According to protesting students at the University of California at San Diego, minority students make up 1% of the student population. Among other things, they “demanded that the black population of students, faculty and staff at UCSD each reach at least 7 percent to represent statewide demographics.”
In addition,
[t]he demands asked for the termination of black individuals’ “scrutinization, tokenization and eroticization by neutral and partisan entities on campus.”
???? Who’s eroticizing them???
Do students go to class anymore? When I was an undergraduate, I did homework and wrote papers and studied for tests. No time for protesting, thank you very much.
Ha! when I was in college (not too many years ago) we were frequently berated for not protesting enough! “oh college students just aren’t politically active anymore. they just don’t care about their country, their community like We did.”
Everthing was always better in the old days to some people.
Ok so this protest seems kinda stupid. But also, 1% is pretty dern low. Maybe there are issues that the University should adress? Eroticization aside…
Jeff, what are they supposed to do, shanghai black high schoolers as they walk out of their graduation ceremonies and shackle them to UCSD desks?
I’d like to know how they arrived at the 1% number without any scrutinizing.
I couldn’t find any data for the current year, but for 2002-2003 I did locate some data which shows Blacks were 1.1% of the total UCSD undergraduate population and 1.1% of the freshmen admitted in the Fall 2002 semester.
U.S. Census data for 2000 reports Blacks made up 6.7% of California’s population and were 5.7% of San Diego County’s residents.
Just anecdotally (I live in San Diego and know some UCSD students), admissions for the school have become extremely competitive in the past few years.
Racial bathos in San Diego
On first glance, it seems that the protesting students’ claims either are misplaced or at most rhetorical. … However, remembering that these are students taking a stance on an issue whose paradigmatic arguments have been long-calcified, I think t…
The recent book (detailing the results of the authors’ study) comes to mind here – students of various ethnic/racial groups were surveyed as to what level of grades they had to bring home in order to avoid trouble with their parents. Asians had to bring home a’s, whites had to bring home B’s and blacks had to bring home C’s. Does nayone happen to notice how that corresponds to how the groups stack up for meriting admissions to colleges?
Nels – I hope that when you were researching those numbers, you weren’t scrutinizing.
Tokenization
A University of California study ((pdf link) is shocked to discover that blacks and Latinos are more likely to be admitted than Asian-American and white applicants with the same qualifications. The UC analysis used a statistical model in which applican…
Laura wrote:
“Jeff, what are they supposed to do, shanghai black high schoolers as they walk out of their graduation ceremonies and shackle them to UCSD desks?”
The problem probably is the Peter Principle that pushes college level minority students up the academic food chain to a school that may be too tough for them. I’ll bet a lot of those kids that would do just fine at UCSD or San Jose State are struggling at USC and UCLA and those that should be there have probably been pushed up to Berkely and Stanford.
I remember reading this years ago in the first chapter of D’nesh D’souza’s “Illiberal Education.”
I went to UCSD about 10 years ago and they were always having dumb student protests. Every so often some group of midterm-crazed students would storm the administration buildings and stage a sit-in in somebody’s office. They would stay there until someone found the right platitudes to say to them, at which point they would all go back to class and nothing substantial would ever be done about their cause.