Actually, greetings from nearby Swarthmore. We brought Jessie up yesterday and deposited her in her room at Bryn Mawr, and now wife Helene and I are staying with our good friend with a large house in Swarthmore, which still contains a garage full of stuff to deliver to Jessie when I get over my new cold.
As many have noted, one of the best features of the blogosphere is the human interaction it can encourage, and we confirmed that last night at dinner with the lovely and talented Kimberly Swygert of Number 2 Pencil fame. Kimberly is even more appealing in person than on her blog, which is saying a lot.
My wife Helene, in what she denies was a Freudian slip, managed to hide my laptop carrying case, with the result that I’m now struggling on an unfamilar computer with none of my shortcuts, quick access codes, etc., available. Thus I will be brief.
Adverbial Proposition
Tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review has a review of two sclerotic political books, one by Dick Morris and the other by Joe Conason, who deserve each other. The reviewer, Michael Janeway, scores some easy points against Morris by quoting some of his early, embarrassingly fulsome praise of Bill Clinton, one example of which was a reference to “Clinton’s manifest passion to do well for the country.”
I suspect Morris meant Clinton’s desire to do good for the country (or perhaps to the country), but if this is a grammatical slip it is a revealing one. What Clinton obviously wanted was to do well, as in do his job well. He may have thought that the best way to do well was to do good (as in do good things), but then he might not. My own suspicion is that if he ever had a choice between doing well and doing good he would choose doing well every time. Sort of like the missionaries who were said to have traveled to Hawaii to do good … and did very well indeed.
4.0 GPAs Are Diverse, But All Blacks Are Fungible
Yesterday, just as we were leaving, I read a Washington Post article about the University of Michigan new, improved racial preference policy that has just been rolled out to comply with the Gratz/Grutter combo command that schools must now do covertly what they had been doing openly. In that spirit, “[p]rospective students will be asked about their backgrounds and personal achievement and assigned to write essays about how they might fit in at a university where economic and racial diversity are a priority.”
Michigan is thus now on record as not caring about religious or intellectual or political diversity (at least not enough to mention them), but then we already knew that. The article did, however, quote an interesting comment from Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said that over the years college admission people had grown dissatisfied with relying on applicant’s grades because they realized that 4.0 in one [high] school wasn’t equal to a 4.0 in another school.”
Curiously, Mr. Nassirian was not quoted as saying anything about the role of standardized tests in alleviating that problem, a striking omission. In the context of the article, the clear implication of his comment is that it is unreasonable to rely too heavily on grades, which differ considerably in what they mean from school to school, but it is quite reasonable to pay attention to race, which right- (which is to say, left-) thinking people know is the same everywhere.
See Kimberly Swygert’s take on the same program, but different article, here.
Every time I hear Dick Morris on the radio, or read one of his articles, I think, God, don’t ever let me tick that man off. He is like a pit bull where the Clintons are concerned. I don’t think he will ever forgive them.
In that spirit, “[p]rospective students will be asked about their backgrounds and personal achievement and assigned to write essays about how they might fit in at a university where economic and racial diversity are a priority.”
Michigan is thus now on record as not caring about religious or intellectual or political diversity (at least not enough to mention them), but then we already knew that.
Those aren’t Michigan’s words, they’re the Post’s gloss on Michigan’s policy. I doubt that is how the university would describe what they are doing. The actual application (available in .pdf format here) asks applicants to answer one of these questions briefly (250 words):
The more substantial essays (500 words) are entirely traditional topics.
Standardized test scores are one piece of information that may help clarify widely variant grading scales, but they certainly do not define any student’s ability or potential contributions to a campus.
Thanks for quoting the actual Michigan questions. Actually, the Post’s gloss strikes me as quite accurate. Michigan might well not describe the questions as I did, but I did, and do. Of course standardized tests are not the final solution to equalizing the differences among high schools, but they are certainly quite relevant to that task and thus I found it odd that the representative of the admissions office didn’t mention them, or was not quoted as having done so. As I’ve said many times before, I think diversity is a Good Thing, and I would be more sympathetic with Michigan et. al.’s reliance on it as a justification for racial discrimination if there some evidence that they really valued diversity instead of simply racial representation. Religion? Class? Swedes? Conservatives? Does adding the 128th Hispanic produce more diversity than finding, say, one Egyptian Jew or native Norwegian speaker or Polish miner’s son who would be the first to attend college? I don’t think so.