the bias of the test takers. You’re not supposed to ask about Common Core or David Coleman’s conflicts of interest. Or about what Bill Gates — who is very close with the Chinese leadership — was really up to when he pushed Common Core across America.
And then there’s the cheating question. It’s rude to talk about high stakes testing producing a culture of cheating and how some ethnic groups are more likely to cheat than others. You’re supposed to take as given people’s merit. And yet we all know people who cheated and got away with it.
It’s always dangerous to talk about this sort of thing. I did well on standardized tests but it wasn’t ultimately worth it. I should have spent more of my life developing my interpersonal skills.
Might there be tests that are not so high stakes and much more accurate?
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The colleges can’t really survive serious inquiry. Maybe they weren’t supposed to. There’s a lot of fraud at major universities. Like a lot a lot.
The biggest problem remains grade inflation which is a fraud both on the students and on the employer.
You get glimpses from time to time. My alma mater Claremont McKenna College admitted to systematically manipulating its SAT scores which I wrote about at the time for the Manhattan Institute.
According to an investigation in the Claremont Port Side, a student magazine, over 75 percent of all SAT scores reported since 2005 had been manipulated. Students promptly took to Facebook with theories about Vos’s motives. The most common was that pressure to improve the school’s ranking blinded his ethical judgment. But the speculation misses a more important question: why did such a systematic fraud go undetected for so long? There are two answers, both of which apply not just to Claremont McKenna, but to colleges across the U.S.: lack of oversight and insufficient accountability.
We don’t even need to go there with Varsity Blues or Jared Kushner’s father bribing Harvard’s admissions department.
We need a real assessment of people’s real capabilities. That may not be possible for the softer subjects but it’s certainly possible with the outliers. Even the rudimentary short of polygenetic scores that are being offered work. My company — Traitwell — has designed a number of these apps and we will bring forward more of them soon.
Why not collect DNA from every applicant and then correlate it with success?
We evaluate the whole student, the college admissions officer says, but how could anyone have that much information on what a successful student might look like?
Indeed IQ tests generally were invented as a way of expanding opportunity for the lower classes as I wrote about here.
Now I suspect that I was discriminated against when I applied to college but I’m oddly cool about it. I feel a bit about this like black novelist Zora Neale Hurston. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
I’ve lived enough to realize that sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is to get exactly what you want.
All that said, I suspect the real reason I was discriminated against wasn’t because I was white but because I was middle class and maybe even poor. (My father’s business was doing poorly and my mother had cancer.) I even had a guidance counselor tell me that I could get off the waitlist if my family put itself seriously into debt to pay for my college. I declined. I graduated with $17,000 in debt and I retired it within three months by playing poker. Really.
I had applied to college through QuestBridge a program for high achieving middle class or poor kids and while I was determined to be sufficiently poor enough, the scholarships went to the blacker, browner, richer, dumber kids. Whoops.
The truth is that while colleges may claim to be need blind they aren’t wealth blind. They are increasingly finishing schools for a global elite.
What we effectively have in our society are titles of nobility and as a Son of the American Revolution — the only lineage that has ever mattered to me — we oppose claims of nobility.
But there is a solution. We can and we should discriminate against those institutions which discriminate against us. We can and probably should hold people’s alleged elite education against them. At the very least we should demand that they do elite things, like be publicly spirited. That would require them to want to actually serve other people. They should follow Charles Garman, Coolidge’s old mentor.
President Coolidge, recalling his education in his memoirs, paid homage to his old mentor:
“We looked upon Garman as a man who walked with God. His course was a demonstration of the existence of a personal God, of our power to know Him, of the Divine immanence, and of the complete dependence of all the universe on Him as the Creator and Father ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’…The conclusions which followed from this position were logical and inescapable. It sets man off in a separate kingdom from all the other creatures in the universe, and makes him a true son of God and a partaker of the Divine nature. This is the warrant for his freedom and the demonstration of his equality. It does not assume all are equal in degree but all are equal in kind. On that precept rests a foundation for democracy that cannot be shaken. It justifies faith in the people…I know that in experience it has worked…In time of crisis my belief that people can know the truth, that when it is presented to them they must accept it, has saved me from many of the counsels of expediency.”
“…In ethics he taught us that there is a standard of righteousness, that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationship is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitious about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give. Yet people are entitled to the rewards of their industry. What they earn is theirs, no matter how small or how great. But the possession of property carries the obligation to use it in a larger service. For a man not to recognize the truth, not to be obedient to law, not to render allegiance to the State, is for him to be at war with his own nature, to commit suicide. That is why ‘the wages of sin is death.’ Unless we live rationally we perish, physically, mentally, spiritually.
“…A great deal of emphasis was placed on the necessity and dignity of work. Our talents are given us in order that we may serve ourselves and our fellow men. Work is the expression of intelligent action for a specified end. It is not industry, but idleness, that is degrading. All kinds of work from the most menial service to the most exalted station are alike honorable. One of the earliest mandates laid on the human race was to subdue the earth. That meant work.
“If he was not in accord with some of the current teachings about religion, he gave to his class a foundation for the firmest religious convictions. He presented no mysteries or dogmas and never asked us to take a theory on faith, but supported every position by facts and logic. He believed in the Bible and constantly quoted it to illustrate his position.” In fact, to the surprise of all, he opened his remarks to the senior class of 1904 in chapel service with the unapologetic admission, “Believing as I do in the divinity of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ…” Coolidge continues, “He divested religion and science of any conflict with each other, and showed that each rested on the common basis of our ability to know the truth.”
“To Garman,” Coolidge wrote, “was given a power which took his class up into a high mountain of spiritual life and left them alone with God. In him was no pride of opinion, no atom of selfishness.”
We can and we should insist that college endowments be used for the betterment of our whole society, starting with the local community colleges and regional universities. Why can’t the smartest kids from Cambridge High check out books from Harvard’s Widener Library? None of that’s likely to happen, of course. They want college to be a velvet rope. They want it to be exclusionary. Well, to hell with that!
The best way to defeat the colleges is to make them totally unnecessary for the amenities of Middle Class life.
And the only man to do that is President Joe Biden.