"However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination."
A petition with 1,200 signatures collected by Harvard students, who seem to want an investigation targeting this one case, because the conclusion offends them. It seems to me the investigation ought to be much broader, into what the general standards are at the school. The students have a big interest in whether the degree means what it's supposed to mean, but the one dissertation they loathe ought to be presented as evidence that the school has low standards, and the investigation ought to range across the political spectrum. But the students are speaking in terms of which policies are ethical, and that sounds like they want a political standard to restrict research, which, ironically, would not be an ethical policy.
याची सदस्यत्व घ्या:
टिप्पणी पोस्ट करा (Atom)
पोस्ट्स
९२ टिप्पण्या:
Perfectly stated.
I fear what the result will be.
For a second there, I thought they might be protesting the discriminatory practice of picking under-qualified women and skin color minorities over qualified white men.
Funny how there's never any mass protests when some bit of discriminatory Academic bullshit posing as "science research" purports that Conservatives are dumber than everybody else.
Harvard University students signed and delivered a petition to President Drew Faust last week demanding an investigation into how the school awarded a doctorate in 2009 based on a dissertation that claimed that Hispanics are not as smart as whites.
Who needs an investigation. Among people who work in the field this is an unremarkable statement. In the law, this would be Black Letter Law.
Creationism.
That quoted statement contradicts itself, which is par for the course when it comes to real diversity and academic freedom on Campii these days.
I don't know if I will ever attend a 4 year school simply based on their monoculture of PC grievance "2 minute hates" on un-favored human beings.
Ahh academia.
The conclusion is unremarkable among those in those fields. I think they get the significance wrong. The IQ test doesn't measure what it claims to measure.
There are really stupid cultures, ought to be the conclusion.
Blacks have another one.
The left sees to it.
Academic freedom and reasoned debate as long as we approve of the outcome.
Translation: Actively manipulating people's belief system is good. Scientific data that shows a different way to discern truth is bad.
Harvard is a mental illness.
And suppose the investigation reveals that the thesis was well-supported by credible evidence and and thorough analysis? That's apparently what the professors who reviewed it in 2009 thought. Will the petitioners shut up?
Funny, a "national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination" via affirmative action doesn't seem to bother them at all, now or ever.
In a Marginal Revolution thread, a discussion started on naturalization.
This isn't the 1st study, there was 1 done by 2 lib academics I think they were on the West Coast, came up with the same conclusion.
If they want to prove this guy wrong, do a few studies.
"However"!
Is there a more perverse word in the English language? It's the exact inverse of "therefore." Consider:
Calling for censorship would destroy any pretense of academic freedom or debate, therefore we don't support it.
Calling for censorship would destroy any pretense of academic freedom or debate, however, we do support it!
Acemoglu and Robinson bring up Nogales AZ and Nogales Mexico across the fence, with the same genetic population and exactly opposite results in everything. ("Why Nations Fail" p.7)
Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community. However, the Harvard Kennedy School does not really mean this when we read something that contradicts our long-held views.
FIFY.
Silence all haters!
Again and again I ask WTF do we even have a Kennedy School of Government? Does it teach IRS agents how to discriminate, does it teach future communications perfunctories how to edit important critical talking points into mush, does it teach community organizers how to misunderestimate the basics of macroeconimics and to fail to grasp the meaning of "shovel ready jobs", does it make their graduates so cocky they establish middle class task forces that have no one from the middle class?
rhhardin said...
Acemoglu and Robinson bring up Nogales AZ and Nogales Mexico across the fence, with the same genetic population and exactly opposite results in everything. ("Why Nations Fail" p.7)
That seems--on its face--to be a strong argument for encouraging assimilation and to "leave Mexico behind" in most all aspects.
America is in deep shit. These are our future technocrats.
The reason you want to restrict immigration is so that dysfunctional cultures don't persist, but rather that the American culture takes over.
The persistance across generations is a result of an immigrant flood.
It's not IQ but culture, but the policy recommendation is the same.
Of course that's what they want. Science stuff takes too long and critical thinking gives people dangerous ideas. It's much better to decide truth by force and intimidation. For your own good, of course.
Did these people have their brains surgically removed? Or were they just empty to begin with?
