I feel genuinely conflicted about these topics. Part of me says “I agree with the letter authors completely. People should experience equal opportunity, equal Justice, and equal responsibility.” Another part of me says “that’s literally impossible (or incompatible) with different families raising their children with different circumstances.”
Overall, I lean pretty strongly towards individual families raising their children as best they can with all the benefits and drawbacks that come from that system. But I think it’s fantasy to believe that that results in even approximately equal opportunities.
My kids will get way more comp.sci and math from me and more biology from my wife than average. Other kids will get more music, art, writing, foreign language, sports or other exposure from their family. If it turns out that one of those is more valuable, well the different kids didn’t have equal opportunities. Other kids worried about nutrition, whether one parent would beat the other, or grow up with a parent in jail. Clearly not equal opportunity.
What’s the limiting principle or boundary condition of “equal opportunity”? Is every social institution required to compensate for all external inequalities? If so, how can each institution subjectively compensate for social inequalities without diminishing their respective core functions?
The point here is that institutions must provide equal opportunity within their own functional scope. But simultaneously, institutions must also maintain enough filtering criteria to ensure they do not abandon their core function.
MIT best serves general social questions of equal opportunity by accepting individuals based on some standard quantifiable baseline filtering criteria, and tackling such vast social questions through open and honest inquiry & research.
As a side note, perhaps institutions that are closer to problems like social inequality are best suited to serve them.
One of the problems with wokeness is I think it started as perfectly reasonable stuff like you mention, but then the activists / priests of wokeness let power go to their heads and get more concerned with having anyone who criticises them fired than helping the underprivileged.
It may be a stretch but I feel nature plays dice where certain events exploit advantages. It feels like something that is futile to balance against.
Perhaps understanding our tribalism and need to differentiate by color, sex, nationalism, etc. It feels like there are moving parts we are not discussing whether because of sensitivity or because we just don't fully understand.
I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal. But how to make education equal? Instead of setting up quotas maybe we should simply switch teachers. Let the teachers rotate among schools so that every kid gets a random selection of teachers and every teacher gets a random selection of students.
At the same time, should also try to minimize the number of private schools, either through legislation or tax.
I guess it still won't work perfectly because teachers can simply go private by themselves. Meh. Whatever.
It's a neat idea but it rests on what I believe is a total misunderstanding of what education is.
In supposed 'bad schools' - kids don't show up to class. There's not much in the way of clubs to join, nobody joins them. Kids are bullied for even contemplating doing well. They are bullied on the way to school. Pulled into gangs. Totally absent an role models at all. Parents absent, living in very poor conditions, often one parent missing or in jail. They might knew very few who actually graduated from anything including HS, let alone College. The thought never crossed their mind and they see no point to it. There is literal violence in class. Kids pay little attention when they are there.
The best school in the world can't 'fix' that.
A 'good school' has conscientious parents who make sure their kids get to school, they live in homes erring towards happy, have the material they needs, parents who care about them, parents who inquire at least a bit. Some friends with talent, enough critical mass in activities that good non-academic clubs exist. An overall workable situation wherein teachers can teach.
Some teachers are better than others, some schools better than others, but it's not really that.
I would really support this 'rotation of teachers' concept because I suggest absolutely nothing would change and people would realize what the underlying issues are.
FYI shipping kids from the ghetto, in smaller numbers, to 'decent schools' in the burbs actually seems to work, so long as the 'special kids' can avoid the extra violence they might face for being labelled as nerds by their peers in poor areas.
As for MIT and donors, there is obviously a good discussion to be had about equality, and frankly I think everyone is open to that discussion, but the extremists shutting down discussion need to be stopped.
Yeah no ... I described failings in the students - or rather, that wouldn't say 'failings' so much as 'contextually, utterly not prepared, willing or able in any way'.
"A good school will not have most of those problems."
Because a 'good school' is full of conscientious and prepared students, raised by conscientious and prepared parents with jobs and stability.
There is nothing a 'decent group of well meaning teachers' can do when 50% don't show up, 90% are literally years behind in reading and the curriculum, 50% are borderline illiterate, nobody pays attention or does any homework, students get violent in class, they are interested only in the most ridiculous artifacts of pop culture, even the students who might try are bullied, and there are zero role models in the lives of students, kids are neglected and abused and the students collectively could care one bit about learning.
There is no possibility for 'education' to happen on those circumstances.
Give them healthcare, parents stable jobs, 2 parents in stable relationship, stable family life, destroy the gangs somehow make them irrelevant, and watch grades magically rise without a single change to the school. We know this because when you take these kinds out of those stark situations and put them in regular suburban schools with teachers roughly the same credentials, they do reasonably well.
Inner city school teachers are not crap, they're basically 1/2 social workers 1/2 teachers, totally undervalued.
> even the students who might try are bullied, and there are zero role models in the lives of students
Some schools allowed students to beat these odds and decide to give themselves a chance by being in an environment where they could succeed academically. Lowell was such a school here in SF [0]. Sadly, it became a target of a certain crowd and has now switched to a "lottery" system to admit, so the bullies have as much chances of getting in as the victims. [1]
An area won't improve in one year because you switch teachers, and this problem is really socially whole. You don't just switch teachers, you need to inject money into the local economy, invest in public spaces (green areas, children's playgrounds, etc.). And of course, in education as well.
But you gotta start regardless. We can't just shrug, though I feel like this problem is so complex it really requires a complete re-structuration of the way America handles its social structure.
