politics

Notes on affirmative action

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At Prof. Stackhouse’s blog, the discussion concerning diversity continues.  I want to strengthen my point that affirmative action has (1) watered down academic standards; (2) is discrimination against certain minorities (particularly Asians and Jews).  Here are some of the articles that I found:

When Affirmative Action Is A Quota System (at the American Thinker)

By Russell Eisenman

A university professor, Eisenmann claims that affirmative action has become a quota system that is basically un-American and leads to resentment.  The Ku Klux Klan could  have invented it as system to make whites hate blacks.

By the way, it may be that some elite schools can do their affirmative action hiring and hire a top candidate. But, this is certainly not the case for most schools. In my experiences, and in that of colleagues I have discussed this with, when affirmative action hiring is done, the dilemma is always that there are better qualified candidates not within the quota category. Sometimes, the person hired, because they have the right skin color or sex, is markedly less qualified than some of the other applicants.

Should Colleges Have Quotas for Asian Americans? (Washington Post, 2004)

By Jay Mathews

Matthews’ article writes about Chinese-American Ed Chin who has been very critical of the quota system of Ivy League schools.  But Matthews, against Chin, concludes its ok for the best schools to discriminate against Asians, because they can get into other schools.   But dear Mr. Matthews, racial preferences have made it more difficult for Asians to get into other schools as well.

And yet the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action preserved the system at most selective private schools in which Asian American students with very high tests scores are passed over in favor of African American and Hispanic students with lower scores because the schools want significant numbers of all ethnicities on campus. Supporters of such policies say a diverse student body helps everyone learn to live in the real world, and there are plenty of other fine colleges that take students, Asian American or otherwise, whom they reject.Whenever I raised this point, Chin would accuse me, rightly, of shrugging off the American commitment to fair play for individuals. He cited comments made by Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Massachusetts state school board member. “I think these racial preferences are very pernicious,” she said in an interview on a PBS Web site after voters banned the use of affirmative action based on race in University of California admissions. “I don’t think they do black students much good. I think they’re poisonous in terms of race relations. And I do not think they are fair to the Asian student, for instance, who has worked very, very hard and is kept out of a Berkeley because a student with a slightly different skin color has gotten in as a consequence of racial identity.”

The Asian-Jewish connection: Is it really kosher to call Asians the “new Jews”? (SF Gate, 2010) by Jeff Yang; The New Jews? by Jennifer Rubin (Weekly Standard, 2008).  Rubin writes to belie Matthew’s point above:

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning racial preference policies at the University of Michigan’s law school (Grutter v. Bollinger) and undergraduate school (Gratz v. Bollinger) highlighted further evidence of great disparities between groups. At Michigan’s law school, the admission rates of “preferred” minorities miraculously held steady between 10 percent and 17 percent in the years for which data were provided. According to Peter Schmidt’s Color and Money, “Among applicants with certain grade point average and LSAT-score combinations, the university was admitting virtually every black applicant while white and Asian American applicants had a less than 1 in 40 chance of getting in.”

The article that first made me aware of the problem of discrimination against Asians, was in the American Thinker in 2005:  Asian Americans and Affirmative Action, by James Chen, who writes about the extraordinary measures that Asian parents will go to in order to overcome discrimination of their children, even moving to “white” areas so that their children will have a better chance of graduating close to the top of their high school class.  Chen’s article infuriated me.  I realized that all of the job post advertising women and minorities are encouraged to apply did not at all mean me, since if a university will discriminate against students applying to a school, how much more will they be willing to do so when hiring a professor?

What’s wrong with affirmative action?

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Affirmative action openly favors women and certain visible minorities (Blacks, hispanics, First Nations); it discriminates against white men and even more so against high achieving minorities such as Asians and Jews.  In academics, throw out the CV’s of the majority and look only at the diverse candidates.   That is a recipe for a disastrous decline in standards and a glaring qualitative discrepancy not only between men and women in the field but between the different races.  I don’t see how that can create better education; if you want good education, you have to choose the best and brightest in the field; if that leads to having 100% of the professors in your faculty being Jewish or Asian men, then so be it.  Affirmative action is social engineering that breeds contempt and animosity, as do all forms of favoritism.  I  stopped looking for a job in academics for this reason.  It is an Atlas shrug.  Why bother sending in a CV if you know it will be thrown in the trash because it is not from a woman or a desired minority?  It is a waste of a postal stamp.  And given this experience, don’t expect me to celebrate “diversity” in higher learning.

This is why I like DIY investing.  It’s “welcome to the real world” time (the red pill), not some virtual academic experience (the blue pill) where all that really matters is diversity.  I don’t get special treatment or discrimination because I am a minority.  It’s just me and the market.  Imagine if some one said to you, “Oh because you are woman, we’re going to lower your commission rate”, or “We will give you $0.50 per share more for your stock sales.”

Affirmative action is the tacit admission that you can’t make it without some special help.  It is a confession that you are too dumb to make it without our help.  It is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Half-Korean basketball players for social justice and egalitarianism!