Clearly they've taken to indoctrination well and respond "How high!" when asked by the left-wing political infrastructure to jump.
But, hey, they're cool! They've all got iPhones and iPods and iPads and MacBooks, but something doesn't allow them to connect their behavior to a company's profits they would just as willingly decry as immoral and unethical, regardless of legality, because as they've just been signaled from on high, legal is irrelevant.
Althouse writes the students have a big interest in a Harvard degree meaning what it is supposed to mean. Exactly, and those 1200 students are defending exactly that. For them, Harvard means networking and a leg up into elite society where among other things right thinking a basic condition. Demonstrating right thinking by signing the petition is exactly in line with what a Harvard degree means to this particular group of 1,200.
2009? Not exactly on top of this issue are they?
What if it was a thesis that religious people have lower IQs?
You have to be that smart to be that stupid.
I don't think the coming generation really understands the Constitution. They want a perfect world. The Founders, infinitely wiser than these yahoos, understood the world can't and will never be perfect. They devised a system to deal with the messiness of the real world that doesn't rely on one person or set of people possessing absolute truth. Whenever one group claims they have absolute truth on their side the trouble starts. Why do we keep having to relearn this lesson? How stupid are people?
Sanger was right, the Papists need to stop breeding.
It's sad that we live in a culture where standardized testing is this important. By testing I mean not just standardized academic tests, but population surveys of all kinds.
Policy analysts are all about analyzing the outcomes of tests and surveys. They do not want to ever consider the inputs.
Would Washington DC collapse if Harvard and Yale ceased graduating anyone for a half dozen years?
Would inexperienced "right thinking" cease nation wide? Might that be a good thing?
Bryan C said...
Science stuff takes too long and critical thinking gives people dangerous ideas. It's much better to decide truth by force and intimidation. For your own good, of course.
Perfect. Thread winner IMO.
Didn't I read a version of this story back in college?
Wasn't this an Ibsen play?
I remember reading a theory that Jews tended to be smarter than average because way back when the smartest Catholic kids were steered into the priesthood and had no offspring while the smartest Jewish kids were pushed to be rabbis and had a lot of kids. Made sense to me - does writing this make me a racist?
I learned the Jews were smarter because the only thing they were allowed to take with them over the millennia was books.
milleniums?
Aridog sez:
Would Washington DC collapse if Harvard and Yale ceased graduating anyone for a half dozen years?
The SCOTUS would most certainly collapse!
SCOTUS would do just fine with University of Madison law clerks. ;)
where he was working, released a paper he co-write claiming that the immigration reform bill being debated in Congress would cost the government $5.3 trillion. (It won’t.)
I thought it was 6.3 trillion? And it wasn't "the government", it was the American tax payer. And how do you know "It won't"?
The answer to a paper purporting to prove intelligence based on race is another paper disproving it.
I'll say it again -- the most ignorant, stupid, brain-dead, know-nothings are the elites who claim to be oh-so-smarter than the rest of us.
It doesn't say what they are saying it says.
What a complete knee jerk reaction. These same students wouldn't complain if there was a study showing the people of Appalachia had lower IQ's than a NYC resident, but in effect, that's what they're complaining about here.
Most Mexican immigrants come from the armpit, redneck sections of Mexico----that's why they're trying to leave. As a product of two Mexican rednecks, my siblings and I can present anecdotal evidence that lower IQs do not persist through the next generations.
When I was at Dartmouth in 1994-95, getting another degree in medical outcomes research, I bought a copy of "The Bell Curve." Of course, this was attacked by every right-thinking leftist, especially at Dartmouth. It was amusing how many people asked me to loan it to them when I finished. They didn't want to be seen buying a copy at Dartmouth Bookstore.
Amazon.com has solved that problem but the need to be seen indignant at the author hasn't gone away.
The answer to a paper purporting to prove intelligence based on race is...
Because shut up.
MIT students are smarter than Harvard students. No dissertation required.
It's been a long time since I was in grad school, and it was B-School at that, but Thesis Defense presentations were posted well in advance, and all grad students could sit in the back. If there was an issue, it should have been raised then. It's not as though the Kennedy School doesn't have its quota of leftists, Hispanics etc, including:
Abadie, Alberto
Barrera-Osorio, Felipe
Campante, Filipe R.
de Jong, Jorrit
Diaz Anadon, Laura
Frenk, Julio
Garay, Candelaria
Gomez-Ibanez, Jose A.