I don't think the USA is going to solve these problems without a complete 180 degrees change in how you view the world, and that won't happen until the empire has completely collapsed. In that regard, I have quite a grim view of the future of America.
>I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal.
It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your social background.
I absolutely can't understand why would any country require its citizens to pay for education in state-funded schools and universities. Educated people are the best and the biggest national asset. Anything that creates a barrier (monetary or not) to education harms the country directly.
Thesis: We are 20 years behind where we should be in online university education, and the only reason we are where we are now is a pandemic.
The universities were at the bleeding edge of new networked IT solutions even into the 1980s. As low-cost portable devices became available that could display high-quality real-time video on demand, it was clear that such a solution would soon be faster, cheaper and better than passively sitting in a lecture hall. And little, if anything, happened on the University side for years and years.
The occasional academician might try something, but it was spotty at best. A few years ago, there were professors who were still banning laptops from lecture rooms. Faculty Senates stuck their collective heads in the sand. They couldn’t figure out a business case where they could make money in a video future, so they ignored it. Meanwhile, students got a slower, worse, more expensive education than they could and should have.
We should be in the third or fourth generation of online university courses by now. Professionally produced and vetted lectures, hyperlinks to past and supplemental materials synced to video, diverse actors presenting material that engage various population of students more effectively. Objective measures of student learning improvements to support process quality improvements. From service courses through grad seminars. The best courses offered to not one university, but all universities (potentially). Simulators of lab equipments so students get training on the newest equipment, and aren’t learning outdated inefficient lab practices. Online networking with mentors in the real world. Effective controls on cheating on exams. These all should be mature, fully deployed technologies by now. And they aren’t.
That is the mortal sin of Higher Education in the 21st Century. They just didn’t care. I consider a lot of the political turmoil on campuses as just a smokescreen by academic leadership to distract the digital native students from asking the inconvenient questions of why is education so…clunky.
Even that won’t do it. Kids show up to kindergarten with wildly different abilities to even “take turns” and participate conversationally. Kids who had less adult conversational interaction as toddlers won’t get the same out of school even with the teachers being in rotation.
All of these replies seem to co-mingle the concepts of equal opportunity and equal outcome. The foundation of a free society is personal responsibility. Personal outcomes in such a system are pretty much guaranteed not to be the same (equal), since different people will use their freedom in different ways. Sucks for kids of irresponsible parents, who truly don't have self-autonomy. But then again, our society is full of compassionate safety nets for such kids.
Exactly. Outside of the state taking away children from their parents at birth and raising them there will never truly be equal opportunity. Even then there are genetic differences which give some more opportunity than others: I got blessed by flat ass feet and bad joints from my parents. I will never be able to be an athlete and will always be somewhat limited in the physical endeavours I can persue. Being tall and attractive is directly correlated with better life outcomes, but if you are ugly or short you are just out of luck.
The real question which needs to be answered is where do institutions need to draw the line for equal opportunity? Do institutional services need to be a zero sum game? Can we offer the same services to everyone — education, healthcare, UBI — where providing services to certain individuals is not at the expense of other individuals?
You raise a very fair question of “when does someone have the responsibility for turning their opportunity into their outcome and how quickly does that responsibility ramp from 0% theirs to 100% theirs?
Could it ever begin before conception? Could it ever begin before birth? At 6 months of age? At 1, 2, or 3 years of age? Is it 100% “on them” at 12, 16, 18, or 21?
I'd not call it a characterization but a fact. I was initially thinking of Western(ized) society, although a moment's reflection suggests to me that it's nearly all current human society. For starters, (nearly?) every nation offers free public education. Westernized nations offer food assistance or some form of welfare for low- or no-income families. There are countless other programs at just at this "systemic," nation-state level; then consider that the world abounds with private and religious charities, which although they mostly hail from wealthier nations, dispense educational and life support to children (and adults) around the world. A myriad of privately-sponsored orphanages in India. Whatever the Gates foundation is doing this week in Africa. Privately sponsored open-to-the-community schools and day cares in Harlem. The list is endless.
It's a subjective, unquantified statement. It cannot possibly be called a fact.
In any case the proof is in the pudding: children in the US who are born poor are highly likely to die poor, and we are significantly worse in that respect than other Western countries.
Yeah you are right, it's really difficult to do that. In the dreamland everyone gets to discover what they are good at and explore possibilities, but in the real world we all struggle to feed the family :/
> how to make education equal? Instead of setting up quotas maybe we should simply switch teachers. Let the teachers rotate among schools so that every kid gets a random selection of teachers and every teacher gets a random selection of students.
The lottery came back and you are moving from a school in Florida to Alaska.
I think you’re on to something. 10 years ago, what you describe would have been entirely infeasible what with forcing teachers to move places they don’t want to go. Now, with KhanAcademy, you can have top-notch teaching on virtually any subject anywhere.
That’s not to say e-learning is a suitable replacement but as a supplement, it should certainly be able to bridge much of the gap.
>If it turns out that one of those is more valuable, well the different kids didn’t have equal opportunities. Other kids worried about nutrition, whether one parent would beat the other, or grow up with a parent in jail. Clearly not equal opportunity.
You confuse equal opportunity with equal circumstances. All we can do is give people equal opportunity under law, so that nobody is restricted from opportunity from a legal perspective. Trying to solve the problem of equal circumstances will always result in the violation of human rights. We should do our best to give people the tools and education they need to succeed so that these other factors do not influence their life as much, and they can overcome the obstacles that they've been presented with.
