Category Archives: education

by | 19 January 2007 · 5:53 pm

"Poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom"

In today’s New York Times, a 10th-grade history teacher at a public school in
the Bronx reviews Hollywood’s latest inspirational-teacher flick.

The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job….

“Freedom Writers,” like all teacher movies this side of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” is presented as a celebration of teaching, but its message is that poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom.

I won’t argue the need for more of the first two, but I’m always surprised at how, once a Ms. Gruwell wins over a class with clowning, tears, rewards and motivational speeches, there is nothing those kids can’t do. It is as if all the previously insurmountable obstacles students face could be erased by a 10-minute pep talk or a fancy dinner. This trivializes not only the difficulties many real students must overcome, but also the hard-earned skill and tireless effort real teachers must use to help those students succeed.

It seems to me that Hollywood takes exactly the same short-attention-span approach to foreign policy. Each international crisis is a movie project. Activists devote their attention to it for six months or so, generating media events and raising tons of cash. When that’s done, they take several months off, then they’re ready for new causes, new projects, new scripts, new locations, new casts, new marriages. Nothing can’t be solved by media events, cash, and lots of feel-good self-congratulation. Who cares if their solution bombs with the people it aims to rescue. They’re not really the audience. They’re somebody else’s responsibility. And it was all somebody else’s money to begin with.

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by | 15 November 2006 · 5:52 pm

Medical Professionalization in Medieval Europe, 1300s

On November 2, 1322, Madame Felicie was convicted of violating an ordinance that prohibited unlicensed healers from visiting, prescribing medications, or performing other duties for a patient, except under the guidance of a university-trained and licensed physician. The conviction was a major victory for the Paris Medical Faculty, a principal architect of the new medical pecking order, which had a pyramid-like shape. At the pinnacle was a relatively small coterie of the university-trained physicians; they practiced what we would call internal medicine. Beneath them were the general surgeons, who usually lacked academic training, although that was changing. By the early fourteenth century surgery was beginning to find a place in the medical schools. A surgeon could treat wounds, sores, abscesses, fractures, and other disorders of the limbs and skin. Beneath the general surgeon “was the barber surgeon, a kind of paramedic, who could perform minor operations, including bleeding, cupping, and applying leeches, as well as cutting hair and pulling teeth; next came the apothecary and the empiric, who usually specialized in a single condition, like hernias or cataracts. At the base of the pyramid were thousands of unlicensed healers like Madame Felicie.

To reflect their new eminence, in the decades prior to the plague, physicians began to adopt a more professional—that is, authoritative—demeanor and code of behavior. A cardinal “don’t” in the new medical etiquette was: don’t jeopardize your professional dignity by visiting patients to solicit business. “Your visit means you are putting yourself in the patient’s hands,” warned William of Saliceto, “and that is just the opposite of what you want to do, which is getting him to express a commitment to you.” A cardinal “do” in the new etiquette was to conduct a comprehensive physical exam on a first visit; the exam should include not just urinalysis, but a detailed medical history and an analysis of the patient’s breath odor, skin color, muscle tone, saliva, sweat, phlegm, and stool. Some physicians also cast a patient’s horoscope on the first visit. Another cardinal “don’t” in the new etiquette was to admit to diagnostic uncertainty. Even when in doubt, said Arnauld of Villanova, a physician should look and act authoritative and confident. For the uncertain physician, Arnauld recommended prescribing a medicine, any medicine, “that may do some good but you know can do no harm.” Another strategy was to “tell the patient and his family that [you are] prescribing this or that drug to cause this or that condition in the patient so that [they] will always be looking for something new to happen.” A third “don’t” in the new etiquette was volubility. Reticence conveyed authority, especially when combined with a grave manner; besides, said one savant, the physician who discusses his medical reasoning with the patient and his family risks letting them think that they know as much as he does, and that may tempt them to dispense with his services.

What made the university-trained physician such an impressive figure to laymen, however, was not only his authoritative bedside manner but his mastery of the arcanae of the New Galenism. Its signature principle was the theory of the four humors. For the ancient Greeks, whose thinking shaped so much medieval medicine, the number four was, like the atom, a universal building block. Everything, the Greeks believed, was made out of four of something. In the case of the physical world, the four elements were earth, wind, water, and fire; in the case of the human body, the four humors were blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. An important element in the humoral theory were the four qualities of all matter: hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus, blood was said to be hot and moist; black bile, cold and dry; yellow bile, hot and dry; and phlegm, cold and wet.

