Quite Diverse Thoughts From Ames, The Home Of Iowa State

This can’t be part of my ersatz series on campus comment on diversity, because it’s from a column in the Ames, Iowa, Tribune, not the Iowa State campus paper. But it’s close to Iowa State, so I’m reporting it anyway. I never cease to be amazed by some of the opinions offered for (or against) diversity.

There’s a wide body of evidence that the SAT is socially biased. Since the test draws on information in the mainstream of American life, at least in the verbal section, a smart person who lives outside the mainstream will score lower. That’s why North Dakotans get such high test scores. A lack of diversity in their personal and academic experiences actually helps them do better.

I’m not quite sure what to do with this. Maybe you can figure it out. Immediately following the above is this:

But there’s a larger problem with a rejection of affirmative action.

It can have consequences beyond who gets what job.

Take, for example, a history professor. Judged on pure merit, most history professors would be white males.

That’s largely because there are many more white men interested in history, which was mostly written by white males. It’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

I wonder if the same sort of thing is true for physicists or sociologists.

“Here at The Tribune,” writes the columnist, David Grebe, “ethnic diversity appears to range from Italian to Norwegian.” I wonder if the University of Michigan knows, or cares, whether those ethnic groups are underrepresented. (Actually, I don’t; they don’t.)

Say What? (2)

  1. Steven Jens December 9, 2002 at 11:56 pm | | Reply

    That column makes me feel better about my ability to write coherently and logically.

    That said, the allegedly culturally-biased excerpt from the SAT that I’ve most often seen relates to regattas. I’m not really part of that scene, but I don’t expect that North Dakota is a boat-racing Mecca.

  2. K. coe December 10, 2002 at 12:34 pm | | Reply

    Opera questions appear frequently on the SATs, but Fargo doesn’t have an opera house. Having grown up in an isolated Western state, no could have felt more out of the mainstream than I, but I broke 790 on my verbal.

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