\n| \n Yesterday the University of Michigan unveiled their new undergraduate
\n admissions policy, attempting to conform to this summer’s Supreme Court
\n decision that their previous policy, which gave "points" to minority
\n applicants, was unconstitutional.<\/p>\n The ruling was somewhat confusing, in that it allows race to be taken
\n into account, but not used as a mathematical factor in any fixed formula
\n to determine admissions. The new plan attempts to incorporate race as
\n a vague and unassailable factor in "holistic" evaluations of essays and
\n short answers to specific questions.<\/p>\n This is tricky stuff. At the same time that school districts and
\n states across the country are instituting mandatory objective testing
\n for all levels of public education and as a graduation requirement for
\n high school students, the Supreme Court seems to be forcing schools to
\n go to a subjective system for making admissions decisions.<\/p>\n The new University of Michigan policy tries to justify and rationalize
\n the methodology by first establishing the institutional desirability
\n of diversity. ”We continue to believe in gathering a group of
\n students that are very bright but different from one another — students
\n from all walks of life and backgrounds,” provost Paul Courant said. <\/p>\n How to evaluate and achieve diversity becomes the problem. The keyword
\n in the new U Mich policy is "holistic". In
\n principle, this is an admirable and necessary technique to evaluate the
\n entire panorama of what each applicant brings to the table, as a whole
\n person and life and not as an accumulation of discrete scores or measurements. It
\n derives from cognitive psychology and the idea of a "gestalt", or a
\n pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated
\n as to constitute a functional unit with properties not
\n derivable by summation of its parts.<\/p>\n This change cuts to the core of the continuing divisions between "hard
\n science" and "soft science" and the main reason I changed my professional
\n focus from cultural anthropology to physical anthropology 25 years
\n ago. I was disgusted with the amount of research in the "soft"
\n area of anthropology which I considered bullshit. There was some
\n worthwhile work out there, I concluded, but no objective way to separate
\n the wheat
\n from the chaff, and not enough time to wade through 800 page ethnographies
\n to decide. Of course, I grew disillusioned with physical anthropology
\n as well once I figured out that it was just as easy (and usually more
\n effective) to bullshit with numbers as with words.<\/p>\n The problem, obviously, is that these holistic
\n gestalts are completely subjunctive
\n and open to
\n questioning
\n in the press
\n and in
\n the
\n courts, and
\n if adopted as the benchmark for university admissions would free
\n officials from having to back up their decisions with numbers. The
\n methods favored in the new UMich plan? <\/p>\n Take into account Socioeconomic factors: <\/b>This is the currently favored
\n method to remedy racial imbalances without mentioning race, based on
\n the reality that most members of the lower socioeconomic strata are
\n also minorities.<\/p>\n Ask a "short-answer" (not multiple choice) question asking each applicant
\n their opinion on diversity: <\/b>And what, applicants aren’t going to
\n learn to write that they think diversity is hunky-dory? Can they deny
\n admission to a student that writes, eloquently, that they believe diversity
\n is a cancerous communist plot foisted in an unsuspecting public by sleeper
\n cells in the Eastern media?<\/p>\n An optional essay will allow students to tell more
\n about their background and expected contributions to campus: <\/b>Here is the
\n real free ride of admissions officials. They can give whatever
\n weight and importance to the content of this essay, as evidence of a
\n students ability to contribute to an amorphous "campus diversity"<\/p>\n In short, I see trouble ahead as the University of Michigan tries to
\n apply this policy in real-life admissions decisions. I foresee an endless
\n duel of expert witnesses.<\/p>\n ”If race continues to trump most other admissions factors, the new
\n system will be just as illegal as the system the court struck down,”
\n said Terry Pell, president of Center for Individual Rights, which represented
\n the white applicants who sued after being rejected from the undergraduate
\n and law schools.<\/p>\n article from the Boston Globe<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yesterday the University of Michigan unveiled their new undergraduate admissions policy, attempting to conform to this summer’s Supreme Court decision that their previous policy, which gave "points" to minority applicants, was unconstitutional. The ruling was somewhat confusing, in that it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |