Harvard and Ronald Sullivan: the dancing bears of the university give in to student pressure
By now you’re probably read about the the dismissal of Ronald Sullivan and his wife from their posts at Harvard College’s Winthrop House:
The story begins last January when the African American Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s defense team…
…[Sullivan’s] decision to represent the man at the centre of the #MeToo scandal proved too much for some radical students, who began organizing protests in Harvard Square. The chant heard most often at these rallies is ‘Believe Survivors’, the same phrase that activists used when campaigning against Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. The implication is that the presumption of innocence should not be extended to men accused of rape or sexual assault.
Initially they wanted to get Sullivan fired from Harvard Law School, but the law school stood firmly behind Sullivan. Law schools still seem to understand the importance of allowing attorneys to defend unpopular clients without losing their teaching jobs. But then the college was approached with a different tactic by the activists:
Sullivan’s critics, perhaps realizing they weren’t going to get very far arguing that Harvey Weinstein wasn’t entitled to due process, focused instead on trying to get him removed as a dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s undergraduate dorms, where he has served for 10 years. This position, which Sullivan shares with his wife Stephanie Robinson, a law lecturer at Harvard, is a pastoral one and, as such, gives him some responsibility for students’ mental health and well-being. This, then, was his Achilles heel.
This is an important point that gets somewhat lost in some of the articles on the issue—the approach of the anti-Sullivan activists was definitely tied to his defense of Weinstein, but it had a psychological twist involving his position as Winthrop dean:
To date, the only half-decent argument that’s been made against Sullivan being able to combine these two roles is one put forward by the feminist intellectual Catharine MacKinnon, also a professor at Harvard Law. For her, the issue turns on whether ‘sexually abused students can feel comfortable confiding in’ a dean who’s representing ‘a credibly accused multiple perpetrator of sexual assault’. She doesn’t categorically say they can’t, but she thinks it’s ‘an equality question’ for him and Harvard to consider…
But the Dean of Harvard College, a sociology professor named Rakesh Khurana, said after a meeting with Sullivan that he took ‘seriously’ the concerns expressed by the activists and said ‘more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students’. Those were no empty words, either. A few days later, he announced Harvard would carry out a ‘climate review’ of Winthrop House, an example of bureaucratic gobbledygook that didn’t bode well for Professor Sullivan. As he pointed out in the New York Times: ‘Never in the history of the faculty dean position has the dean been subjected to a “climate review” in the middle of some controversy.’
Sure enough, Khurana announced the outcome of the review on Saturday: Sullivan and his wife’s employment as faculty deans of Winthrop House would end on June 30.
‘Over the last few weeks, students and staff have continued to communicate concerns about the climate in Winthrop House to the college,’ he wrote in an email to students and staff at Winthrop. ‘The concerns expressed have been serious and numerous.’
Not only does this constitute a capitulation of the dancing bears (see *NOTE below) at Harvard to sensitive students over the right of a law professor to defend unpopular clients (and, connected with that, the right of that defendant to even have an effective defense with a lawyer of his/her choice), but it also represents Harvard’s placing the needs of the #MeToo crowd over its championing of a minority group professor as well as a profound break with its own law school, as describe here:
According to The New York Times, “They were the first African-American faculty deans in Harvard’s history.”…
The Harvard Crimson reports that over 50 law professors at Harvard, including Dershowitz, are standing behind Sullivan.
There’s still another aspect of the story, covered heavily in the Harvard newspaper the Crimson, which is that the “climate” in Winthrop House concerning Sullivan and Robinson seems to have a history prior to this incident. I read the whole Crimson article (it’s long) and found it not the least bit evident what they’re talking about, except that it seems that some people complained about the couple and had some trouble with them earlier. A commenter at the article wrote this, and I agree with it: “There are a lot of adjectives [in the Crimson article], like ‘toxic’ and ‘antagonistic’, but a paucity of specifics. All they really add up to is, ‘something I dislike.’ What did Robinson supposedly do or not do?”