Gonzalez Barragan, Carlos
Hidalgo, Cesar
Monaldi, Francisco
Rodriguez-Pueblita, Jose Carlos
Unger, Roberto
SGT Ted said...
"For a second there, I thought they might be protesting the discriminatory practice of picking under-qualified women and skin color minorities..."
Are you referring to that high cheek-boned white woman, and that 1/2 white Editor-in-Chief of the school rag?
I thought it was 6.3 trillion? And it wasn't "the government", it was the American tax payer. And how do you know "It won't"?
Because they’re probably using the same methodology that was used to claim that ObamaCare would be “deficit neutral.” You know where you delay implementation of benefits so that the full cost isn’t captured by the CBO’s scoring which is on a ten-year horizon.
The current immigration “reform” proposal works the same way. On paper those who are in the country illegal won’t be eligible for SOME benefits for 13 years (compliance is assumed even though we already know that people receive benefits illegally) but after the 13-year period, they’re eligible for the same benefits as citizens. Since the CBO only does an analysis for a 10-year period, it naturally won’t look into what happens after that period. Which enables supporters of the bill to say “see the CBO says the bill won’t cost taxpayers anything!”
What the Heritage Foundation study is much more comprehensive and looked beyond the ten-year period for a 75-year period and found that on the aggregate illegal aliens consume about $9.4 Trillion in government benefits and services while paying about $3.1 Trillion in taxes which creates a net fiscal cost of $6.3 Trillion. You can read their study here and decide for yourself if it’s “fatally flawed” as the critics claim. And if so, what's the real number because it sure as heck isn't zero.
Washed brains, closed minds.
No amount of daddy's money could pry those minds open.
Every statement by a lefty regarding freedom of speech will contain the word "BUT" or "HOWEVER."
There are no exceptions.
Somebody smarter than me once said, if you always have to use the word "BUT" in a sentence that deals with freedom of speech, then you don't believe in freedom of speech.
First of all I have a lot of problems with the students trying to censor research.
To a lesser degree I have a HUGE problem with the whole concept of an Hispanic race or ethnicity.
Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Argentines, Philipinos et all have nothing in common culturally other than that they all speak Spanish.
Even the ones who originally came from Spain came from different parts. (Many Puerto Ricans came from the Canary Islands) Argentina was so heavily populated by Italians and Germans that their spoken Spanish is quite distinctive.
The Spanish conquistadores were mostly Irish, officered by Spaniards.
Puerto Rico, DR and Cuba have a very heavy African mix from the imported slaves.
And so on.
Having said that, if they can come up some grouping that makes sense, they can come up with IQ scores for that group. We could argue whether IQ scores are valid or not but, if they are, it seems like straight math to say one group has higher scores than another.
So to those Harvard students: FYYFF.
John Henry
Historically, this country has always imported low-skilled and uneducated, but highly ambitious, immigrants from poorer countries. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, on average, Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than native whites. The same could probably have been said for our earlier immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, etc.
At some point, those immigrants achieve material success, send their children to good schools, build a life in America, and so forth. There's no reason to suspect lower IQs will persist in later generations.
More to the point, if a truth is inconvenient, the stupidest thing to do is to suppress it while genuflecting at the altar of PC. A fact is a fact, and it must be acknowledged as such, and the interpretation of a fact is where the battle should be.
That said, is it even true that Hispanic immigrants, on average, have lower IQs?
elkh1 scores a direct hit..
Birches said:
Most Mexican immigrants come from the armpit, redneck sections of Mexico----that's why they're trying to leave.
This has always been true for most immigrants to the US and elsewhere.
They come here because they have no opportunities at home. It may be because of geography (non-arable land), discrimination, lack of jobs.
The "best and the brightest" tend not to immigrate. They see no need. They are doing OK where they are.
Read Thomas Sowell on this. He has written a number of books. The best is "Ethnic America" which looks at 9 ethnic groups and how they came to be in the US.
John Henry
John Henry
BDNYC
Educate yourself. Go to Steve Sailer's site and read up on this in the many articles he has.