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I got into this discussion at Prof. Stackhouse’s blog about affirmative action.  I contended that it has watered down academics by filling empty academic posts first from the handful of women candidates instead of also taking into consideration the much larger pool of white angry males.  When Wayne Park called this point into question, I wrote:

I for one do not believe that the sacrifice of quality at the altar of diversity has been beneficial to academic standards in higher learning. Before I started job hunting, one of the colleagues in my field, explained to me how they did a job search at his California University (this was in circa 1994). He testified that they would receive maybe 100 applications. They would take the 95 or so from men and file them in the trash. Then they would choose three from the five women applicants and interview them, and then choose the best candidate from those three.

This means then that a woman can find a job in academics quite easily and men have a much harder time. This scenario is confirmed even by Prof. Stackhouse own confession above. Faculties will go out of their way to “recruit” women; but to hire a man, they just have to post the position and the applications come in.

The same holds true for racial minorities of the correct sort–forget it if you are either Jewish or Asian; that won’t help, because these are over-represented minorities–in fact only the best Chinese or Jewish kids can even get into some schools.

Now imagine if they did this with the NBA. Ok. We are going to give half-Korean men (they are underrepresented in the NBA, quelle horreur!) and females the preference for hiring. How long would it be before people would stop even watching the NBA and just start watching European league basketball instead? But in academics they’ve been selecting the team not to win championships (based strictly on the people with the best talent and the strongest dossier) but to create diversity–then telling the entire world that the team is better because of it. Well perhaps the faculty page on the website looks less monolithic, but I would rather watch European league academics where the concept of diversity has been much slower in catching on.

Wayne Park then proceeded to insinuate that I believed that white Europeans are more intellectual than other races, not to mention that he found my comments demeaning to women.  Also, he did not like that I used “sarcasm”.  My comment about half-Korean men in the NBA was the point of contention and he did not find the analogy helpful.  I guess I made the mistake of forgetting that I guy named “Dunn” should not assume that guy name “Park” would immediately understand such a line to be self-deprecating humor but would perhaps consider it instead an attack on Koreans in general. But maybe it is a good question:  why aren’t there more half Koreans in the NBA?

Where am I supposed to go after all?  Studies have shown that half Koreans excel in the academy, and so we find no special treatment there.  If anything, we are lumped with other over-acheiving Asians and discriminated against.  Full Koreans in Korea generally appreciate purity– have you ever played the Asian game Mah Jong? My Korean grandparents taught me when I was eleven; the game rewards every conceivable form of purity and eschews mixture: a game with a mixture of pung and chow is called a “chicken hand” and is considered worthless.  I am a person of Korean and white race (mostly Scottish) and am therefore a “chicken” person.  So I won’t get any special favors if I went to Korea.  The special word for half-breed in Korea is togee or something like that.  I learned the word years ago from an article about a poor, starved half-Korean girl who was adopted by American parents.

So even though I have a degree from the University of Cambridge, and very high g.p.a. from both Regent College and my undergraduate studies, nobody has ever offered me a full-time job in academics.  So I feel free to express bigoted comments about the academy, though I have many friends who are academics.  When you hear about how people bend over backwards to hire blacks African-Americans, Hispanics, white et al. women, and First Nations, it’s maddening.  I mean I’ve often considered changing my last name to Muktuk and saying that I grew up in Bethel, Alaska, of a Yupik father and a white mother–I know just enough of the language to be able to fake it in the interview, arigato very much.  My brother’s best friend in high school was half Yupik, half white, and looked a lot like him, and their teachers mixed them up. So I could do it, and then I’d be on the short list for every job I applied for.

So why not the NBA?  Why shouldn’t social justice and egalitarianism for half Koreans start with the NBA?  My high school basketball coach did a short stint with the LA Lakers, but I don’t think he really liked me, and he certainly gave me no playing time; he seemed to prefer the high-flying African Americans to me and my steady set shot.  Ok, so I’m 5 ft, 9 8 in. with 26.5 inch inseam.  My standing vertical jump is about six inches.  But I can shoot a mean three-point shot; the NBA player that I try to emulate is Steve Kerr.  My high scoring game was 44 points; it was circa 1984 at Northwest College, an intramural game–ok, I admit that the other team only had four players.  So I think in order to give half Koreans a step up, they should get preferential treatment in the NBA.  Every single NBA team should be required by law and social pressure to hire at least one half Korean.  I volunteer to play on the Raptors.  I would be at the same time the first half-Korean and the oldest player in NBA history.

The one great thing about DIY trading is that nobody asks you your race when you trade, unlike the US census.  It’s anonymous.  And as a half Korean, a member of a despised group both in Korea and in the other half of the world, I find great solace and refuge in that anonymity.

The Absurd Incoherence of the Left

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Has anyone ever noticed the absurd incoherence of the Left to be both at the same time anti-progress, Luddite in their position on environmentalism, and socialist redistributionists with regard to economic policy?  I have.