The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field. This frees parents to work/spend and ensures the only advantage exists at the gene level. We can selectively breed those traits away .
The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.
"The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations." [1]
"The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field."
I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure?
I hope you're will to pay for that in blood because there will be war over it.
We get that there's no such thing as a perfectly level playing field, but we're not going to allow children to be raised by the state to achieve what will be frankly in all likelihood not much of a gain in that regard, and a loss of basic freedom, and that's before the obvious risk of totalitarianism.
If you're worried about the state reading your emails, or net neutrality, you should naturally be 100x more concerned about what the state wants your child to believe.
While I am actually in support of good basic public education, I suggest the issue is important enough so that it should be at 'arms length' from the politicians, much like the Central Bank, but with more public input.
We need to get rid of this notion that there's really such a thing as 'perfectly equal' anyhow. Comparative Value. People value different things. Instead, take the approach of 'if there's a will there's a way' i.e. every kid gets access to good, basic, core schooling, and if a kid is motivated and has basic talents, they should have access to basic higher education.
Finally, most of the needle has nothing to do with quality of education, which most kids have access to, it's the quality of their home life. I'll bet material improvements in minimum wage and some kind of basic 'healthcare for all' would yield materially better results for kids than any specific changes to schooling, other than the cost of higher ed.
Edit: thee are enough examples of great public schools i.e. Norway, S. Korea, Canada, we don't need to get all theoretical about it. Work on 'all the issues' and the kids will be mostly ok.
The general idea came to me when discussing equal pay for women and how kids affects a women's career.
Thinking about ways to equalize education with kids frim different economic level. I came upon this idea.
There are many benefits and many drawbacks. No matter how taboo this topic it feels like the natural evolution of putting the children first, equalizing poverty backgrounds, equalizing pay, increasing workforce durations, spending power.
Why would you allow untrained professionals to raise our most valuable resource?
Raising children is different from anything you do in the workplace. "Professional" abilities aren't the key metrics for this responsibility. The best "boost" I'm aware of for being good at the job is being raised by good loving parents and thus having a good model to then emulate when it becomes your turn. Sometimes people can find good models elsewhere, but the number of places one can do that today is pretty small — media and movies certainly don't.
From my research, the sociological numbers bear this out, good homes make better well-adjusted successful and able children who generally go on to make another generation of well-adjusted and successful children.
Broken families, single parents homes, have lower success rates.
If you want to create an environment where our most valuable resource is given the best shot, then we should be teaching about marriage, man+woman partnership, fidelity and faithfulness. We don't have any known better models for raising them — and it isn't even close.
"Why would you allow untrained professionals to raise our most valuable resource? "
I would start by saying that anyone who would even use that kind of language is living in a totally different dimension of reality than I, and so first, I'd have to bridge that gap.
Our children are not 'resources' and while teaching certainly requires a degree of professional demeanour, raising children has nothing to do with 'professionalism' per say.
For gosh sake ... life is about life (!) - the whole gosh darn point of 'the economy' is so that families can be families and communities, not the other way around, i.e. that they can be turned into 'proletariat resource factories'.
We live, we have our communities, our culture, our institutions, our faith, our celebrations, our hopes, our fears, our failures, our conquests, our rituals. The economy can be a part of that. Stopping really bad acting (i.e. abuse) is always good. The state has a role even in education, obviously.
But the language you are using is the same type of culturally secular language that totalitarian systems adopted and resulted in dramatic failure.
If you want to see what that looks like, visit non-Moscow Russia, the parts that were designed in built in the latter part of the 20th century. Or better yet, Poland, because they will not romanticize that era in a perverse way and give you an earful.
The 'best' schools in the world, in Finland, if one could describe their approach it would be 'Communitarian' more than anything. Yes, they have standard European views on equality and somewhat higher taxation, but they are not 'top down secular equality socialists'. Instead, they value teachers as a culture. They value reading, education, intellectualism, they work as local communities. We would consider them 'somewhat progressive' in many ways, but they are not what we would call 'woke'. Their method of education is not anything special, it's downright ancient if anything. They are not what we would nominally call 'capitalist' either, they have a blended communitarian + regulated free-market + socialization in certain sectors and definitely national strategic cooperation between state, established families/wealth, industry.
They are a great example, there are others, though ideas and rhetoric are always good, there's no need to roll back to 100 year old ideas that have been essentially discredited.
> I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure?
I’ve seen both serious Marxist arguments for it and serious capitalist arguments for it (and also serious critiques of each of those camps that the other camp ultimately leads to that end!), among others, so while I don't think it is a good idea, it is not one I dismiss out of hand as a joke when I see it.
> The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field.
Except for the parents powerful / wealthy enough to opt out of this system for one with more resources, who will, just as we do today.
Who is going to die on a hill to pass legislation banning private schooling and forcing a state monopoly on raising children? We would need generations of culture shift before many people could even debate the idea without involuntarily shuddering in horror.
Probably a reference to the "residential school" system in Canada, which largely served as a way to extract indigenous kids from their nations and raise them instead in the culture of the people running the government, with parents fairly intentionally unable to visit their children. (Also they were in the news in recent months for the recent discoveries of mass graves.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
(It does seem, as another commenter pointed out, that this isn't necessarily the only end result of state involvement in child-raising. In particular, it seems to me you can draw a qualitative difference between greater state education as a way to expand the experiences of children growing up and as a way to constrain those experiences.)
