Posted on 10/16/2006 9:18:07 AM PDT by brookwood
I pride myself on being thoroughly bourgeois - hatred of the bourgeoisie and discrimination against them is the surest sign of an evil, repressive regime.
It may have been John Lukacs who made the argument that Hitler was able to whip up enough hatred against the Jews because the Jews - as successful and productive citizens - were overwhelmingly bourgeois as a group, so the anti-Semitic tendencies of the racial Left and the anti-bourgeois prejudices of the economic Left were combined in the perfect target for this evil ideology.
Wherever the bourgeoisie is strong, freedom triumphs.
I come from a state where the privileged are well cared for. Kennedy and Kerry come to mind as two of the most useless humans on the planet. Their wealth lifted them far above many useful and smarter people who came from meager means. I think the author is pretentious and full of crap.
Are you a student there?
The administration must go out of their way to avoid you on campus!
:-)
Purely as a devil's advocate, what about the fact that Amherst is a (nominally anyway!) private institution, and as such they should be free to educate whomever they feel like. If they wanted to become an all-Black, or all-Jewish or all-whatever institution, who am I to say that they shouldn't?
Of course they do receive, just because of being in the business they are in, a lot of government money, in the form of grants to faculty, and tuition grants and federally assisted loans to students, but still, why should I really care what they do with their spaces, especially if by pursuing these admissions policies they will tend to diminish the quality of their student body on average.
I went to a New England prep school with some very wealthy kids and they weren't none too bright.
Maybe they should just change their name from Amherst to "Meharry-North."
Why does any institution see the need to remake itself in the image of the rest of the population?
Amherst should require Spanish as the primary language of 30 percent of its applicants given the current demographics in the western states.
Amherst wants to look like what part of "the rest of the poulation"?
The majority of the USA is christian (80%) and a large part are red-neck southerners. Just how far are the bigwhigs at Amherst willing to carry out their ethnocentric goal of remaking their school in the image of the rest of the USA?
Ivy league type schools are no more than minority mills anyway.
You get a better education at State U or a school with less "edge" by staying away from the PC White-guilt ethnocentric, too light for heavy work and too heavy for light work institutions of indoctrination.
I encourage you to read the articles mentioned in the footnotes. Like it or not, intelligence is hereditary and correlated with income.
I think they can legally discriminate based on income but not on race, sex, etc. Up to this point we haven't had to have laws restricting employers from hiring based on income, because they've never wanted to. If it became a common practice, however, I think it should be made illegal because children are not responsible for the income level of their parents. Think of the Cultural Revolution in China; income-based reverse discrimination can be very ugly.
I was going to make your point that no one cares that Christians are probably un-represented, but it's a separate issue. Thanks for the post though.
It is a repugnant policy, but I hardly think its anything new. I have a family member who worked in an Ivy league admissions office in the 1980's and says that it was absolutely accepted fact that being a white male from a comfortable background was a strike against any applicant. Such people were considered uninteresting unless they were just stratospheric in terms of grades, scores or other achievements (linebacker, flutist, dad donated a building etc.)
The correlation is certainly not perfect. The question is do you want to be turned down for a job because your parents were wealthy. It's one thing to allow that for minorities, given the legal discrimination they suffered historically. Income-based discrimination is a dangerous new frontier.
BULLCRAP! Racism is not tolerable no matter which direction it's done.
Interesting implications here; if Amherst's class distribution is (roughly) 1/4 "URMs" (underrepresented minorities), 1/4 athletes, 1/4 alumni children and 1/4 applicants who have nothing going for them but hard work and brains...it's actually 1/4 upper-class URMs, 1/4 upper-class athletes, etc.
Full disclosure: my daughter was wait-listed by Amherst, I believe Amherst's wait-list is larger than the actual class size, and maybe 5-10 get accepted from the list on a good year.
also raises the question about what do you do with a wealthy black kid?
Why is this more important than, say, making the faculty reflect the distribution of political viewpoints of the U.S. population (60% say they are somewhat to very conservative, only about 20% say they are liberals).
If Amherst is rejecting liberal children of liberal Democratic
fat-cats...
that would just be poetic justice.
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