Lot's of other places to read up, if you're interested. Richwine's research is mainstream.
BD
Start with Sailer's articles on PISA.
I'm with hardin:
It's the culture, and this is the inevitable result of the tilting of the culture a few ticks toward the Left's ideals of diversity, multiculturalism, and all cultures being equal.
Goodbye melting pot?
Hello California?
@BryanC/
"It's much better to decide truth by force and intimidation. For your own good, of course."
I.e., those with Sowells "Vision of the Anointed" will not cease in their desire, in their efforts, to impatiently make "Kingdom Come" here on utopian lefty "progressive" Earth--even if that means we are all "marched to virtue at bayonet-point."
Their still kids, to some extent, and they're moving into the pockets of incentives and valued ideas the adults hold aloft.
Which way would you like the culture to tilt?
"They're"
It's often clearer to use a short word instead of a long one when the short one will do.
In this case, the sentence may as well be "Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community BUT not when it threatens certain political dogmas."
If they're so sure of the answer (or they're convinced that the studies are meaningless) then why are they threatened by these studies that they feel the need to stop them before they start?
rhhardin:
The persistance across generations is a result of an immigrant flood.
I personally think it's the American culture that's screwing things up. The work ethic of the immigrant is pretty good, as someone mentioned in a post before. We know the illegal will do the job no one else will do.
The problem is with the mixing of the two cultures. Leftism in K-12 with the culture of hard work.
Aridog said...
"Would Washington DC collapse if Harvard and Yale ceased graduating anyone for a half dozen years?"
Alas, no such luck!
@elkh1/
LOL!
Ugly Catholic girls with rich parents used to be sent to convents. Ugly Jewish girls with rich parents used to marry the rabbi's son. This is why over the millenia Catholic girls became better looking than Jewish girls, although many Jewish girls adapted the protective coloration of big tits.......I hope that this incident doesn't lead to any unfortunate stereotyping of Harvard students. While the petition attracted 1200 signatures, I'm sure that there are many Harvard students who are law abiding citizens who only want the best for America......Those who are doubtful about climate warning should heed the example of this student. I wonder if he's been audited by the IRS.
It used to be when an immigrant came to America, he pressed the reset button and forgot all the historical grudges of the old word. I think, for example, our Germans were better than Germany's Germans. Ireland after securing its independence in 1916 went on to prove that Irish nationalism could be as detrimental as British imperialism. When you can only give a child an 8th grade education, do you really want him studying the Gaelic language in school?....At any rate, nowadays Americans and not immigrants are expected to press the reset button.
Doesn't Matter What You See
Or into it What You Read
You Can Do it Your Own Way
If It's Done Just How I Say
A thousand leftwingers calling dissenters "racists" is completely ordinary.
The petition is an attempt at ideological policing by the usual campus brownshirts.
Let's just say from now on that all Hispanics have triple digit IQs and all score above 1600 on their SATs. Hey, it's inclusionary and it's the nice thing to do.
The only reason they are attacking this dissertation is to smear the author as a racist, so that the Heritage Study that he worked on can be disregarded and dismissed as "racism".
Old wine in new bottles.
IQ? Subjective at best.
Latino's and/or people who support immigration would do better to study what immigrants bring to the table that trumps such a subjective measure.
Wouldn't you think someone at Harvard would be smart enough to figure that out?
But if a petition can get the result you want I suppose it's easier and cheaper.
I am not sure the dissertation "claimed" that Hispanics are not as smart as whites, I think it produced data that led to that inconvenient conclusion. It is much more satisfying to sign a letter demanding an investigation than it would be to refute the data in the dissertation or otherwise deal with it in what was once called a "scholarly" manner.
G. Joubert has a good idea, one I myself have considered in slightly different form. Why do we not just issue all minorities a degree from an Ivy League college of their choice upon their birth. They can then decide to supplement the degree with education or they can proceed directly to government and investment banks upon being tall enough to wear the right clothes.
The Harvard kids are afraid of losing their cheap landscapers and daycare workers.
Some strange assertions -
Filipinos rarely speak Spanish. There are plenty of Spanish words in various Philippine languages, but unlike some Spanish colonies, in the Philippines the Spanish never imposed the language and the common people never adopted it. Few (other than the elite) spoke Spanish even in colonial times and even fewer do today. When Filipinos speak with Mexicans they do so in English.