The British and later Canadian (of British descent mostly) Administration had native children raised by the state. The end results are, well, let's just say it makes what's happening to the Uighur look not so bad in comparison. [0]
BTW these "schools" were still around when their current leader's father (Trudeau) was in office.
I have never understood why there is an expectation to treat everyone equally when people are very unequal, from their birth circumstances, which obviously they can't control, to their behavior as adults, which people do have control over.
People don't treat me like Michael Jordon because, guess what? I cannot do the things he does. It would be rather silly for me to get all in a huff because I don't get the treatment that celebrities get.
Another example: a single teenage girl has a baby when she's 15 and two married computer engineers have a baby. Does anyone really expect that those two kids will have equal opportunities? Is it our society's job to ensure that they do? Should we limit one kid's opportunities if society can't provide them to the other kid too?
It sucks that some kids are born into less advantageous circumstances, but it's the way the world works. Sometimes it's because parents make bad decisions, sometimes social systems are unfair, sometimes it's neither; luck of the draw.
It's funny to me that everyone seems to think diversity is a good thing, yet at the same time want everyone to be the same.
> Third, intellectual ability and achievement are the principal requirements for admission as a student or faculty member to any university.
This is the crux of the issue as I see it. The author sees achievement as a proxy for ability, and therefore achievement-meritocracy is the only acceptable system.
By contrast, MIT sees ability as only one factor among many that create achievement. If one takes the further axiom that ability is independent of protected categories like race and gender, then achievement-meritocracy does not recruit the most able students. Hence, affirmative action and reducing oppression.
Mathematically, author believes achievement=f(ability) so ability=f^{-1}(achievement) while MIT believes achievement=f(ability,identity, background) so ability=f^{-1}(achievement,identity,background)
See, here is the thing. What you said is completely true, some people grow up in a really shitty environment and the achievements of children needs to be compared with the achievements of those around them.
However, without going into details, I have spent enough time at one of these ivy league universities to see first hand how it works it practice. The black people I met who benefited from these affirmative action policies were some of the richest most privileged human beings in the country. These policies are in no way actually implemented to help disadvantaged people.
A simple test would be your family income, for example. But MIT openly avoids this. These universities definitely don't want "those lower class people" corrupting them with their lower class ideas. They just want to feel virtuous, and the best way to do that is to have people there that "look the part" whether or not they are actually disadvantaged.
I think income-diversity is a valid and very appropriate criticism of MIT and other schools. I agree that not enough able but poor students are admitted.
Without diminishing MIT's responsibility, I also think the rest of the education system needs to take responsibility for the same problem. In many cases, a very smart kid with low income is afforded poor secondary education, so if they were admitted to MIT, they might not have the preparation to thrive. MIT's disparate impact on low income kids is unacceptable, but the solution requires cooperation from high schools.
When I was in college Louis Farrakhan [1] came to speak. There was a great debate if he should come (state school/funds and a pretty high speaking fee.)
He spoke, huge protest outside (I covered the protests for the college paper) As a suburban white kid i learned a lot about things I wasn’t exposed to. I listened to a recording of him speaking a while I processes the pictures in the dark room. His oratory was mesmerizing.
Universities should be places where interesting opinions are shared and debated. If the person is relevant and not crazy they should be heard. Let the protests happen or ask them questions.
As for the other complaint, big companies have sexual harassment and diversity training. Probably not a terrible idea, just get everyone on the same page and it’s also an big time institutional protective move (CYA).
All these students got into MIT so they’re already doing pretty pretty good..
I work at a university so I might be a bit biased, but they’re not terrible places to donate to. My group shares all its science data with the community and does a lot of stuff that’s pretty non-commercial. I had someone in pharma tell me they’re always grabbing all the public data..
It certainly depends on the university/school. I saw the writing on the wall in 2010 and left a nine year career in the university behind. The focus was to "get asses in seats" (the president's words, not mine). Then on top of that certain segments of the faculty had become intolerant of certain student groups and would frequently punish students for their world views, even those that are now classified in higher intersectional categories. Yes this is all anecdotal, but we're seeing it play out with our own eyes in public now. I give to my alma mater but less so than to charities and institutions of which have missions that are clearly and plainly defined. I don't think the entire university model is corrupt or broken but we have to be careful.
> He (Abbot) proposed instead an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone
I am in full support with this, though it seems to me this is too idealized to be practical in practice. How can one reach a fair judgement of a student only based on a 1000-word essay in his/her application (which might not even be written by him/herself)?
However, I'm still saddened by that the MIT response to this incident is simply "it is Abbot's right of free expression to say whatever he wants", but nothing about what he actually said, or whether it at least makes some sense. It's as if MIT treated Abbot as an unknowing child whose nonsense words shall be tolerated, which is disturbing. Below is part of the mail list letter I received:
> Freedom of expression is a fundamental value of the Institute.
> I believe that, as an institution of higher learning, we must ensure that different points of view – even views that some or all of us may reject – are allowed to be heard and debated at MIT. Open dialogue is how we make each other wiser and smarter.
> This commitment to free expression can carry a human cost. The speech of those we strongly disagree with can anger us. It can disgust us. It can even make members of our own community feel unwelcome and illegitimate on our campus or in their field of study.