At any rate, it’s fairly clear that these previous complaints were about other things, and that Sullivan and Robinson’s dismissal as deans would never have occurred but for the prospect of Sullivan defending Weinstein and the pressure from students worrying about being triggered. In an irony, Sullivan has actually quit the Weinstein defense team because of a scheduling conflict, but I doubt that would have put a dent in the students’ demands. He had already been branded as evil and insufficiently nurturing.
A lot of things are going on here, none of them good. But I’d like to discuss one thing that I don’t think has been emphasized enough in the Sullivan controversy, and that is the idea of what students should expect from universities as well as what universities should expect from students.
Are students to be considered adults? And if the university is still in loco parentis, does it need to be consistent in this regard?
When I was in college it was pretty clear: students were not adults. For the most part, we couldn’t legally drink. We couldn’t vote. Women not only didn’t live in men’s dorms and vice versa, we couldn’t even go upstairs in each other’s dorms. Women had curfews every single night; men did not.
Obviously, much of this was for the protection of women from sexual predators and pressures. It’s not that the rules couldn’t be circumvented—they could, and they sometimes were. But the colleges weren’t saying okay to a lot of sex among college age students, and for the most part society itself wasn’t saying okay, and therefore it was also easier for young women to learn how to say “no” to pressure, something a lot of compliant and people-pleasing (and love-seeking) women had trouble doing even if they really wanted to say “no.”
Simply put, society was strongly reinforcing women’s right to wait till they were ready to have sex. What that meant for each individual woman was different, but the general trend was quite different than now, when pressures are quite the opposite.
At the very same time, we college students were all treated as adults in that we weren’t given the impression that the world of the college was there to conform to our emotional needs and/or demands. If something made us uncomfortable—if a professor was insufficiently warm and fuzzy, or was defending a murderer or rapist, or whatever might upset us but was within the law—well then, it was pretty much suck it up, buttercup. That had its problems, too, but it had the distinct advantage of teaching us something about the world, which is that the world wasn’t going to cater to our vulnerabilities, and that it was up to us to try to get stronger and tougher and deal with it.
Not a bad lesson, really.
Today’s students probably have more to contend with, really—although they also have more resources in terms of counseling available if they need help dealing with the pressures. It’s not just the hookup culture, which I think is profoundly tension-producing. It’s social media, whipping them into a frenzy. It’s more instability at home—more divorce, for example, and more drug use. But in particular it’s that way too many adults have failed to teach them that no, the world doesn’t function around you and your PTSD, difficult and upsetting though this may be.
[*NOTE: The term “dancing bears” is one I’ve used several times before. It comes from a quote from Allan Bloom’s 80s classic on the university and its students, The Closing of the American Mind:
[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.
As I wrote in the post I just linked, in response to that Bloom quote:
Well, now that the universities have been purged of just about all remaining conservative professors and administrators, campus activists don’t have to listen to all that blather about academic freedom. Or if they do, it’s all about freedom for the left, freedom to threaten anyone and everyone who disagrees with them.]
In my opinion, the worst aspect of caving in to student pressure is that Harvard isn’t listening to intellectual powerhouses. These activists’ arguments, both spoken and written, never rise to the level of a varsity high school debate team (or quiz bowl team, to be more current). What are their majors?
I admit my own bias, though. At my alma mater, “activism” often was a socially-acceptable way to blow off classes and get extensions from sympathetic instructors.
It is positively “cringeworthy” to read Catharine MacKinnon’s comments, by the way. My classmates and I would have loved to have ousted several people from the Communications Department, including Jeffrey Masson, MacKinnon’s boyfriend. He was allowed to teach a class called “Media Harms” which seemed like one long discussion of his ongoing defamation suit against The New Yorker.
Truly disgusting.
And it will get worse.
Of course, this “passionately intense” Orwellian mob can only be encouraged by the disingenuous moral genii of the Democratic Party (and others), whose current cri de coeur is that Trump IS—MUST BE! CAN ONLY BE—guilty in spite of Mueller’s disappointing failure to pin anything concrete on He-Who-Must-Be-Impeached….
