Dartlog: 05/11/2003 - 05/18/2003

The Dartmouth Review

Thursday, May 15, 2003

More from Adil

"Alex, I believe in merit, not in color. affirmative action is little more than bullshit.

so i wrote at the end "It would be funny, if the nonsense I wrote above were actually true." which should make it apparent that i am not being serious. and secondly, the two points are not meant to be really "understood." i am trying to point out that the college's logic in getting more colored folks into Dartmouth is rather fuzzy.

do you get it now?"

"a very wrong policy of the college i must say. i am colored and i dont want special concessions to get into a college. of course, my sat score of 1590 was higher than most students, so i dont really care."

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 2:45 PM (0 comments)

I respond to Adil

>Date: 15 May 2003 13:25:54 EDT
>From: Alexander D. Talcott
>Reply-To: alex.talcott
>Subject: Re: response!
>To: Adil Warisuddin Ahmad

Hi, Adil

I appreciate your response. I find my self going back and forth between keeping my mouth shut on race to make my contribution to Dr. King's call for colorblindness...and then talking about other folks' insulting attempts at overcompensation.

I don't know if it's that I don't get your two points. I specifically made my letter short and bulleted to provoke other talk. My facts stand alone and are interesting when considered together. I don't really draw any conclusions in my letter.

Regarding point 1, it's either national or international aspirations or guilty overcompensation for past discrimination or current inequities in performance.

Regarding point 2, here's an excerpt from a 2001 article I wrote:

" According to Michele Hern�ndez, a former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth and author of the 1997 book, A is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, applications from minority students are literally flagged early on. "At Dartmouth," she writes, "minority-student status is designated by blue tags for black students, red tags for Hispanic students, and black tags for Native American students." Admissions officers apply different criteria to these applicants. Hernandez says that officers are willing to trade off test scores for class rank, or vice versa--and will generally "give less weight to test scores and class rank than would be accorded to nonminority applicants"--when weighing a decision about a non-Asian minority candidate. "For white students without tags, modest test scores are not offset by superior class rank." According to 1992 data, the average SAT score of black students at Dartmouth is 218 points below that of whites.

Hern�ndez notes the cost of hosting minority students for special recruiting weekends--"Dartmouth in a typical year spends in excess of fifty thousand dollars to fly or bus accepted minority students to the campus"--and finds that the real difficulty is that "many of the highly selective colleges end up fighting over a small number of qualified minority students, such that it becomes a Sisyphean task to enroll even a low number of minority students at each individual college."

Best,
Alex

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 2:41 PM (0 comments)

Adil Warisuddin Ahmad '05 to respond in The D

"To the editor:

Alexander Talcott �04 in his recent letter �A Clear Paradox� tries to point out that the 40% of non-white students on campus that Dean Furstenburg calls �real progress� does not quite match up to U.S. population statistics.

Ah, but Mr. Talcott does not quite get it. I see two possibilities here:

1. Dean Furstenburg is trying to say that as 'we are approaching 40 percent non-whites on campus' it 'represents real progress' towards becoming a truly international university. Of course, there are more than 40% non-whites in the world.

2. Alternatively, he is trying to say that as 'we are approaching 40 percent non-whites on campus' it 'represents real progress' towards becoming a better college. Well, some non-whites have this arrogance of being more intelligent than their white peers are and it seems that the college is buying into this.

It would be funny, if the nonsense I wrote above were actually true."

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 2:41 PM (0 comments)

Overheard

In the Office of Pluralism and Leadership:

Dean of Asian Students to Dean of Black Students: Congratulations.

Dean of Black Students: What?

DAS: You're the only one who got their numbers up.

DBS: Oh...yes

DAS: Congratulations. That's real progress. We're not there yet but we're getting there.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 1:13 PM (0 comments)

All That's Fit to Print

The D finally runs a letter to the editor by yours truly.

Graduate student Mark Bubriski responds:

"One statistic you missed:

1 year of minorities barely pushing "overrepresentation" at Dartmouth
vs.
234 years of whites being overrepresented at Dartmouth

That's progress.

Would you complain if the campus went, for example, from 45% female to 53% female in one year, after always being under 50%? It'll even out in the end most likely. Yes, it'd be questionable if the numbers continued to increase because that wouldn't make sense. But admissions is not a cut and dry process. It's a lot of guesswork.

And, statistically minorities are counted as poorly as 1 out of 3 in some urban areas or possibly less because of the poor job the the U.S. Census does (they've tried hard to improve, it's just really hard). So the numbers are fairly inaccurate.

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." -- Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1963

I dream of that day, too. But it's not coming anytime soon."

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 1:11 PM (0 comments)

At Coppin State College, an historically black institution in Baltimore, students who failed the requirements for a masters degree in criminal justice will be graduating anyway after they threatened the school with a lawsuit. (Alas, the story, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, requires registration.)

When the students learned that they would not be graduating because of their failed exam and seminar papers, a group of them took the matter to the president of the college, Stanley F. Battle.

They argued that they were not sufficiently prepared for the exam because the department did not plan any study sessions before the test, and that the department had unfairly judged their seminar papers as inadequate. Mr. Battle told department officials to allow the students to take a makeup exam on April 19. Again, all 10 students failed the test; several left together in the middle of the exam.

Once served with a lawsuit, the president of the College reneged:

"He told us that we were in a capital campaign, that we couldn't afford any bad publicity," Mr. Monk said. "I said, 'But they didn't pass the exam. They walked out of the makeup. They plagiarized papers.' He said, 'I know, but I have to let them graduate.'"