> I am convinced that, as an institution, we must be prepared to endure such painful outcomes as the price of protecting free expression – the principle is that important.
> MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions)
Surely the authors know that "statement of facts" has the ability to completely alter the interpretation of the rest of the content. Key questions are: why is this fact relevant in this context, what is the author conveying by bringing this in? Etc. To take a radical example, if one reads an article about a recent mass shooting followed by "statements of fact" about the declining population of whites in America, then one would reasonably conclude that the author is a white supremacist who implicitly supports the shooter. Non-white supremacists don't talk about the great replacement.
So the question is why would someone bring up the criminal record of an unarmed Black man who was extrajudicially killed by an officer of the state? What does this fact do for the reader? It's not hard to imagine what many would conclude. Editorial narrative is something I learned about in middle school, why are the authors feigning ignorance about its existence?
Reading the email in question (https://newbostonpost.com/2020/06/19/heres-what-the-m-i-t-ca...), it really seems like he was attempting to bring together the two camps. At the time the talking point of “oh, he was just a criminal” was pretty widespread as if this somehow justified what happened. In his email, as I understand it he’s addressing people who think like that.
A core purpose of a church is to identify and evaluate:
1. What a virtuous life is.
2. How to live one.
3. What examples exist of people who have lived one.
4. How practically achievable a virtuous life is.
The chaplain is doing his job here. He is supposed to identify that Floyd hasn't lived a virtuous life, but he is still part of a greater community and that a virtuous person would help Floyd live the best life he can.
> Non-white supremacists don't talk about the great replacement.
It isn't clear that the church actually objected that much, for all their statement to the contrary. It isn't like they defrocked him or anything. It is more likely that MIT asked for him to be sacked and they took a decision not to fight over it because it wouldn't be helpful. What the chaplain was trying to do here was entirely in line with how he was meant to act.
I wasn't blaming anyone but it does seem quite likely that this action was driven by MIT rather than the church. The church hasn't fired him, MIT has had him moved on from their campus. The church is being relatively proportional about the whole business.
> It isn’t clear that the church actually objected that much, for all their statement to the contrary.
I disagree. Not only is it clear that they objected to his message, its clear from the Cardinal Archbishop’s own public message on the same issue two days before Moloney’s why they did.
> It isn’t like they defrocked him or anything.
Er, yeah, I mean no matter the severity of the disagreement, its not even the class of issue for which that is appropriate. It’s like saying DOJ must not really be upset at someone prosecuted for tax fraud because they didn’t seek the death penalty.
> It is more likely that MIT asked for him to be sacked and they took a decision not to fight over it because it wouldn’t be helpful.
It’s clearly the case that MIT brought Moloney’s message to the Archdiocese’s attention, and its pretty clear that the message stands in stark contrast to both the MIT President’s and the Cardinal Archbishop’s prior statements on the same issue. It’s not clear to me what even shadow of a basis you have for suggesting that MIT was upset but the Church viewed the chaplain as “entirely in line with how he was meant to act”.
Someone thinks that this letter - which I cheerfully point out is not only race-neutral but preaching tolerance and peace - is threatening enough that they have to disassociate with the priest.
He then disassociates from MIT. He is still associated with the Catholic Church. This suggests that the outrage is emanating from MIT, rather than the Church.
> Er, yeah, I mean no matter the severity of the disagreement, its not even the class of issue for which that is appropriate.
It isn't appropriate to fire him full stop, appropriateness isn't at play here. The problem is that it has been a number of months, the people involved were convicted and there is still no evidence that the Floyd case was racially motivated. And that is politically inconvenient for a vocal group of people. People who, coincidentally, are very much associated with MIT students and leadership.
To all, your defenses of the chaplain are more nuanced than even the authors of this article give. The sole argument they make is that the chaplain made "statement of...facts" and "facts are not racist, and stating facts is not racism." As discussed above, this may be true in a narrow sense, but the inclusion, exclusion, and sequencing of facts is the very basis of editorial narrative. If we agree that bigoted diatribes such as the white supremacist example above are a sequence of carefully chosen facts, then how is this a valid defense of anything?
To me the issue is that they fired the guy. It's one thing to disagree with someone's statement or political views, it's another to fire them over it.
It might be different if the chaplain was blatantly racist. But even if we read his statement as "I don't think George Floyd was innocent here" - that is not something you should get fired over. You can't compare this to white supremism, he didn't even imply George Floyd wasn't innocent.
He got fired for saying something which suggested he was a racist.
When you fire people over saying things which suggest they are bigoted, you create a culture where people hide mundane things and non-PC facts. You get people to be shy and not say anything for fear of vaguely implying something bad. And you risk hiding real "harsh truths" like (idk) the fact that the J&J vaccine caused fatal blood clots in 0.000014% of people.
He resigned. And, yeah, he was asked to resign, which is very much like being fired, but he was asked to resign his post as chaplain by the Archdiocese of Boston, not MIT. Why? Well…
Moloney wrote on June 7: “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been. He had not lived a virtuous life. He was convicted of several crimes, including armed robbery, which he seems to have committed to feed his drug habit. And he was high on drugs at the time of his arrest. But we do not kill such people.” And: “In the wake of George Floyd’s death, most people in the country have framed this as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that. Many people have claimed that racism is a major problem in police forces. I don’t think we know that.”
