Posted on 05/15/2018 6:48:04 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.
A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.”
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Entrance into STEM fields should not be based on tests.Tests only promote the tyranny of Merit. Entrance should be determined by lot modified by deliberate selection when lot does not provide a perfectly balanced student body at grad school. Then science could be done properly with results decreed for teams of scientists to provide politically correct justifications.
Unfortunately even Trump cannot return medicine to the Market where advance would come upon advance and everyday practice would grow steadily cheaper and thereby more widely available.
For something like market medicine one must go "offshore." That will continue to some degree as an outlet for the ruling class until the progressive ineffectiveness of existing antibiotics and their non replacement by non existent R&D render that minimally beneficial.
Well, that’s depressing.
Don’t buy that bunk about white women being the main beneficiaries of affirmative action. There has been a major effort to convey that because fully two-thirds of white women oppose affirmative action—and they want to change that. Their claims are based on the greater number of women in various professions that first came about with civil rights protections against affirmative action. That is simply from it becoming illegal to discriminate baswd on sex. Women are often discriminated against in undergraduate college admissions now if they are white or Asian, because so many more women are applying at many schools at various teat score and grade levels that the colleges are fighting reaching the tipping point of being so female heavy that the most qualified women don’t want to attend.
They use the raw numbers of how many more architects, lawyers, doctors, etc., that are female in the decades since affirmative action was introsuced to claim that they are beneficiaries—when ovwrwhelmingly that is due simply to lack of discrimination and social change. Blacks and Hispanics with test scores hundreds of points lower than white men or women are still reliably admitted over their more qualified counterparts.
That said, the recent attempts to dumb down DTEM fields to try to equalize race and sex numbers are hideous.
You mean like when it denies the existence of G-d?
Conservatism and this forum are too full of G-d-denying atheist Darwinists whose sole claim to "conservatism" is their belief that White Western European Civilization is superior to all others because the ancient pagan Greeks and Romans made such pretty statues.
Yet these miserable atheists will actually support (white) Fundamentalist Protestants for political office because white Fundamentalist Protestants are part of White Western Civilization, even if they are "bonkers." (Kind of like how liberals will celebrate Black Fundamentalist Protestants while calling white Fundamentalist Protestants "flat earthers.")
So the different races of mankind evolved from different species of monkeys? That's what you're saying, isn't it?
The most blatant examples are Soviet and Maoist condemnations of entire areas of research as "bourgeois" - such as Stalin's effective ban on genetics research in favor of ideologically approved Lysenkoism. You have milder versions of the same thing in America's PC Left in their attacks on studies of IQ and racial/ethnic differences (the Left claims to champion Darwinism and evolution, but in their version, humans may have evolved from other organisms, but then evolution suddenly stopped and we all became equal).
The other main subversion of science by the Left comes from multiculturalism. "Science" can be used by the Left to attack conservative global warming skeptics, but scientific facts should never be imposed on Third World peoples and cultures. That would be Western cultural hegemony and imperialism. Similarly, if Blacks, Mexicans, and feminist harpies can't hack math and science courses in school, well, then it's math and science courses that need to go - as described in the article.
Someone never explained the difference between correlation and causation to you. Nobody is claiming that high melanin content makes people less intelligent or slanted eyelids make people smart. They are asserting that one racial group that is characterized by lower average intelligence also happens to have higher melanin content, while one with higher average intelligence happens to have slanted eyelids.
Some of the stupidest people in the world I have known happen to have been phenotypically "white." Speaking as one who has achieved multiple degrees in natural sciences, undergrad and grad
Evidently you've never heard of statistics either, which sheds doubt on your "multiple degrees in natural science." If somebody says "men tend to be taller then women" and you say, "Oh yeah, what about that 5 foot tall man down the street or the 6 foot female basketball player," would your argument carry any weight? Or if I said that being a regular smoker increases the risk of lung cancer, would citing an anecdote about an uncle who lived to 90 after being a chain smoker his entire life mean much?
Is there a *SARC* tag missing somewhere in your post?
Is such necessary?
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