(“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” has—so predictably—morphed into “Black lives matter but some matter more than others”…while still others—those who don’t think “right”—have to be exiled and disgraced. And driven far off into the wilderness….
Time for the academy to wake up! (But I wouldn’t hold my breath at this point, as the toxins appear to have spread too wide, too deep—viz. MacKinnon, who is right on cue with the pitch-perfect, oh-so-“reasonable”-sounding perversity of Shakespearian proportions).
And time for Dershowitz to step up—and not just offer support, though this is an encouraging and courageous, but no not surprising, step—since for him this debacle, this disaster is personal: seeing Harvard collapse like a house of cards MUST be perceived as the equivalent of kicking out those Jewish professors from German universities in the 30s, though in this case the impetus is ideological rather than racial “IMPURITY”. (To be sure, were Sullivan a Caucasian professor, the likelihood is that he would’ve been kicked out even more summarily. With a whole lot less fanfare. Without any “humanistic” and “caring” musings from Professor MacKinnon….)
Alas, if the universities keep this up, then they are doomed.
Incidents like this…and they are occurring almost every day…point out the extreme importance of ensuring that the Democrats do NOT take control in the next election.
Academia is certainly doing its best to destroy its brand.
Another nice touch is the announcement out today from the College Board that, from now on, SAT scores will be modified by adding a secret “adversity score” of between 1 and 100 extra points to make up for test takers “wealth advantage” or the lack thereof.
“Colleges have long been concerned with scoring patterns on the SAT that seem unfavorable to certain racial and economic groups,” explained the New York Times. “Higher scores have been found to correlate with the student coming from a higher-income family, having better-educated parents, and being white or Asian rather than black or Hispanic.”
Said the head of the College Board, “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.”
But, fear not, it’s all going to be so, so scientific, because in deciding how many extra adversity points a test taker should have added to their score, the Board is going to consider 15 different factors–“like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood.”
And race, of course, will have nothing to do with this calculation.
See https://pjmedia.com/trending/killing-education-sats-to-add-adversity-score-to-address-wealth-disparity-in-results/
To the extent in which the image of a dancing bear presents us a nice incongruity; here an amusing, rhythmic and delicate being; all the while retaining (for our frisson of terror) a genuine element of frightful ferocity; a natural basis which we understand can potentially reemerge in any moment, unbidden — I cannot imagine any similar underlying nature in our current run of administrators or professors.
Just ain’t any there there.
There couldn’t be a clearer example of trying to artificially engineer “equality of outcome” vs. providing “equality of opportunity,” now could there?
Who’d you rather hire, someone who could answer the questions correctly based on their education and native talent, or someone who couldn’t answer the questions correctly, but who had his SAT score artificially inflated, to make it appear that he could?
Someone who had a better chance of doing the job, or someone who had less chance of doing the job?
Useful idiots can always be counted upon to saw off the branch upon which they sit.
Should these sheep succeed in banishing their sheepdogs, neither the Stalinists, the Maoists nor the Islamists will allow them their illusions.
As many ‘object lessons’ will be made, as are needed. Maduro is providing the latest demonstration of what wolves do with sheep.
It has ever been thus, “If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep…” Mexican bandit Calvera (Eli Wallach) explaining why they preyed on the innocent, peaceful villagers.
The left is recreating the religious concept of the pariah. There is no need to take legal or extralegal action. Those who decide what is right-think and wrong-think simply have to declare someone guilty (a pariah), and the howling wolves of political correctness do all the heavy lifting for them.
The poor unfortunate souls that have been so designated have no appeal and no hope. They have been banished, and that is that. And this from the very people who prided themselves on their tolerance and liberalism.