SOURCE: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly (Harper Perennial, 2006), pp. 167-169

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by | 12 November 2006 · 9:36 pm

Foreign Outliers in Kyoto 50 Years Ago

Fifty years ago, I was attending second grade at the U.S. Army Base on the grounds of the Kyoto Botanical Garden. I’m not sure whether it might have been called Camp Botanical Garden (Shokubutsuen, 植物園). I remember that some of my military-brat classmates had to ride a school bus from nearby Camp Otsu, which didn’t have its own school at the time.

It was my third school in as many years, and the next year I would enter my fourth. The previous year, while we were on furlough at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I had attended first grade at Greathouse Elementary School in St. Matthews. The year before that, I had attended the Japanese kindergarten on the grounds of Seinan Jo Gakuin, a Baptist girls school where my father served as chaplain.

After we returned from furlough in 1956, my father became chaplain of the newly established Japan Baptist Hospital in Kyoto. The military base closed down the very next year, so the local missionaries hastily organized Kyoto Christian Day School (now KIS), using Calvert School curriculum materials.

The photo above is from a KCDS field trip to the Kyoto police headquarters, maybe in 1958. Our adult chaperone was Mr. Daub, whose eldest son Philip was in my brother’s class (a year behind me). My brother is the disgusted-looking kid in the front row, with Philip to his right. I’m the angry-looking kid in the front row, with my classmate David Thurber to my left. I don’t remember much about David except that he was somehow related to the writer, James Thurber; and that he had a wide-smile contest at his birthday party, which I thought was kind of unfair because he had the widest mouth in the class (and not just because I was such an accomplished frowner).

Behind me are two more of my classmates, Danny Hesselgrave and John Hawley. I remember riding my bike to the Hesselgraves on more than a few weekends, where Danny and I would play with his sets of little plastic cowboy and Indian figures, each of us taking one side or the other. Our games would always start with the question “Peace or War?” I once experimented—only once—with the game-killing answer, “Peace!”

John Hawley was an only child with what we imagined to be a rich grandmother back in England, who used to send him much more impressive sets of little metal figurines: legions of finely crafted toy soldiers in the colors of famous British regiments. I remember only once or twice going out to visit him in a huge mansion on a large estate in Yamashina. To us, he seemed the poor little rich kid. We envied him his toys, but not what we imagined to be his solitude.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: Such, anyway, were my childish impressions at the time. In truth, we were all poor little rich kids relative to our Japanese neighbors at the time. We lived in a large American house on a lot so big that it was later subdivided to accommodate at least half a dozen Japanese houses for employees of the Baptist Hospital. We had a Japanese maid, as did most other American missionaries at the time. And we got presents of various kinds either from relatives or churches back home or from Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogs we ordered from in time for Christmas every year.

At the time, we only knew that John’s father was a writer of some kind, but I’ve just this weekend learned what an extraordinary man he was. Frank Hawley (1906-1961) was a linguist who taught at SOAS, spent the 1930s in Japan, helped found the Japanese language section of the BBC after being repatriated to England during the war, then returned to Japan where he worked as a writer and collector of well over 20,000 books, some of which were destroyed during the war, others first confiscated then purchased by Keio University in Tokyo, and others after his death now housed at the University of Hawai‘i.

It also turns out that Danny Hesselgrave’s father was a very productive author in his own right. I had thought the Hesselgraves were Evangelical Lutheran, but now I’ve found that they belonged to a pietist, congregationalist offshoot of Scandinavian Lutheranism, the Evangelical Free Church, explained further below.

There were also Finnish Lutheran missionaries in Kyoto at the time, and at least two Finnish MKs, John and Eva Kekkonen. Eva taught the kids of KCDS a game that we used to call Finnish Red Rover, where one kid in the middle tried to tag the other kids as they ran between the endzones, turning each person tagged into a tagger until all had been caught. (Eva was also the object of my first secret boyhood crush.)

Thanks to a random, mindful act of Internet archiving [PDF], I’ve discovered more about the first school teacher whose name I remember. Miss Pilcher was the first principal and first credentialed teacher of Kyoto Christian Day School.

Reflecting the keen interest of the denomination to which they belonged, the fledgling church [Evangelical Free Church of Walnut Creek, now known as NorthCreek Church] was very missionary-minded from the start, and this was further demonstrated when Shirley Pilcher left for Japan. Shirley’s folks, Carl and Ada, often had missionaries visit in their home thus exposing their children to the spiritual needs of the wider world.