Sean Cardinal O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston wrote, in a “Letter to the People of the Archdiocese of Boston” on June 5 (that is, two day before Moloney’s email, so Moloney would—if not completely negligent—have been aware of it when writing his own missive): “The murder of George Floyd, an African American citizen, at the hands of four rogue police officers was tragically all too familiar to the African American community. During our lifetimes there has been the reality of the Negro Travelers Green Book, identifying locations where African Americans stop and stay in our country with less likelihood of being attacked. We have seen the Ku Klux Klan’s brutal lynchings of innocent black people. And we have now again witnessed heinous violence perpetrated by some who were entrusted with the duty to protect. George Floyd’s death makes clear that racist premises and attitudes, often implicit, are woven through basic structures—political, legal, economic, cultural and religious—in the United States.” And he wrote, later in the letter: “Going forward, the reality of racism in our society and the moral imperative of racial equality and justice must be incorporated in our schools, our teaching and our preaching. We must uphold the commitments to equal dignity and human rights in all institutions of our society, in politics, law, economy, education. Catholic teaching on social justice measures the way a society acts fairly or not. Our work will not be done until African American men, women and children are treated equally in every aspect of life in the United States.” [0]
Moloney wasn’t forced out because of a conflict with MIT leadership over a statement of simple facts. He was forced out because of a conflict over the basic pastoral responsibilities of the Church in the context of then-current events with the Church official to whom is entrusted, under Canon Law, the charge to “take care that [presbyters, a.k.a priests] correctly fulfill the obligations proper to their state” and the power and duty “to govern the particular church entrusted to him with legislative, executive, and judicial power” [1]
This wasn’t MIT “wokeness” impinging the freedom of the Catholic chaplain to minister to the community, this was the Catholic Church in the Boston Archdiocese taking action because a chaplain was acting at odds with the pastoral priorities identified by the highest authority in that particular church.
The story being spun here by Hafer and Miller is propaganda where facts are discarded and replaced with more convenient fictions where it advances the political narrative.
Counter that it was an inappropriate argument, don't fire the person who made it. Seems overkill at an institution that used to take pride in intellectual freedom.
I see so many Asian parents, many first generation immigrants to the United States, working several jobs, working their tales off to put their kids through good schools. Spending time with their kids, disciplining their kids, which is not easy and not pleasant for the parents. Marriages are hard for everyone, with disagreements, fights, bitterness, sacrifices. And yet, all these Asian parents stay together and endure for their kids. And this is the reward these Asian parents get from the society? For their kids to be put at the end of the line? I am glad the authors had the courage to speak up.
“Wokeness” treats Asians as white adjacent and often dismisses the real issues they face because of an idea that other people suffer more. Eg see efforts to use BIPOC instead of POC. Those communities do suffer more, but that doesn’t invalidate the issues other people face.
The Asian community is kind of split on this. A lot of the older generations think like the poster but some younger second generation Asians are more “woke”.
Also see active efforts in California and in universities to reduce “overrepresentation” of Asians. In some ways it feels like you’re being punished for being too successful.
I vote completely progressive, but I agree there are demons on the left, just like on the right. The point at which common sense flies out the window and emotion becomes the driving force, it's extremism or cultism, not politics.
I think when whatever becomes a political movement (as it has to be one to attract awareness), it eventually brings in more bureaucracy to the point that "administrators" rule the movement.
I am convinced that the relationship between American universities and its public are entirely untenable. There is no reason to give them any money as their goals are not to educate people. I have no sympathy for anybody that goes to a university and accrues a massive amount of debt anymore. The general assumption now is that people who went to these toxic places did so fully knowing that they will be lied to about economic prospects and brainwashed into believing a certain brand of racist wokeism.
I do not offer any solutions to this. The only solution I can see involves some form of violent and total destruction of these institutions. It would also require a building of new that absolutely forbid all parties involved with the old institions from even contacting the people involved with the new ones. I do not know what this will entail. There is no means of peaceful transfer of power away from these virtue signalling sycophants and toxic soulless wretches.
MIT did not, or at least it was not reported as such by Boston-area news outlets. From CBS Boston:
The Archdiocese of Boston asked Rev. Moloney to resign as
Catholic Chaplain at MIT and he agreed.
“The personal opinions echoed in his comments regarding
the murder of George Floyd do not reflect the positions of
the Archdiocese,” spokesperson Terrence Donilon told WBZ-
TV in a statement Wednesday.
> Third, intellectual ability and achievement are the principal requirements for admission as a student or faculty member to any university.
We know from the lawsuit against Harvard brought by Asian applicants that the principle requirements for admission are having a parent alumni or donor, since discovery in that case revealed that the majority of all admissions were legacies. I don't think the quoted suggestion has ever existed.
Selective universities who wish to rebuke any assumed nefarious intent behind their admission policies and procedures are welcome to publish data showing us that the bulk of their admissions are not legacy admissions. Until then, I say Harvard describes them all.
After all, the new norm is that accusation denotes guilt, right?
However, an argument can be made that it was appropriate for Fr. Moloney to leave his role as chaplain. That he chose to state unsentimental judgments about a murdered person was perhaps unusual for a chaplain.
When we lose the power to express our thoughts from a differing perspective, we have lost our powers of free speech. Facts are facts. They do not care whether we like them or not.
How long can a country endure if it continues to cripple learning, muzzle truth and persecute some of its most talented and capable individuals in the name of childish, incoherent ideology? Not long.