“When I was in college it was pretty clear: students were not adults. For the most part, we couldn’t legally drink. We couldn’t vote. Women not only didn’t live in men’s dorms and vice versa, we couldn’t even go upstairs in each other’s dorms. Women had curfews every single night; men did not.”
I was a freshman in the early ’70’s and virtually everything was the opposite. We could vote, I got a draft lottery number, alcohol was legal (not in dorm rooms but was OK in dorm rec rooms), and the opposite sex was just around the corner in the hallways. Commercial bars and the grad student bar were a few blocks away. No curfews of any sort.
The university had subsumed an all women’s college years prior, and they had a few women only dorms for those who wanted that.
I can’t say there was a huge amount of debauchery probably because most the students I knew were busting their butts with course work. While there were left wing student protests on occasion, they were largely ignored. Excepting the seizing of the admin building, or course.
I also took a 6 week summer school course for advanced high school students between their junior and senior year, that was held at my home state’s state univ. campus. In that circumstance there were many students that went completely berserk with their new found freedoms.
Those were tumultuous times. A great deal changed from ’65 through ’85.
David Foster on May 16, 2019 at 5:13 pm at 5:13 pm said:
Incidents like this…and they are occurring almost every day…point out the extreme importance of ensuring that the Democrats do NOT take control in the next election.
* * *
Add it to the lengthening list.
The most frightening thing, to me, is that, once again, the Rabid Left are attacking one of their formerly favored own, with nary a Republican, conservative, or white supremacist in sight.
Sullivan also defended a few other leftist icons in his career, according to the Crimson article (which is, indeed, quite long, with additional discussion in the comments as to the credibility of the charges against the deans).
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/10/winthrop-climate/
While I agree that every defendant, no matter how scurrilous, is entitled to the most competent attorneys he/she/it can pay for, anyone who takes a long-term position as counsel to Ted Kennedy, whose own imputed and known behavior is not far removed from Weinstein’s, has some serious moral compartmentalization going on.
However, that choice of defendant did not distress any of the wilting snowflakes at Harvard, did it? I wonder, though, how he would fare in the #MeToo climate of today, as it is mostly the province of the young and enthusiastic, rather than the old and treacherous (ditto the communism and anti-Semitism of the New Skul congresspersons), and not beholden to the Kennedy dynasty in any way, neither captives of the Kennedy mystique.
For those concerned about the climate of tar-and-pitchforks at universities in general, and especially the complaints that Sullivan should be removed because he hurt peoples’ feelings, here is an account of a case which ends up on the Right Side of History.
The first two links are variations-on-a-theme, but contain slightly different sets of events and opinions; the third is the judge’s decision, which any legal-beagles here ought to enjoy immensely (it’s a rarified choice of entertainment, though).
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/04/22/the-splendid-peter-ridd-court-judgment/
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/04/24/peter-ridd-vs-the-dishonourables/
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ridd-v-james-cook-university-2019-fcca-997-.pdf
Actually, the thing that puzzles me most, which I haven’t seen anyone address yet, is why Sullivan made the decision to defend Weinstein in the first place.
He had to have known it would be controversial in the current climate of “believe the victim” hysteria (and I use that word deliberately), so why take the risk?
Especially in defending the man who actually served as the catalyst for the #MeToo movement in the first place.
As one of the Crimson commenters said, harking back to the Ward Churchill Effect from Boulder a few years ago, although he probably doesn’t know anything about it:
I certainly hope the sexual assault rate is not that high* — although if students do in fact believe it is correct that might explain most of the protesting — but the rest of the remark is pertinent.
What was Sullivan thinking??
FWIW, when I went searching for that comment, the word “why” got exactly zero hits in the Crimson article.
*on college assault stats
https://spectator.us/diversocrats-take-harvard/
Let’s not forget Sullivan’s wife, Stephanie Robinson, who has been considered collateral damage in the Dancing Bears’ routine in most of the reports. She is mentioned only once or twice by the Spectator and TownHall and Atlantic, but an astounding 41 times by the Crimson, which pairs her name with Sullivan’s in all but a few instances, and definitely includes her as a full partner in the alleged toxicity at Windsor House.
https://spectator.us/diversocrats-take-harvard/
In re the bolded sentence, look back at the Crimson excerpt.
