I remember how it was -- JR
How the Supremes can head off back-door racial favoritism by US colleges
Legend had it that whoever untied the impossibly convoluted Gordian Knot would rule the world.
Facing the intractable challenge, young Alexander the Great took out his sword, cut the Knot and went on to conquer the largest empire to date, spanning Greece, Egypt and India.
We have a Gordian Knot today — in the form of the murky college-admissions environment that followed the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The ruling was plain enough: Students must not be treated in any way on the basis of race in admissions; that amounts to unconstitutional racial discrimination.
Yet the ruling set off a woke storm.
The White House blasted the ruling (though President Joe Biden never explained what about it exactly ticked him off), and Harvard immediately redid its upcoming admissions application form to help get around the order: Its first essay prompt now asks applicants how their “life experiences” shaped them in view of Harvard’s recognition of the importance of a “diverse” student body.
Expect the multibillion-dollar Diversity, Equity, Inclusion industrial complex to rack its brains finding schemes to circumvent the SFFA ruling.
DEI racketeers’ continued prosperity depends on their tenacity to subvert Chief Justice John Roberts’ dictum that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to . . . stop discriminating on the basis of race. They’ll be searching high and low for ways.
Sure to come, then, is an unending stream of increasingly complex and stealthy schemes resulting in multitudes of expensive legal actions sure to keep lawyers busy for decades — all while allowing colleges to continue their racial discrimination.
The Supreme Court has a choice.
It can allow itself to be trapped into a war of attrition with the DEI establishment, and labor to unravel each and every twisty, stealthy scheme, now and to come, each with its double-speak, code words and plausible deniability. That would suit the DEI folks just fine.
Or, it can whip out a mighty sword and cut the Gordian Knot — by asking why colleges have a race checkbox in the first place.
Many colleges don’t ask for SAT/ACT scores any longer, because they say they fear triggering “implicit racial bias.” (They actually think the existence of scores data would add pressure to admit kids based on race-blind merit.)
They don’t ask for applicants’ (your child’s future roommates?) criminal history any longer, because, again, they say they fear triggering “implicit racial bias.”
Yet they explicitly ask for race? If they aren’t doing racial engineering, why track racial-engineering performance?
Might there be a legitimate need for colleges to collect self-identified racial information? That’s hard to imagine. For starters, self-identified race is hoax-ridden, with 34% of white college applicants pretending to be “minority,” per one study.
Furthermore, racial categories, in truth, have neither biological nor cultural validity, with neither “Asian,” nor “Hispanic,” nor “black,” nor “white” describing anything in common without engaging in at best ignorant and at worst toxic stereotyping.
Still, granting a theoretical possibility for a legitimate (constitutional) need, the Supreme Court could allow the collection and use of racial information, but it should subject such policies to the high legal standard of strict scrutiny.
That means colleges — and their regulators and suppliers — that want to collect or use such info may do so, but they must show that:
They have a legitimate need for it that cannot be fulfilled another way.
The use of racial information effectively addresses the stated need in a precise and measurable way.
The need (and policies) have an end date declared in advance.
The schools have put safeguards in place to ensure the racial information is used only for the stated need and duration.
This is precisely what the Chinese American Citizens Alliance-Greater New York asked the Supreme Court to consider in the amicus brief it filed Friday, along with eight other educational partners, asking the justices to hear an appeal by parents of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School in their lawsuit against their school board for racial discrimination against Asian students.
Such conditions would ensure that colleges follow the plain order in the SFFA ruling —that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”
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UK: Teachers who 'misgender' trans pupils are not guilty of discrimination, says equality watchdog
Teachers who ‘misgender’ trans pupils are not guilty of discrimination, guidance from the equality watchdog suggests.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) also urged the Government to publish its own long-awaited guidelines to give clarity to teachers and families.
Rishi Sunak vowed in March that official guidance on transgender students would be released before the summer break. But Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said in July that it would be delayed.
Yesterday, the EHRC clarified its own legal advice, deleting an example in an earlier version from 2014 to reflect that misgendering a pupil does not constitute discrimination.
The original guidance posed the question: ‘A previously female pupil has started to live as a boy and has adopted a male name. Does the school have to use this name and refer to the pupil as a boy?’
The answer provided said that to not do so would be ‘direct gender reassignment discrimination’. Misgendering a pupil would not amount to discrimination because they do not have the legal right to transition gender, it is understood.
Campaigners yesterday hailed the watchdog’s change in position.
Helen Joyce, from campaign group Sex Matters, said: ‘It’s very helpful that... the EHRC has finally removed this legally faulty example from its technical guidance.
‘The improvements will make it easier for the Department for Education to bring out strong guidance.’
Baroness Falkner, chairman of the EHRC, said the DfE should publish the guidelines as soon as possible, adding: ‘It is crucial we avoid any confusion on this important topic.’
This week the NHS published its own trans guidance for schools due to the delayed government document. It says schools should not let children who question their gender ‘socially transition’ without parental consent
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Australia: Will no university students ever fail now?
British politician Enoch Powell famously said ‘All political lives end in failure’ – a proposition amply corroborated by his own career. Scholars are vulnerable to a similar fate. To paraphrase the famous anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, academics can be certain of two things: someday, they will all be dead, and eventually, they will all be proven wrong. (Sahlins’ tip for a successful scholarly career: make sure the first precedes the second.)