A lot of kooks think academic standards are inadvisable. Now, it seems, they are a liability. Sheesh.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 10:03 AM (0 comments)

Billie Jean King

Just noticed the post over at Free Dartmouth on Billie Jean King receiving an honorary degree at commencement this year. The post does, and I'm sure her intro at graduation will, reference the "Battle of the Sexes" match with Bobby Riggs in the mid-70s. Ever since the first time I heard about the match, I've wondered why it was such a big deal. I mean Bobby Riggs was a 55-year-old journeyman while King was a top player in the prime of her career. She should have beaten him. And the worst part is that every anniversary of the match, there has to be a self-righteous piece on the news about how it was such an important event. It wasn't. It was just a circus.

At least when Annika plays in the Colonial next week, she's playing against the best.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Ryan at 12:18 AM (0 comments)

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Re: I Have a Nightmare

Talcott, your criticism of Furstenberg's absurd statement is very fitting. However, it's worth noting that, according to The D article, the non-white population at Dartmouth is not really "approaching 40 percent"; it's at 32.4 percent. That means Dartmouth has a white population of 67.6 percent. This is only a hair's breadth away from the national figure, 69.1 percent.

If Dartmouth's goal is an equitable racial balance, it's pretty much been achieved. Let's hope Furstenberg's inane comment was just bloviation.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 1:24 PM (0 comments)

I Have a Nightmare

>Date: 14 May 2003 11:25:56 EDT
>From: Alexander D. Talcott
>Reply-To: alex.talcott
>Subject: I Have a Dream
>To: Karl M. Furstenberg

From The Dartmouth (5/14/03):
Furstenberg said that as "we are approaching 40 percent non-whites on campus" it "represents real progress."

From the U.S. Census Bureau:
White persons, percent, 2000 (a) 75.1%
Black or African American persons, percent, 2000 (a) 12.3%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2000 (a) 0.9%
Asian persons, percent, 2000 (a) 3.6%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2000 (a) 0.1%
Persons reporting some other race, percent, 2000 (a) 5.5%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2000 2.4%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2000 (b) 12.5%
White persons, not of Hispanic/Latino origin, percent, 2000 69.1%

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."---Martin Luther King, Jr. August 28, 1963

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 11:31 AM (0 comments)

My Alleged Hypocrisy

Over on (well, you know), Jonathan Eisenman has scurrilously accused me of hypocrisy. He claims that my post below on "sex fests" is contradictory with my post below on an op-ed by a student at Portland State University.

Jonathan, there's no hypocrisy here. I criticize the use of university funds to pay for purposeless drivel like sex fests. And I criticize people getting hysterical over posters and magazines, flinging accusations of sexual harassment and oppression all over the place. In both cases, certain people have come untethered from common sense, and I am pointing that out in each case.

I don't know where you got the idea that I am criticizing the student's right to express an opinion. That's nowhere. I call her ideas stupid; how much more directly to the message can I make it?

Actually, as I was reading the woman's op-ed, I found myself thinking that there is a lot there that I could agree with. The ubiquitous sexualization of our society, for instance (and, it should perhaps be stated clearly, the fact that this is a bad thing). The objectification of women in the media is cause for concern. My criticism was that this lady put it in the context of sexual harassment, oppression, victim's rights, blah blah blah... In other words, she took what could be valid points and made a mockery of them. It's odd that you would accuse me of seeking to dodge an argument; that's the matter with this op-ed. Rather than stating a very legitimate, and on some points even correct, case, the author hyperventilates.

So there is no hypocrisy on my part.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 10:06 AM (0 comments)

Re: Big Green Bean

Yeah, that article was unduly laudatory. Who the hell cares about the Big Green Bean anyway...

But I am puzzled by one thing. The article said that the Big Green Bean services will be transferred to Lone Pine Tavern, and that no students will lose their jobs. How, then, are they saving money -- or at least any appreciable amount of money? Or is it just that Student Services can't afford it, so is passing it off to DDS? Anyone know?

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 9:47 AM (0 comments)

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Re: Big Green Bean

Janos just poured me my usual large vanilla chai at Novack.

He told me that he's a bit concerned about budget cuts in the next year. If every cut is going to be fought tooth-and-nail, this is going to be a very difficult process.

And the Big Green Bean really isn't a Dartmouth institution by any means. It's near and dear to very few.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 10:46 PM (0 comments)

Feminazi Alert

Someone at Portland State University has a chip on her shoulder.

And no, it's not about being at Portland State University.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 9:41 PM (0 comments)

Sex Away!

Erin O'Connor -- Penn professor, friend of FIRE, and all-around wonderful person -- has the goods on "sex fests" on college campuses. Sickening, and disheartening.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 9:34 PM (0 comments)

A Touch of Diplomacy

On the just-announced closing of the Big Green Bean:

Assembly President Janos Marton said he had not widely circulated information about the effort to close the Bean because he had not considered it a "big deal" and had not been sure about the final decision.

Well, that's our Janos. Say what you like, you can't say he's not honest.

(Per usual, this blog post stands only on the assumption that The D has reported accurately.)

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 9:59 AM (0 comments)

Monday, May 12, 2003

For all you Women's Lax Fans

Dartmouth falls to Maryland 13-5, but you wouldn't know it until the sixth paragraph if you read this heap of junk in The D.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by alex at 10:46 AM (0 comments)

Re: Time Warp

Nilly, how is it apt? The article only mentions 2000 once, and mentions a host of other years as well. I bet it's simply that the image never got updated. Hell, that would prove the thesis of the declining importance of the Symposium, now wouldn't it...

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Emmett at 9:31 AM (0 comments)

Emmett, stuck in a time warp?

Actually, Emmett, the 2000-vintage image is apt, given the content of the article.

Full post and comments below the fold.

Posted by Nilanjan at 12:49 AM (0 comments)