“Robinson served as chief counsel to the late United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54.”
Sullivan is getting most of the pixel-inches, but his wife and co-dean Robinson was the one who worked for Chappaquiddick Kennedy.
This official website post may not be up much longer.
https://winthrop.harvard.edu/masters-0
“Faculty Dean Stephanie Robinson
Stephanie Robinson, Esq. is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a national media figure, author, former Chief Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and the President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focusing on democracy.
..
For five years, between 2008 and 2013, Ms. Robinson was Political Commentator for the Tom Joyner Morning Show where she spoke to between 9 and 10 million people weekly, offering her perspective on the day’s most pressing social and political issues.
Ms. Robinson is a nationally recognized expert on issues relating to social policy, women, race, family, and electoral politics.”
Did she have any input into her husband’s decision to defend Weinstein?
The movie titan was certainly in the same social circles as Kennedy, and probably known to him at least indirectly (see below; if two-steps-away is good enough for FISA surveillance, it’s good enough for blog comments).
Surely she had to realize, given her own career history, that female students at Harvard would be up in arms even more about her betrayal than her husband’s.
What was she thinking???
https://freebeacon.com/culture/mpaa-chair-chris-dodd-a-harvey-weinstein-friend-still-silent-on-sexual-abuse/
BY: Brent Scher
November 7, 2017 10:00 am
Typo fixes: missed another blockquote for the Harvard quote; and it’s Winthrop House, not Windsor (well, they were accused of autocratic behavior…)
Let’s look at the Winthrop-Kennedy connection a bit further, although most of the references at Wikipedia are to JFK rather than Teddie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_House
Interesting that the students knew enough about Teddie’s habits to make the apocryphal story believable.
A couple of posts back at the beginning of the Weinstein furor also make a Kennedy connection, but only by analogy, because it was so obvious.
Does anyone know if Weinstein had a direct connection with Kennedy, the way he did with the Clintons?
Surely, at some point while Robinson was Ted’s Chief Counsel, she introduced him to her husband.
Was Sullivan just doing a favor for a friend of an old friend?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/kennedy-clinton-and-weinstein-sexual-assaults-accountability-conveniently-timed/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/harvey-weinstein-harassment-liberals.html
(Julie: my 2-line comment has now lasted 2 hours, in case you are counting)
Aesop, I’m glad to know you’re holding up the side. 😀
Indeed “What were they thinking!!!!!!!”
Upholding the principle of due process, the right of a defendant to a defense attorney, and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”.
WHAT THE F*&#^@! H*#& WERE THEY THINKING!!!!
And these guys are university professors at America’s MOST PRESTIGIOUS university!!??….
Neo links to Conor Friedendorf’s article at The Atlantic without quoting from it.
I read it to find out what the View from the Left looked like, because it was odd to see both left and right wing publications supporting Sullivan rather than the aggrieved protestors, and ostensibly for the same reasons.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/harvard-ronald-sullivan-weinstein/589300/
Here are a couple more articles, via Conor’s links, that have the same response (the first also by Conor).
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/defense-harvey-weinsteins-lawyer-ronald-sullivan/583717/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/unpopular-speech-in-a-cold-climate
Same song, different verse:
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-nipsey-hussle-chris-darden-20190510-story.html
I used the word “ostensibly” because the arguments look the same on the surface, but the virtue-signaling spin that the writers apply, almost reflexively, reveals how far detached they are from reality.
So many posts to fisk, so little time….
Suffice it to say, the pundits on the left, including the Slate author, really believe that they exemplify the liberal values they profess, without ever noticing that they only apply those values when it’s convenient, and even then only to people on their side of the ideological divide; and can’t see that the protestors they complain about in this case are only doing what they themselves support, incite, and perpetrate when it’s aimed at the Right.