The stage of history doesn't care how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many people's lives you can destroy in the name of your religion masquerading as science. In the coming years, the US MUST LEAD. It must shake the slop from itself and rise to the role of world leader again, not just with guns but with minds, because the battlefield of the future is a battlefield of the mind. If it does not rise, China or Russia will be glad to.
Either "wokeness" dies, or the US dies. It's that simple.
"How long can a country endure if it continues to cripple learning, muzzle truth and persecute some of its most talented and capable individuals in the name of childish, incoherent ideology? Not long"
Are you talking about modern "wokeness" or are you talking about the while history of the United States as a primarily Christian state? Because I still feel more crippled, muzzled, and persecuted by us Christian morality/ideology than any recent up surgance in "wokeness".
Not parent poster but I would guess that there's now hundreds of thousands of students going through institutions like MIT who are being indoctrinated, who will be coming to a work force near you real soon. They will be demanding (and I've seen this already first hand) for everyone to fall into line with the wokeness. Spineless leaders will listen to them and fear them, and as we have seen already, do as they demand.
You'll have to educate me on who Deltron3030 are and what "Crises precipitate change" means. Is there something in the song's lyrics that is relevant here?
Before every great change there is a crescendo of the status quo. The lyric is from a future dystopian song that is unrelated, in the concrete sense. The quote, however, in my own interpretation the quote expresses that when things reach a fever pitch, when things become unpalatable for general society, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.
One of the authors makes a living from taxpayer-funded endeavors (NIH, FDA). I imagine that if, eventually, he does enough to piss off people who pay him (say, Black taxpayers) to lose his funding, he'd whine about being cancelled so loudly, we won't need SETI.
"Not on my dime!” goes both ways, huh.
The other author is ungooglable, so they either work for the gov, or don't have to work at all.
Poking aside, the questions to ask are:
* Who are the people these two chaps see as being hurt by MIT's so-called "wokeness"? I.e., whom are they trying to help with their withdrawal of funds?
* Who are the people MIT sees as behind hurt by the people they stopped working with? I.e. whom is MIT trying to help with their options?
* Whom do the actions of MIT / people "canceled" by MIT actually hurt? What's the impact?
The answer to these questions is left as an exercise to the reader, and will tell everything about the situation at hand.
While I agree with the authors opinion, I actually agree with you too, and quite like how succinctly you pointed out their hypocrisy. I personally didn't see it immediately.
Regardless, allow me to answer your question to perhaps give you a different perspective on the matter.
>Who are the people these two chaps see as being hurt by MIT's so-called "wokeness"? I.e., whom are they trying to help with their withdrawal of funds?
They probably see minorities from the Asian community who are hurt terribly from what I can only describe as incredibly racist policies wielded against them by the university. Also, members from poor white communities who also suffer because of these policies.
Furthermore, I think most people would agree the great things Western civilization has achieved over the centuries mostly comes from our respect for free speech and free thought, and the universities have traditionally been the institutions that took the lead roll in this. What will happen when the universities stop being the leaders of free thought? What institutions will take their place? It is not so far fetched to say that everyone on the planet could suffer from this
>Who are the people MIT sees as behind hurt by the people they stopped working with? I.e. whom is MIT trying to help with their options?
I honestly don't know. They clearly aren't trying to help people from disadvantaged communities, because they actively refuse to take into account objective measures such as family income when choosing applicants. I made another comment about this which I will just link to to save space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29135126.
Given that in the USA, Asians, Indians, and Nigerians all have a higher average family income that white people, it is clear that ones skin color has nothing to do with ones advantages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U.... What is clear is that ones background determines ones advantages. MIT is clearly making no effort to address these disadvantages, so what are they trying to do? My comment I linked to makes my opinion on that clear.
Thanks! The hypocrisy is what stands out to me; other than that — I'm not donating any money to MIT either.
The real issue here is where the educational institutions get their money from, and how they spend the money they get.
Undergraduate admission systems are so deeply flawed that changing admission criteria does nothing, I feel: there's always a way to fine-tune them to get or exclude any demographic. I feel like the first step to addressing the disparity is making higher education free to begin with.
I'm on board with the idea of taking background into account, I'm just too pessimistic about the universities not twisting anything we come up with.
I agree with what you are saying (though the conclusion that "skin color has nothing to do with advantages" is flawed; you should look at where white people with background comparable to those of Nigerian immigrants end up). It's a data science question, and "skin color" has a nonzero weight.
Rephrase it as "skin color alone doesn't determine advantages or disadvantages, and comes after socioeconomic status" — and I don't think you'll find much disagreement; the idea that poor black people and poor white people have much more in common than the poor and the rich is the reason why the rich have been fueling racial tensions hundreds of years ago (divide and conquer). But the consequences of such divisions last a while.
But it doesn't seem like that is really what the authors of the original post care about anyway.
Say, firing of the chaplain who felt the need to issue a piblic comment on a tragedy that made the entire institution look stupid.
If I start talking about how deeply the entire education system is flawed — including the admission criteria — I'll be here for a very, very long time. I got a PhD in math, left academia for a software job, and am currently trying to figure out how to teach without being a cog in the education complex. My partner left after getting on the tenure track.
The amount of structural problems in our education is so immense, that "wokeness" (the way they think it's a problem) in general — and whatever is going on at MIT in particular — is so, so insignificant in comparison that I don't even know where to start.
