

Race and Merit at MIT - tokenadult
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/15/mit

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hga
Outside of fields like "music, theater and writing", the ones MIT is _really_
serious about, it's only fair to hire the very best. In those fields, at MIT
you don't get tenure unless you are #1 or 2 in your sub-field (sometimes
_maybe_ but very rarely #3).

" _Furthermore, it is clear that the value placed on gaining a diverse faculty
is not high._ "

Damned straight: "the very best in their fields" has nothing to do with a
"diverse faculty" as defined in this study.

Anyway, we're talking about pretty small numbers here. MIT has 1,003 faculty
members, I don't think any departments are significantly/disproportionately
larger than say the "average" (MIT has a strong policy of not letting the
facility and graduate program of a department get too large because fields
tend to go bust, witness aero/astro in the early '70s, nuclear engineering a
little later, and EECS at the beginning of this decade; in the sciences
physics has seriously declined and chemistry is smaller than it used to be).

So you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions. See the comment by
Jack Olson: for many departments the pool of black scholars _is nonexistent_.

Bottom line of the report, as summarized in this article: MIT _may_ be
imperfect in its pursuit of its ideal of meritocracy, and discussion of
meritocracy along the axis of "diversity" is discouraged at best.

My comment: Too bad, if you want to play the academic game by different rules,
the majority of universities and colleges in the US will be _delighted_ to
accommodate you. MIT will _never_ do so.

Or as commentator "mb" put it, "There is no such thing as 'black
thermodynamics,' 'women's calculus,' [or] 'hispanic quantum mechanics'".

~~~
patio11
Affirmative action also creates distortions in the pipeline for new hirees.
For example, since essentially all private elite universities in the United
States systematically discriminate on the basis of race, for a given "quality"
of applicant, minority applicants are likely to have a more prestigious
degree. This tends to concentrate the top-of-the-field scholars MIT wants to
attract at a very, small set of institutions, since if you move just a little
down the institutional prestige scale you'll find schools happily admitting
minority students who are not cut out for careers at world-class research
institutions.

This is difficult to verify because universities lie pervasively about their
systematic racial discrimination, but when data does come to light about them,
for example in the Gratz v Bollinger litigation, it typically shows that the
discrimination is less a "plus factor" and more "two institutions at different
academic tiers which happen to be geographically co-located". (The difference
between the mean white and black student at the University of Michigan is more
than the difference between the mean UoM student and the mean Harvard
student.)

~~~
hga
Thomas Sowell has written extensively about this, using his alma mater of
Harvard. Using MIT as an example:

If you come across a minority MIT undergraduate, it's an absolutely safe
assumption they belong there. With one notable exception (Dean of Students
Shirley McBay, who just didn't have the right attitudes for that job), that
was also my experience with the staff (probably goes along with the general
attitude of meritocracy).

MIT is currently getting around 13,000 applicants each year with a third of
them being qualified to attend (self-selection by applicants is _very_
strong). I would assume that MIT accepts pretty much every qualified STEM
minority applicant (although I'm sure a lot go elsewhere; predicting yield is
probably the hardest part of admissions).

As I remember, Sowell's general point was that the very top schools like
Harvard (and I assume MIT) take a disproportionate fraction of the top
minority students, and therefore to maintain "diversity" the lower tier
schools will accept a fair fraction of minority students who aren't as
qualified for the school (including ones who don't have much of a chance of
making it).

This cascades on down the quality/intensity ladder of schools, and is grossly
unfair to a lot of the students who would be happy at a lower tier school but
who struggle at best in the one they (initially) attend. Admittance to
graduation rates are instructive.