I won’t excerpt the examples justifying that particular conclusion, because you can spot them pretty easily if you want to go look; you’ll recognize them, even if their authors don’t. I want to concentrate just on the topic at issue: can good leftists defend bad people?
The bottom line is that all the writers stress that they themselves, or other “liberal” lawyers, have always defended “unpopular” defendants before, without anyone calling them out; “Why is defending Weinstein any different?” they cry, confused and upset. They present their cases.
(Slate) she defends young black men in college rape cases…well, she does get hate tweets from feminists, but any sane leftists, as well as most conservatives, totally agree with her work;
(New Yorker) “In the years that followed (9/11), accused terrorists were the defendants who inspired the fiercest public scorn. Their lawyers were denounced as enemies of national security. Yet lawyers’ work in those cases forged sane legal doctrine on due process and executive power, doctrine that protects our civil rights today.”…that’s what they believe. (Read this article while thinking about Brett Kavanaugh and theTrump Dossier, for starters, and you’ll see what I mean about not having the time or energy to fisk the whole thing.)
(LA Times) “After centuries of a history of black men hung from trees without trial, or after the thousands of cases of black men tried, convicted and executed without counsel … I cannot understand why in 2019 some people would deny a black man his 6th Amendment right to counsel of his choice,” Darden said, speaking of the man accused of killing “a celebrated rapper and community activist”…which is why I say, by extension: they really don’t understand the opposition to defending Weinstein; “Darden told The Times outside the courtroom that he has been defending accused criminals, including gang members, for two decades….He went on to add: “I defend poor people — that’s all I do. And he’s definitely poor.”
(Atlantic, both articles) “Ronald Sullivan, an African American law professor and faculty dean with a long history of freeing marginalized innocents from prison” … none of whom, I suspect, are going to be on any leftist’s “no way” list;
“Defense attorneys for Communists made many feel angry and unsafe.” … and no communist was unpopular on the left, even if some people didn’t say so out loud;
“Defense attorneys for al-Qaeda terrorists made many feel angry and unsafe.”…but were very popular people on the left;
This one needs more context —
“In 2016, during the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump attacked his rival as unfit to lead because she once acted as the defense attorney for a man accused of raping a 12-year-old. (She thought he was guilty.) Defense attorneys for child predators make many feel angry and unsafe. ” … BTW, Republicans were incensed, not because she was his lawyer, but because she mocked the victim and laughed about defending a man she believed was guilty;
“Now Sullivan is defending a man who makes many at Harvard feel angry and unsafe.”
You all saw what he did there, I assume.
Conor just called the Harvard students McCartheyite warmongering Islamophobic… somethings; that will really swing the protestors over to his side, you betcha!
They really don’t know the answer.
So I’ll tell them.
Your prior defendants might be “unpopular” with the mythical Right that you are always speaking Truth to (despite the fact that it has no Power to stop you doing anything you jolly well please, and even then you have to impute to all conservatives opinions many of them don’t hold), but Weinstein is unpopular with the Left.
And that is the bottom line.
Barry: I love the smell of good snark in the morning.
To summarize the argument:
They may be professors at America’s most prestigious university, but they were not smart enough to look at what might ensue from defending Weinstein and turn down the job.
Regardless of their motivation for joining Weinstein’s legal team (and I do think both of them must have agreed Sullivan would do it), they probably did think that they were doing something that is a matter of course in a world where classical liberal values (or at least some of them) still hold, and which is — or was — the norm for lawyers.
They were not thinking in tune with these times, when college kids can torpedo any professor, any time, for any reason, and no quarter given for former commendable behavior.
Maybe they thought that their leftist credentials would protect them, in the same way Bill Clinton’s protected him, and Ted Kennedy and others; however, they should have known that time was past — the writers at NR did.
But maybe they didn’t even think about it at all, in the same way that so many other professors have gotten on the wrong side of a student protest because they haven’t really internalized how little it takes to melt a snowflake or trigger an activist looking to cause trouble.