After high school, Shirley went to Trinity College, the EFCA school in Chicago, and then to San Francisco State where she completed her teaching credential. After a second grade assignment for one year in Walnut Creek, she felt God’s call to overseas work under the Evangelical Free Church Overseas Missions Department, as it was then called. This opportunity had developed on very short notice, so a commissioning service was quickly arranged and held on the evening of July 31, 1958. About 200 people attended. A few days later, with about 100 well-wishers at the airport, Shirley left for Kyoto, Japan, where she spent four years teaching mostly missionary children plus some from U.S. Embassy families. Church records show that the stipend paid to her monthly was $1,287.

Because Shirley would spend her next birthday thousands of miles from home, all in the church family were encouraged to send her appropriate greetings. For those wishing to send money, envelopes were provided. A telephone call to her was initiated from the church during a Sunday school hour; it was probably very early morning in Kyoto. In 1962 she returned home to a public school teaching assignment in Alamo. Later, Shirley met Foster Donaldson and, after they were married, they served for many years in the Philippines with Overseas Crusade where they were engaged in a Bible correspondence ministry and provided literature resources for pastors. They also opened a couple of bookstores there. Shirley lost her life to cancer in January 2004; Fos continues to be active in the church. Following is a reproduction of the farewell program for Shirley’s departure for Japan.

I must confess that, until today, I had never heard of the Evangelical Free Church of America. Here’s a bit of its history, from the document I discovered online.

Scandinavians began streaming to the United States in the late nineteenth century, settling mainly in the East and Midwest. They brought with them all of the thinking, the implements, and the practices of the culture they knew abroad. One big difference was that there was no state church in America. Most Christian immigrants attended a Lutheran Church where their own languages were spoken, Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. Following their experiences back home, especially where they did not find evangelical messages in the churches here, many began to meet privately for worship, Bible study, and fellowship. In 1884 a Norwegian-Danish Free Church was founded in Tacoma, Washington. It was the first church with “Free church” roots on the West coast. Shortly a group of seven persons formed the next Norwegian-Danish Church, this one in Boston. Those of this European background thus organized two conferences, one “eastern” and one “western.” In time these two joined to form the Evangelical Free Church Association….

Although there were a number of leaders in those early years, the research points to John. G. Princell as the “founder” of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church of America. His counterpart was R. A. Jernberg of the Norwegian-Danish Free Church. Princell attended the University of Chicago, majoring in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Jernberg graduated from Yale University and the Chicago Theological Seminary. So both of these men were learned and well-trained in the American tradition that the best educated men were those “of the cloth.”

People feared becoming a denomination because that word was associated with Lutheranism in Europe….

In the early history of these Scandinavian free churches, all the preaching was done in the native tongues since the immigrants still spoke them here. But their children were learning English rapidly and so English gradually took over, first in the Sunday schools. And little by little it then followed in the preaching services despite some resistance by the “old timers.” In some churches it was necessary for lay people to provide the pastoral leadership owing to the absence of ordained and capable men. So efforts to unite the two regional Norwegian-Danish associations had taken a long time, and getting those two to agree, despite their long years of political union in Europe, was not accomplished without a lot of discussion. And then there were many further discussions before they united with the Swedes!

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by | 9 September 2006 · 8:18 am

New Findings on Dolphin Intelligence

Randy McDonald’s wide-ranging LiveJournal recently noted new findings about dolphin intelligence.

Paul Manger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand says the super-sized brains of dolphins, whales and porpoises are a function of being warm-blooded in a cold water environment and not a sign of intelligence. “We equate our big brain with intelligence. Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,” he said….

They are widely regarded as one of the smartest mammals. But Manger, whose peer-reviewed research on the subject has been published in “Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society”, says the reality is different. Brains, he says, are made of neurons and glia. The latter create the environment for the neurons to work properly and producing heat is one of glia’s functions. “Dolphins have a superabundance of glia and very few neurons … The dolphin’s brain is not made for information processing it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water,” Manger said.

As a couple of Randy’s commenters note, other measures of intelligence seem to tell a different story.

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by | 4 September 2006 · 12:28 pm

At the Dawn of Engineering Education in the U.S.

Until the 1830s, West Point dominated American engineering. West Point offered the only academic training in the field in America, and Army engineers were a true elite. Only the top cadets of each West Point class were allowed to enter the Corps of Engineers, while only the top eight cadets in each class could enter the separate Corps of Topographical Engineers….