And the virtue signaling and hubris of the two nincompoops that feel they're influencing the system by withholding their donations (tsk tsk, they never say how big they were anywau) is as astounding as the noise they make is insignificant.
If we want to have some straight talk, we need to start with federal funding of K12 education (having it tied to local/property taxes is oprressive by design).
We need to have national standards (please support common core — it's the only thing happening that doesn't make me want to pull my hair off).
We need not just free higher education, we need stipends to support the students while they are studying (hard to study when you have nowhere to live and nothing to eat).
Then, after all of that, we can start looking into admission criteria.
Elite private colleges are pretty open about not having fair admission: your parents went there — you're favored; that's a criterion they consider without shame.
Such institutions may not receive any taxpayer money.
But our state-funded schools have completely opaque admission criteria too, and funding subject to the whims of boards that have nothing to do with education. Case in point: the university my partner taught in thought of shutting down their physics department, citing too few majors produced as the reason, even though the department brought more in tuition and research grants than was ever spent on it.
The real reason was that the board who appointed the decision makers in a red rural state didn't like eggheads who don't vote for them.
It was a huge scandal, but the staff was powerless.
The rabbit holes of who is actually in control of how, what, and whom we teach go so deep, that thinking that any single issue is going to doom (or un-doom) or education is naïve at best.
Which is why I'm so pissed with these two fools.
As someone who's spent years actually teaching, I find the audacity of them saying "goodbye" to anything — and people, for some reason, caring about it! — both sad and amusing.
>What will happen when the universities stop being the leaders of free thought?
The late 1980s.
It's kind of hard to truly destroy a system where at the bottom level, people actually care about free thought, and are willing to work for slave wages (i.e. adjunct salaries) to keep it going, but boy have we succeeded a lot in turning universities into glorified trade schools.
>most will agree the great things Western civilization has achieved over the centuries mostly comes from our respect for free speech and free thought
I think Giordano Bruno might have disagreed, but that's a whole another conversation :)
I agree with your identification of the problems, but not your solutions. You seem to point out again and again the problems with public school education. I know a few highly educated people in your position too who are trying to teach without being hampered from all sides by the government and the unions.
I just find it weird that despite all that you think more government, more regulation, is going to fix it. Private schools do not have any of these problems. Why not?
The solutions are simple and obvious. School choice. Let kids go to whatever school they want. Give monetary incentives to schools that attract more kids. Let the schools teach whatever and however they want, but with nation wide testing. The problem will fix itself.
If you are talking about colleges: it's not "regulations" that are the problem, it's that in a system where the students have to count every penny, there's no room for a diverse curriculum.
I haven't been hampered by either government or unions, and the situation is absolutely identical in private colleges.
When it comes to colleges, there is no school choice without free schools. People go where they can afford to go.
Having educational standards in place means more room for non-standard material.
Now, colleges vs. K12 have an entirely different set of problems.
If by "school choice" you mean not forcing K12 kids to be attached to a school district, sure (I went to a "magnet" school, which wasn't tied to home address).
But not everyone can go to school that's far away for whatever reasons. And having college-style admission systems in schools will lead to the same problems.
On top of that, little children shouldn't be expected to make these kind of choices, so basically we are screwing over kids whose parents aren't parenting them well. And since we want all kids to be in school, what's the "default" option if they don't make a choice?
Nationwide testing sounds an awful lot like regulation:D
Essentially, common core is doing just that: sets guidelines, while leaving a lot of freedom to the teachers. You can see how much of an uphill battle it is.
And as for "private schools don't have problems" — yeah, no. They absolutely do. And the best schools in NYC are all public (Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, etc.
And there's the problem of finding and retaining qualified teachers while paying them reasonable wages.
But I digress. What I can assure you of is that's there's no one single thing that will fix it. Many things need to change, and be done by many people.
They specifically brought up the example of Chaplain being fired as "canceling".
Also, your definition needs doesn't match common usage, or what happens. Here's a better one:
Canceling (n.): holding a public person accountable for their actions by withdrawing monetary support.
This can be done by not extending a contract; by termination of employment, contract, or the privilege of access to particular public platforms from which they profit, if the funding is provided on a contractual basis; and - wait for it -
We’re seemingly six months away from any and all diversity movements being dismissed as anti-white propaganda. It seems high time for the NAACP/BLM/ACLU to begin to walk back their extremist rhetoric before they’re deemed terrorist groups like they themselves have deemed so many other groups before.
They ARE anti-white propaganda. This isn't hyperbole, it's simply descriptive of the facts. Maybe they weren't at some point, but a new crop has taken over the reigns, and pretty much all of those groups have embraced wokeness, intersectionality, "white man bad" etc. Hell, forget "diversity groups": we live in world where Google deliberately tampers with Image Search results to downplay white people and promote literally anyone else. We're DROWNING in anti-white propaganda. And yes, sooner or later, there's going to be a backlash.
Overall, I lean pretty strongly towards individual families raising their children as best they can with all the benefits and drawbacks that come from that system. But I think it’s fantasy to believe that that results in even approximately equal opportunities.
My kids will get way more comp.sci and math from me and more biology from my wife than average. Other kids will get more music, art, writing, foreign language, sports or other exposure from their family. If it turns out that one of those is more valuable, well the different kids didn’t have equal opportunities. Other kids worried about nutrition, whether one parent would beat the other, or grow up with a parent in jail. Clearly not equal opportunity.