The faculty who were first to be taken down by the mobs had no real fore-warning that they were wandering into a mine-field; these two ought to have known better.
The New Yorker writer is smarter, and had a good excuse to boot.
“(I was also approached by Weinstein to join his criminal-defense team, which I disclose here with his permission. Primarily because The New Yorker had, famously, investigated and published various allegations against Weinstein that led to his being charged, and, because I am a contributing writer to The New Yorker, I declined to represent him, wishing to avoid any possible appearance of a legal conflict of interest.)”
Neo – apologies for all those links in the Google search copy-paste.
What was I thinking???
Snow – another take on the SAT insanity.
https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2019/05/16/the-new-sat/
RTWT
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/05/16/sat-will-now-assign-adversity-score-student/
“I’m torn over this. On the one hand, I think schools should be making some effort to recognize students who overcome personal adversity to achieve high scores. If there are two students with the same good grades and very similar scores and one kid clearly worked a lot harder to get there, rewarding that extra effort makes sense.
However, the way this is set up seems designed to punish students for “privilege.” If a student has great grades and test scores but comes from a wealthy family that lives in a wealthy neighborhood, he’s still a great student with great test scores. He should get into a good school and shouldn’t be penalized because his parents also did well and went to great schools and got good jobs. That would be punishing the student for someone else’s extra effort.
I guess my worry is that schools seem likely to get carried away with this in a way that penalizes success. I don’t think that’s a good idea or a good message.”
The message is “you didn’t build that.”
The dragons’ teeth have been meticulously sown
The gates of intimidation have been thrown open.
And the Red Guards—those passionate guardians of virtue—have been let loose across the land.
(Which is absolutely fine as long as they can confine their virtuous enthusiasms to the right people…and groups. IF….)
Being from the same neck of the woods, as Rajesh Khurana, I can assume this was a lynching. If you do not believe it, just attend any of our soirées and overhear the racism against “kaloos”. Would be automatic admission into the al-right, only the brown-ness getting in the way.
On the one hand, I think schools should be making some effort to recognize students who overcome personal adversity to achieve high scores. If there are two students with the same good grades and very similar scores and one kid clearly worked a lot harder to get there, rewarding that extra effort makes sense.
That is what personal statements and essays are supposed to do, plus, of course, interviews. The imitation of objectivity is important to race hustlers.
The PC-Klan, another virtual lynching, trying to destroy a person’s position.
Fed research funding should be removed from Harvard, no students should be getting Fed supported loans.
Universities need to have some quota, like 20%, of conservative pro-life professors. This is not a popular proposal, and is unlikely to get implemented, yet it would help save the universities.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
“Adjusting” the SATs by the test givers is terrible — any such adjustment should be done by the colleges. It’s very racist; yet the Democrats are good at finding some plausible excuse to be racist & tribalist.
Creating and supporting tribes is what the Dem “identity politics” is all about. Throughout history, tribal warfare has been the norm. The prior American Dream included a “melting pot” to make all US citizens American, German- or English-American, Black or White or Brown or Yellow-American, but “American” first. If some other tribe comes before American in priority, America gets into trouble.
Voluntary black segregation at elite colleges, supported by the racist administrators, is a clear expression against melting pot integration. Instead of judging people by their character, these official organizations will judge people based on some other tribal identity. It’s so sad.
Tom Grey on May 17, 2019 at 1:41 pm at 1:41 pm said:
…This is not a popular proposal, and is unlikely to get implemented, yet it would help save the universities.
* * *
Cue Sir Roger Scruton, another victim of leftists over in Blimey-land.
https://humanevents.com/2019/05/13/roger-scruton-get-rid-of-universities-altogether/
LOL, Urban Dictionary says “Actually, “Cor Blimey!” is derrived [sic] from the middle-aged [siccer] expression “God, Blind Me!”, used when someone saw something they shouldnt have,” which seems very appropriate for the condition of Great Britain today.