Take for example the recent anonymous blogger at Nathan Calquhoun’s blog who protested the Olympics in Vancouver.  He is evidently in favor of greater redistribution of wealth to the poor, but at the same time, against the oil sands and other forms of mining which create wealth both in Canada and abroad.  My dear leftist friends, you can’t have it both ways.  If you want to continue your socialist agenda of redistribtuion, you have to get out of the way of the evil capitalists so that there is wealth to redistribute!  But if you block every kind of progress, particularly here in Canada, in the resource sector, I don’t see how you can ever achieve your redistributionist utopia. If memory serves, when David Suzuki contemplating politics a few years ago, he was planning to join the NDP party (though he remains non-partisan).  But how can he square the redistributionist and union sentiments of the NDP with his green Luddite stances?

Soon-to-be Canadian citizens like myself learn that there are three major sectors of the Canadian economy:  (1) resources; (2) manufacturing; (3) service.  Kill one of those sectors and you will have less wealth to give to the poor.   Even yesterday talking to my good friend who is a leftist I told him that I had increased my Canadian oil investments last week and he was surprised by my insistance that oil is a righteous investment.  Yet he was upset too about the poor in Vancouver not having a chance to receive any benefit from the Olympics and the government funding that went to the games.

Leftist, anarchist Christians against the Winter Olympics in Vancouver

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My friend the Brooks pointed out a conversation at the blog of Nathan Colquhoun, in a blog post, “The Enchanting Economics of Death, Spectacular Resistance, and the Pursuit of New Life: a reflection from the streets of Vancouver“, in which Colquhoun repeats the anxious rant of an anonymous protestor at the games.  It has aroused a discussion in which Dan Oudshoorn, a.k.a. Poserorprophet, insults everyone who disagrees with him and basically condemns wealthy Christians.  Poser offered on his own blog another post by the same anonymous poster called “F— the police”.

Many of the institutions with which I do business, Royal Bank, oil sands, Latin American mining companies, TD Bank, were mentioned.  So I decided to write the following comment against Poser, against the anonymous Poster, and against the generally anarchist marxist tendencies among certain Christians today:

This conversation really baffles me. The other day on his blog Poser said that he needed to raise funds for his new job: amongst whom was he going raise this funding this except ordinary Christians who have money and jobs? He studies at Regent College which is richly endowed by wealthy Christians. He then condemns them all with a sweeping, Bourgeois Christians: “my friend is now being vilified by a bunch of bourgeois Christians who are far removed from the struggle for justice”.

I don’t have a particular ax to grind about the Olympics but the disconnect to me is related to the “economics of death”. Besides the poor Georgian luger, who has died? When Christians talk about the culture of death it is easy to see who has died, 100s of millions of babies. But “economics of death”? That is a play on the term “culture of death”, and yet it is hallow. Who is dying? Who did TD Bank kill that they deserve to have their windows smashed? And for that matter, just because RBC is behind the oil sands, why is that so bad? If it weren’t for oil, you poor folks would have to walk everywhere you go. That’s fine if you live in some African country where it is warm all the time, but some of them work 18 hours a day carrying firewood on small carts for $3 a day. I’d much rather burn oil sands in my Toyota than die at 38 of exhaustion in that kind of misery. But walking everywhere you go is not really an option for living in Canada, particularly in winter.

What are the protesters doing to create life. Anyone can smash a window. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy. Vandalism is theft by destruction. That is not what Jesus did. He overturned the tables to prevent the moneychangers from stealing from the people of God and thus charging them to worship God which the moneychangers had no right to do.

Finally, the poster refers to destroying the structures of the economics of death, forewarned that others who have done this (communists around the world) have created misery. Yet Canada is one of the greatest countries in the world and the envy of many millions who long to have an opportunity to come here to live, to study and to raise their families. Yet all the protesters, the poster, and Poser can think about is how to destroy what other people envy. Is that not a sign of their own envy? There is something deeply wrong with that. TD Bank, by employing thousands of people, by extending mortgages to allow young couples to buy their first house, and by providing a safe place where people can put their investments, has done more to promote the welfare of the many than these sad anarchists. That is why I am a proud, bourgeois Christian stockholder of TD.

“In order to construct a society that is more just, less just ways of organizing life together must be destructed. This should be obvious.” This is an extremely scary prospect. When people who hold such views have succeeded only misery results. Please name one case where death was not the result of destruction of capitalism. 100,000,000 people were killed by communists in 20th century alone. Is that not enough?

Signed, an investor in oil sands and Latin American mines, shopper at the Bay, a proud-soon-to-be Canadian, Bourgeois Christian, who owns more than one pair of shoes.

Poser responded, and I replied:

  1. dan says:

    Shame on you, Peter. That’s my cue to exit this conversation.

  2. P. W. Dunn says:

    Poser, your response confirms what one of the professors at Regent told me a few months back: he said there is among the students a new generation of Pharisees. This reminds me of Matt 23.4: “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” You leave in a huff, telling me to be ashamed, but you fail even to explain for what things I should be ashamed or even to give a single counterargument. I can only suppose it is because I am a proud-soon-to-be Canadian. Or is it just because I am wealthy, owning two pairs of shoes?