But these few could hardly supply the nation’s needs. Engineers who left the Army were besieged with job offers, and a civilian profession was developing through apprentice programs, especially on the Erie Canal. In 1835, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute first granted a degree in engineering. By 1850 so did Michigan, Harvard, Yale, Union, and Dartmouth. Meanwhile, technical knowledge was advancing at an exponential rate, and civilian engineers began denigrating their military counterparts for their rigid and dated training.

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 35-36 (reviewed here)

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by | 24 August 2006 · 5:53 pm

Poor Pluto: A Very Far Outlier Demoted

Poor Pluto has been kicked off the world-famous Solar Planets for regularly failing to stay in its lane—or clear its own lane—during repeated orbits of the sun.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is — and isn’t — a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one….

Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s….

Now, two of the objects that at one point were cruising toward possible full-fledged planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed “Xena.”

It’s a cold world out there at the far end of the solar system!

UPDATE: Matt of No-sword and his commenters offer some interesting observations about the etymologies of ‘planet’ and ‘dwarf planet’ in Japanese, Sino-Japanese, Chinese, and even Greek.

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by | 16 August 2006 · 8:39 am

Education of Essad Bay Nousimbaoum, Orientalist

On October 17, 1922, Lev enrolled as a student in classes in Turkish and Arabic in the Seminar for Oriental Languages at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. On his application, he wrote his name as “Essad Bey Nousimbaoum,” from Georgia. This was the first recorded official use of his new name—which was essentially “Mr. Leo Nussimbaum” transposed into Turkish. (However, the word “Bey” had connotations of Turkish nobility, and his new name helped build the impression that Lev was of princely origin.)

The inconvenient detail that Lev had not yet graduated from high school was not mentioned, and it became his great secret for the next year and a half. At first he was slightly disturbed by the university lectures, for he found that “the professors spoke about their subject matter as though they were speaking about completely ordinary things.” But gradually, he understood that the professors saw the Orient as a professional pursuit, while he was driven by “a mysterious compulsion.” Lev started to figure something out—a neat trick, in fact; a mental survival skill. He found that his love of ancient crumbling walls and winding souks was a guiding light he could shine on almost any landscape, no matter how bleak and intimidating it might seem. He would learn to carry a portable “Orient” inside him, one that he could unpack whenever he found a comfortable spot and the right audience.

He began to keep a crazy schedule. He was determined that no one in the Russian gymnasium find out that he was attending the university (under false pretenses), and at the same time no one at the university must realize that he was still in high school. At 6 a.m. each day, he set out from Charlottenburg and walked all the way to the other side of the city to the university. He would spend the morning in seminars while the gymnasium was still full of German girls. When the Russian school opened, at 3 p.m., he would be there just as if he had been loafing all day like his classmates. “While the teacher was explaining a geometric theorem, the Arabic grammar lay on my knees.”…

Lev’s capacity for hard work and mental focus was something that would drive the rest of his short life. The emigre writers were known for drinking and working like fiends, but Lev would soon astound even them. His clandestine academic activities made him feel at times like he was in an “exclusive club,” and at other times as though he lived in another world. He was glad to have a reason for being separate, however. Both the work and the schedule were a sort of emotional survival strategy. “Most likely I would have perished from this leap into poverty, if it had not been for the love of the ancient Orient that kept me going,” he recalled. Lev also found he enjoyed having a secret life. He was different, he knew, because of what he had done and what he was doing. He was now an Orientalist….

On the day of his final examination at the Russian gymnasium, Lev felt lost and hopeless. He had spent far too much time at night school, studying Arabic, Turkish dialects, and Uzbek geography. There was no hope he could pass in his basic subjects—especially Latin and mathematics. He felt a fool and imagined how his and his father’s prospects would become even worse when he flunked the exam. He would not be able to face the old man, who had experienced so much hardship. It would be more than he could bear.

The chairman of the examination committee, a wrinkled old Romanov prince with a monocle sunk impossibly deep into his face, seemed to take barely any notice of Lev during his exam. Then Lev saw he had written on his pad, “in his melancholy aristocratic handwriting” next to the name Nussimbaum, “a very poor candidate.” During the history examination, the old chairman practically seemed asleep as Lev was quizzed, sitting there indifferently and gazing off into the distance. Suddenly, he raised his head, fixed Lev through his monocle, and said: “Tell us something about the dominion of the Tartars and Mongols over Russia.”