The conquistadors certainly weren't Irish. There was no significant Irish component in the Spanish armies of the 16th century, and in any case the conquistadors weren't soldiers as such. They thought of themselves, each one, as independent adventurers, and their officers were mainly chosen by the men themselves. See Bernal Diaz. Ethnically the 16th century conquistadors were nearly all natives of Spain, with some odds and ends. The Irish started showing up in continental armies in the mid-17th century and formed many regiments of several armies. They weren't necessarily the rank and file either, Irish officers were very prominent in European armies for two centuries, often commanding in non-Irish regiments or in senior commands. European armies of the period were multi-national. But they were never a majority of any continental army.
Is this the truth that dare not speak its name? If the political criterion is adopted, it will soon have a lot of company.
It's also what happens in monocultures like today's American university.
We need to make the list of signatories as widely public as possible. Because every single one of them is a dishonest pile of human refuse, and nothing they say, write, or publish should ever be trusted so long as they live.
They have every right to petition to protect their alma mater from a reputation (or reality) of moral vacancy.
Did they conduct the investigation or just shut it down?
Some questions I would have that are not made clear in this article is if the author advocates adjusting immigration policy to increase the number of Asians and European Jews and also if he/she divides the results by race since hispanics can be white, brown, or black.
For entertainment value, Louis CK (who was a ginger Mexican/Hispanic btw until he moved here around age 8) bit on racial historical context:
http://youtu.be/derzWWYf3-w
Why don't we just say the Hispanics are the smartest people on earth? Their smarts are apparent in bankrupt Spain to drug infested Mexico to the banana republics in S. America.
Funny about Hispanics: the brown skinned natives were brutally subjugated by the white Europeans from Spain, now their descendants identify themselves with the butchers and defend their legacies.
Unknown: They have every right to petition to protect their alma mater from a reputation (or reality) of moral vacancy.
Where's the moral vacancy?
Some questions I would have that are not made clear in this article is if the author...
Paper's online, if you're actually curious.
For entertainment value, Louis CK...http://youtu.be/derzWWYf3-w
If by "entertaining", you mean "lame", yeah. That "spoiled white people haw haw haw" schtick was past its sell-by date when George Carlin did it.
The reverence for science amongst the Left knows no bounds.
Tank: Educate yourself. Go to Steve Sailer's site and read up on this in the many articles he has.
Lot's of other places to read up, if you're interested. Richwine's research is mainstream.
...
Start with Sailer's articles on PISA.
That site traffics in hate-facts and wrong-think and Google should shut it down.
If nothing else, those PISA stats are great for trolling hysterical leftists, who take it as an article of faith that the poor relative (aggregate) showing of the U.S. in international testing is caused by a combination of red-state creationist rubes and anti-intellectual rethuglikkans refusing to pour more money into schools.
These days Harvard anoints students. It would be better if it educated them.
The term "ad hominem argument" is frequently misused to mean "personal attack" when in fact it means the dismissal of someone's argument on the grounds that he or she is deficient in unrelated ways. The Richwine case is the clearest example of a true ad hominem argument that I can remember seeing.
I haven't read either the Heritage study of immigration policy or Richwine's dissertation, butI infer from this tempest that the estimate of the cost of immigration must be pretty good. Otherwise, why go rooting around in his prior writing instead of simply rebutting whatever points are made in the Heritage study?
Jim DeMint has shat himself over this w/ the ridiculous claim that Heritage knew nothing about the PhD dissertation of a guy they hired to be a staff researcher. If that's true, then Heritage is being run by clowns. If it's a lie, then it's being run by moral cowards.
Buwaya said
The conquistadors certainly weren't Irish. There was no significant Irish component in the Spanish armies of the 16th century, and in any case the conquistadors weren't soldiers as such
++++
Yeah, sloppy on my part. The Conquistadores themselves were Spanish. The folks they brought along included a high portion of Irish. Was it an "officered" "army"? Not in the strict sense of the word. I should have been clearer.
My basic point was that lots more Irish came to "Spanish America" than Spaniards.