Even superstars fail. In a classic Nike advertisement, basketball legend Michael Jordan confesses to missing more than 9,000 shots and losing almost 300 basketball games in his career. ‘Twenty-six times,’ he says, ‘I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot – and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life.’ Then he delivers the line that has attracted millions of people to view the ad on YouTube: ‘And that is why I succeed.’
Jordan’s message is motivating and inspiring, but it’s also worrying. If failure is essential to success, then what are the prospects for our current crop of students who have never experienced failure of any kind? No school student is held back, summer school repeats are rare, and first-class honours are becoming the typical university grade. What happens when these students move out of education, where success is now the norm, to a world in which failure is ubiquitous? Never having had to deal with setbacks, never having failed at anything, will they have the capacity to cope? We will soon find out.
Over the past 20 years, government policy has resulted in an avalanche of university students. The highest-ranked institutions swept up the best-prepared applicants, forcing the less prestigious universities to lower their entry standards drastically. Not surprisingly, many of these poorly prepared students are finding themselves unable to complete their courses; dropout rates have climbed to record levels.
Under the rules governing accreditation, Australian universities have a legal requirement to ensure that the students they admit have the educational background and study support to complete their courses. It appears that universities have flaunted this requirement, so the government has stepped in.
In a daring display of its unshakeable commitment to the academic success of its constituents, the federal government has introduced legislation that could revolutionise, or perhaps obliterate, the way we understand the concept of failure. Call it the ‘No Student Left Behind – Especially If They’ve Failed’ Act. It’s an ambitious move, guaranteeing the total eradication of that ghastly ‘F’ word from the Australian educational system: failure.
The Australian government is mandating that university students who score less than 50 per cent in their exams shall be entitled to a slew of educational life-savers. University-funded tutoring, counselling, examination do-overs, special exams and extended deadlines are all on the table. With these bountiful resources at their disposal, no student will ever feel the sting of failure again. And to ensure universities are as invested in the success of their students as the government, a hefty fine of $18,780 per student will be introduced for those institutions that fail to help their students rise above the 50 per cent benchmark.
If Dante were alive, he might have added a tenth circle to his Inferno for the university administrators who will have to deal with this fiscal sword of Damocles. Instead of cramming more students into lecture halls and labs, universities will have to find funds for an army of tutors, counsellors and exam monitors.
But worry not, for the Education Minister has spoken: ‘Universities should be helping students to succeed, not to fail.’ It’s a comforting thought, almost reminiscent of a fairy tale ending. It gives students a cosy sense of assurance that the government is there, always ready to sweep in and replace the big bad wolf of failure with the benevolent fairy godmother of success. But will it work?
Tim Harford fears it won’t. In his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Follows Failure, Harford claims that messing up is central to learning. Students gain more from mistakes, blind alleys and dead ends than from success. Failures give students the opportunity to ‘pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again’.
Such resilience is essential because becoming an expert is a long process, at least 10,000 hours, says Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Expertise takes a long time to acquire because, outside of universities, 50 per cent is not good enough. The real world has higher standards. Businesses will collapse if their accountants are only 50 per cent accurate, computer programs that work only half the time are useless, and no one would be happy if surgeons fluffed half their operations. A 10,000-hour apprenticeship provides plenty of opportunities for students to learn from their errors, and everyone knows that practice makes perfect.
Failing is not only essential to honing one’s skills, but it also provides the chance to cultivate oneself (‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’). The character traits forged by experiencing and overcoming failure are necessary for success in any field. Tenaciousness, resilience, drive, perseverance and the ability to delay gratification while working toward a distant goal are just as crucial in achieving success as intelligence. Psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth calls this combination of character traits ‘grit’. It comes from confronting failure and overcoming it. Without failure, progress is impossible.
Universities, faced with high costs and potential fines, may be tempted to take the easy way out and pass every single student. That view might sound cynical, but it is realistic. Will a university degree retain its lustre when passing becomes an expected, almost mundane occurrence rather than a reward for hard work, grit and resilience? If everyone is a winner, is anyone winning anything at all?
But these are long-term concerns and our politicians are unable to think beyond the next election campaign. They look forward to offering voters a world where failure ceases to exist and success requires no effort. A world in which every student gets a degree just for showing up.
It’s an idyllic vision that might catch on across the globe. Imagine a future in which everyone gets a shot at the Grand Dream, even if their exam scores are below 50 per cent, a time in which the ‘School of Hard Knocks’ has shut its doors forever. Fans of Horatio Alger novels, the stoic pioneers who defined the ethos of hard work and success through perseverance, must be turning in their graves.
The moral of the story, dear reader, is that university failure is on the brink of extinction. At least, it is Down Under. This extraordinary development will have vast repercussions for education, success, and the very nature of our universities.
Of course, we want our students to succeed. But passing every student will ensure just the opposite. By preventing students from experiencing failure, we will keep them from gaining the self-confidence that comes from overcoming it.
If we want young people to be able to handle life’s inevitable slings and arrows, then for their own sake, we must let them fail.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/eliminating-the-f-word/
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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