The question would already have been the ultimate gift to Lev, even if he wasn’t in his third semester at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

“I saw before us the wide Mongolian steppes and the horsemen … and there was no stopping me,” Lev recalled. I think I even forgot that I was in the middle of the examination. I spoke and spoke, I quoted Arabic, Turkish, Persian authors in the original languages. Indeed, I even knew some Mongolian. The committee was dumbstruck—the prince dropped his monocle. Then suddenly he started posing questions, and lo and behold!—he posed questions in Persian, in Mongolian, he even quoted the classics of Oriental literature…. Only later did I find out that the prince was one of the most renowned Orientalists of Russia. The examination committee sweated; the whole thing went beyond their imagination. The teacher suddenly looked like a little schoolboy. What started out as an examination turned into a discussion in all different languages about all sorts of Oriental problems. I think it lasted two hours and it would have continued into the evening if the person sitting next to the prince, a former Russian privy councilor, hadn’t given him a nudge.

The discussion saved Lev. Whatever other mistakes he made on his examinations, the old prince saw his talent and would not let him fail. In place of “a very poor candidate,” the chairman made sure that all his examiners marked Lev as “average.” He could graduate.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 193-194, 198-199

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by | 21 July 2006 · 10:11 pm

Ode to English Majors

The Chronicle recently carried a column entitled “Goodbye Mr. Keating [the teacher in Dead Poets’ Society]: To succeed as a Ph.D. in English, you have to give up all of the things that attracted you to the subject in the first place.” It appealed to me for two reasons. (1) I thoroughly enjoyed my graduate work in linguistics because it involved a lot of fieldwork and language-learning, two achievements that proved unfortunately of no great consequence in pursuing an academic career in linguistics, for which I believe I lacked the necessary temperament. (2) My daughter is scheduled to graduate with a B.A. in English next year and is pondering what to do after that. The pseudonymous author of the Chronicle article, an English professor at a midwestern university, waxes romantic about the qualities of undergraduate English majors, many of which ring true.

In a course I taught last spring, after three months of tracing the development of literary theory from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to the dilemmas of the present, I finally asked my students the question: “So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?” I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest.

They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting in a circle in the grass, backed by purple hydrangeas, they offered the following motives:

  • Formative experiences with reading as a child: being read to by beloved parents and siblings, discovering the world of books and solitude at a young age.
  • Feelings of alienation from one’s peers in adolescence, turning to books as a form of escapism and as a search for a sympathetic connection to other people in other places and times.
  • A love for books themselves, and libraries, as sites of memory and comfort.
  • A “geeky” attraction to intricate alternate worlds such as those created by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas.
  • Contact with inspirational teachers who recognized and affirmed one’s special gifts in reading and writing, often combined with negative experiences in other subjects like math and chemistry.
  • A transference of spiritual longings — perhaps cultivated in a strict religious upbringing — toward more secular literary forms that inspired “transcendence.”
  • A fascination with history or science that is not grounded in a desire for rigorous data collection or strict interpretive methodologies.
  • A desire for freedom and independence from authority figures; a love for the free play of ideas. English includes everything, and all approaches are welcome, they believe.
  • A recognition of mortality combined with a desire to live fully, to have multiple lives through the mediation of literary works.
  • A desire to express oneself through language and, in so doing, to make a bid for immortality.
  • A love for the beauty of words and ideas, often expressed in a desire to read out loud and perform the text.
  • An attraction to the cultural aura of being a creative artist, sometimes linked to aristocratic and bohemian notions of the good life.
  • A desire for wisdom, an understanding of the big picture rather than the details that obsess specialists.

Those answers defied everything they had been taught in my theory seminar. Nevertheless, they were all, in different degrees, the answers I would have given as an undergraduate. They reflected the drive toward imaginative freedom expressed by Keating, but they also reflected a deep traditionalism that is equally crucial to English as a discipline. Both impulses, however, are intractably emotional, irrational, and romantic.

Not one student said, I am studying English “because I want to make a lot of money” or “because my parents made me.”

English is, almost always, a freely chosen major — and sometimes it is chosen in spite of parental and material resistance. English is a rebellious major, even as it draws on a tradition deeper than the contemporary American dream of success.

It surprised me that none of my students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive. Nearly all of them would have skewed to the left on most of the usual subjects.

When I asked about that, one said, “If I wanted to be a politician, I’d major in political science. If I wanted to be a social worker, I’d major in sociology.” English is, among my undergraduates at least, one of the last refuges of the classical notion of a liberal-arts education.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 21 June 2006 · 1:33 pm

Negative Action vs. Affirmative Action Inside Higher Ed

The 21 June issue of Inside Higher Ed reports on two articles that “challenge some conventional wisdom about affirmative action in higher education.”