Next time you come to Puerto Rico give me a call. I'll take you to the El Morro Fortress in San Juan. Started under Juan Ponce de Leon in 1500 or so.
I'll show you the plaque at the entrance crediting it to those fine "Spanish" engineers Tomas O'Daly and Alejandro O'Reilly
John Henry
Buwaya said
"Filipinos rarely speak Spanish."
Not sure how true that is. I have known some that do.
There are a lot of Spanish surnames, as well as first names, that are common in the Philipines.
If your comment about strange assertions was aimed at me, I was asserting that Filipinos were Hispanic, not that they spoke Spanish.
In any event, I have lived in PR for more than 40 years now and have heard quite a bit of discussion in that time about whether Filipinos are "Hispanic" or "Asian".
I tend not to think of them as Hispanic but I do understand the argument that they are. I am kind of agnostic on this whole issue of who is and is not Hispanic. I find the discussion pretty meaningless.
Now if you want to talk about who is or is not Puerto Rican, Cuban, Chilean, that might be a more reasonable segmentation.
John Henry
John Henry
Funny about Hispanics: the brown skinned natives were brutally subjugated by the white Europeans from Spain, now their descendants identify themselves with the butchers and defend their legacies.
The brown skinned natives were ignorant savages that engaged in human sacrifice and other unpleasant behaviors. The continent would have been better off had they been ethnically cleansed instead of interbreeding with the Euros.
Crunchy Frog:
That history is often forgotten. There were native empires, nations, and tribes which enslaved other native Americans, and even participated in genocidal actions. Some were subjugated by the Europeans, while others were liberated with their arrival.
It's interesting that you should mention human sacrifice. Unfortunately, that practice has not ended, but instead acquired a different character. However, it is no longer practiced to appease gods, but instead to fulfill dreams of material, physical, and ego gratification. The people today consider that to represent "progress."
Why such an emphasis in differences in intelligence. I'm sure that there are many other areas of divergence among different ethnic and racial groups. Do we all have equal ability in our senses of taste and smell? I would think not. My theory is that the peoples of the British isles, Ireland, and the Indian subcontinent are deficient. This in combination with their culture explains why their food is so crappy. Further research needs to be done to confirm this hypothesis but it seems a reasonable place to start. I don't think our culinary institutes should discriminate against people of British or Indian background, but neither should such people be encouraged to take up cooking.
Yes, El Morro was, like most such military constructions, a work in progress right up to the end of the 19th century. The part you are referring to probably was built or rebuilt long after the original fort. There were plenty of Irish officers in the Spanish armies of the 17th and 18th centuries, and right up to the Napoleonic wars officers of Irish descent were prominent, including several commanders in chief like Blake. There were Irish regiments in the Spanish army right up to 1814 or so, though by that time in name only.
However, there is nothing to support the idea that most European immigration to the Spanish colonies came from Ireland. Its certainly not reflected in Latin American names.
As for the Filipinos, some few do speak Spanish, I am myself one of those native speakers of Spanish from the Philippines - but I am in an excellent position to tell you that we are a very small minority, and getting smaller.
Spanish priests ran the Philippines as essentially a religious colony, much like what was attempted in Paraguay with the Guarani (see the movie "The Mission"; in the Philippines the missions survived). The Spanish church went out of its way to use and promote the native languages, instead of Spanish. Spanish was thought to be a route of transmission of liberal and heretical ideas.
As for Filipino names - given names come from the 400 years of Catholic Christianity, with multiple generations having been baptized by Spanish priests. Surnames were regularized by the Spanish Governor Claveria in 1849, when he made all Filipino families adopt surnames off an approved list, most of which were Spanish.
There really is little basis to call Filipinos hispanic. There is some attempt to do so on the part of the Spanish government in their cultural outreach, for example, but the Filipinos themselves have no special affinity with Latin Americans.
The Celts of Iberia migrated to Ireland about the 6th century BCE. The Irish have a closer genetic link with the Celts of Spain than with their neighbors in Scotland ot Wales. A span of 2600 years is a blink in genetic time. It seems to me only fair that the Irish be granted all privileges accruing to Hispanics.
Wonder when the SCOTUS will ban public displays of intellectual masturbation.
टिप्पणी पोस्ट करा