Wiktionary concurs, with slightly better grammar.
Its just self-evident that not everyone is college material, or will succeed in and be happy in an academically oriented career.
As has been pointed out, you would have to be omniscient and have perfect knowledge of everyone’s entire life and circumstances to make the Solomonic judgement as to who should get how many “adversity points.”
Who makes this call anyway, who will be assigning these adversity points, and what are their qualifications for making these decisions?
To take just one example, what about the kid who comes from a wealthy family and neighborhood, but whose parents are neglectful and abusive alcoholics, who belittle him and beat him up, and are no help at all, but a hindrance to his ability to learn and do well in school?
Should this student be given fewer points just because of outward circumstance, of his parent’s income and where he lives, of his “privilege”?
What about the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, whose low income parents are loving and supportive and, as a result, he is an excellent student.
Should his score be boosted even higher just because of his parent’s low income and the neighborhood he happens to live in, of his outward lack of “privilege”?
What about kids from a school which has a generally bad track record, antiquated textbooks, and limited equipment–computers, say–but which also has a couple of outstanding teachers, who regularly turn out very well educated students, who are far above average.
Does each individual student from this school get more or less points?
Apparently, listening to the head of the College Board and architect of this cockamamie social engineering scheme, everyone from the same sub-standard school would get the same number of points.
Moreover, does anyone really think it is a good idea to set up students–if they are not well prepared, may not have innate talent, and who are not highly motivated–for failure, by inflating/augmenting their SAT scores so that they can gain admission to very competitive schools that they would not otherwise be able to gain admission to, and where they will likely fail?
And why make these adversity point augmentations secret, and only visible to the schools themselves, and not to the students or their parents?
Is this scheme really the best thing for these students?
What a bad idea.
Moreover, what a way to sabotage each one of these students, our country, economy, and society, by making it harder for the truly talented–regardless of their background, race, income level, or home address–to succeed–to rise to the top–on their own merit and moreover, at the same time, to likely sabotage the less motivated and talented by increasing their chances of failure in college, and by saddling them with the suspicion that, as recipients of such an “adversity score” augmentation, they are not really able to cut it.
It would seem far more beneficial to all potential college students if–as used to often happen in the bad “old days”–a very candid assessment were made of their levels of knowledge, skill, and ability, and, based on their results, they were to be directed down a path that they would likely succeed in, be happy with and, not coincidentally, make a good living at, whether it was college, or some other form of education, say, a trade, a technical school, or on the job training.
Not everyone has to go to college.
There are a lot of supposedly “less glamorous” and “dirty” but often high paying jobs that keep this country running, and jobs in these fields are reportedly just begging for people to fill them.
Snow on Pine on May 18, 2019 at 10:13 am at 10:13 am said:
Its just self-evident that not everyone is college material, or will succeed in and be happy in an academically oriented career.
As has been pointed out, you would have to be omniscient and have perfect knowledge of everyone’s entire life and circumstances to make the Solomonic judgement as to who should get how many “adversity points.”
* * *
Matt. 7
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
John 7
24 Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.
Romans 14
13 Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.
Snow on Pine on May 18, 2019 at 10:13 am at 10:13 am said:
…Not everyone has to go to college.
* * *
They do if the Academic Empires are to continue to rake in their ill-gotten gains.
Snow on Pine on May 18, 2019 at 10:13 am at 10:13 am said:
…
Moreover, what a way to sabotage each one of these students, our country, economy, and society, by making it harder for the truly talented–regardless of their background, race, income level, or home address–to succeed–to rise to the top–on their own merit and moreover, at the same time, to likely sabotage the less motivated and talented by increasing their chances of failure in college, and by saddling them with the suspicion that, as recipients of such an “adversity score” augmentation, they are not really able to cut it.
* * *
Everything you said is true in your excellent summary of the cons of the new SAT scoring (there are no pros).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SICa0tWHzJQ&feature=youtu.be
“The year was 2081, and finally everyone was equal….”
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