The article about Asian Americans comes amid many reports that they are the group that most benefits from the elimination of affirmative action. That supposition is important for several reasons, both practical and political. On a practical level, it counters the idea that colleges will be all white in a post-affirmative action era. Politically, these projections have been used repeatedly by critics of affirmative action, arguing that they are not “anti-minority” and to appeal for Asian support in referendums. One of the most dramatic studies on this issue came last year, when two Princeton University researchers analyzed data from elite colleges and projected that, without affirmative action, four of every five slots lost by black and Latino students would go to Asian Americans.

In “Negative Action Versus Affirmative Action: Asian Pacific Americans Are Still Caught in the Crossfire,” William C. Kidder takes issue with the Princeton study and similar findings by other scholars. It’s not that the demographic shift seen by the Princeton researchers wouldn’t take place in an admissions system that’s truly race-neutral, says Kidder, a senior policy analyst at the University of California at Davis. Rather, it’s the question of why those slots would go to Asian applicants.

The reason, he says, isn’t the elimination of affirmative action, but the widespread use of “negative action,” under which colleges appear to hold Asian American applicants to higher standards than they hold other applicants. Using the available data from the Princeton study — and not all of it is available — Kidder argues that the vast majority of the gains that Asian American applicants would see come from the elimination of “negative action,” not the opening up of slots currently used for affirmative action. Based on the data used by the Princeton study, Kidder argues that negative action is the equivalent of losing 50 points on the SAT….

Tracking enrollment patterns from 1993, when all of the law schools had affirmative action, to 2004 — when they all did not — and then to 2005, when Texas restored it, his results were surprising. Without affirmative action, the share of Asian American enrollments dropped at two of the law schools and increased only marginally at three of the schools — even though people assume Asian American enrollments will go way up without affirmative action. Kidder notes that during the time period studied, the percentage of Asian Americans applying to law school increased 50 percent, so the pool should have created the opportunity for major increases.

What does this all mean? Kidder argues that all the references to growing Asian enrollments in a post-affirmative action world encourage a return to the “yellow peril” fear of people from Asia taking over. More broadly, he thinks Asian Americans in particular aren’t getting accurate information about the real cause of their perceived difficulties getting into competitive colleges. Their obstacle, he says, isn’t affirmative action, but the discrimination Asian Americans experience by being held to higher standards than anyone else. He says that the differential standards appear to be growing and are similar in some ways to the way some Ivy League institutions limited Jewish enrollments in the first half of the 20th century.

via Instapundit

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by | 10 May 2006 · 12:09 am

The Meaning of Tolerance in Tehran

About two weeks into my second semester of teaching at Allameh, as soon as I opened the door to my office, I noticed on the floor an envelope that had been pushed under the door. I still have both the envelope and the yellowing piece of paper I found inside, folded once to fit. My name and address at the university is typed, but on a piece of paper there is only one line, childish and as obscene as its message: The adulterous Nafisi should be expelled. This was the welcoming gift I received on my formal return to academia.

Later that day, I spoke to the head of the department. The president had also received a note, with similar message. I wondered why they told me this. I knew and they knew that the word adulterous, like all other words confiscated by the regime, had lost its meaning. It was merely an insult, intended to make you feel dirty and disqualified. I also knew that this could happen anywhere: the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.

What hurt, and still hurts, is that this mentality ultimately ruled our lives. This was the same language that the official papers, the radio and television and the clerics from their pulpits used to discredit and demolish their foes. And most of them succeeded at their task. What made me feel cheap, and in some way complicit, was the knowledge that so many people had been deprived of their livelihood on the basis of similar charges—because they had laughed loudly in public, because they had shaken hands with a member of the opposite sex. Should I just thank my lucky stars that I escaped with no more than one line scrawled on a cheap piece of paper?

I understood then what it meant when I was told that this university and my department in particular were more “liberal.” It did not mean that they would take action to prevent such incidents: it meant that they would not take action against me on account of them. The administration did not understand my anger; they attributed it to a “feminine” outburst, as they would become accustomed to calling my protests in the years to come. They gave me to understand that they were prepared to put up with my antics, my informal addresses to my students, my jokes, my constantly slipping scarf, my Tom Jones and Daisy Miller. This was called tolerance. And the strange thing is that in some way it was tolerance, and in some way I had to be grateful to them.

SOURCE: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi (Random House, 2004), pp. 189-190

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