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.
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.
If Amherst is rejecting liberal children of liberal Democratic
fat-cats...
that would just be poetic justice.
Any college who hasn't figured this out and actually discriminates against the wealthy isn't a place I'd want to send my kids anyway. They obviously don't have the common sense that God gave a goose.
There's a WSJ reporter, Dan Golden, out with a book on admissions to elite colleges. "The Price of Admission..."
Heard him on the radio. Being a legacy, even from a generous family ain't enough any more. You have to come
from a super wealthy, super generous family, unless you're the next Einstein (in that case, Cal Tech would
want you to interview with the physics department faculty), got political connections that did something
for the school, or you're good at some non-mainstream sport.
My guess is that the reason Ted "The Swimmer" Kennedy tries to pass legislation that blocks/limits legacies
is that his family has pruned itself of so much of IQ, that elite institutions can't justify admitting
them, when other legacies have just as much money, heck of a lot smarter, less behavioral problems, less
bad press, etc.
Bourgeoisie is certainly being misused lately.
Main Entry: bour·geoi·sie
Pronunciation: "bu(r)zh-"wä-'zE
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from bourgeois
1 : MIDDLE CLASS; also plural in construction : members of the middle class