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Professor Mansfield's academic epigrams

Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, writing elegantly in The Claremont Review of Books, recommends perusal of a particular study undertaken at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Undertaken, he hastens to add, without cooperation from the college. Nevertheless, “Peter Wood and Michael Toscano . . . in a comprehensive new study, ‘What Does Bowdoin Teach?’ the first of its kind and probably destined to be the best, [show] in the practices and principles of one college what political correctness in our time has done to higher education in our country.”

Mansfield is a writer of notable subtlety; unpacking his seriatim steps of analogy and logic requires care and concentration. It’s well worth doing so. He occupies a unique position in our age: Harvard University’s most prestigious conservative. He also occupies a particular range of grandeur in the Straussian academic constellation. This constellation (a formidable net of nebula and globular clusters) is not known for the clarity of its features, but rather than intricacy of their structure.

In his more topical writings, however, Mansfield favors a concision that culminates in some superb epigrams:

“Today’s liberals do not use liberalism to achieve excellence, but abandon excellence to achieve liberalism.”

“A liberal arts education, the study says, has become an education in liberating oneself from the liberal arts.”

“The report sums up the Bowdoin curriculum of equal courses as having a certain ‘flatness’ and tending toward ‘entropy,’ where faculty and students share the undemanding practice of self-expression, and the uninterest in teaching of the former joins with the uninterest in learning of the latter.”

Read the whole thing.

(Some more discursive reflections are below the fold.)

One almost feels that this brilliant polemical essay by Mansfield is what Chesterton’s writing might have been, had the great man disciplined his own fancies just a bit.

Far be it from me to begrudge GKC his unforgettable fancies; better a thousand more columns of torturous tangles, peculiar referents and oddball comparisons, than one less story from The Club of Queer Trades or some measure less slashing hilarity of astonished debate induced by Adam Wayne in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I’ll take Chesterton’s chaffier stuff any day, in return for the golden grain of his masterstrokes, like Lepanto or the anti-eugenic broadsides.

His refined work evidenced a mastery of the epigram: “Civilized man does not eat cannibals, bite sharks, or sting wasps.” “That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend.” Many, many more examples could be added.

Professor Mansfield has composed some beauties worthy of Chesterton. American higher education could benefit by an irruption of Adam Wayne-like adventurers in its midst. Mansfield is doing his part to cultivate them.

Comments (25)

I really cannot believe a sincerely religious person would endorse Leo Strauss' philosophy.

Fr Fortin must then have been an insincerely religious person. Friends personally acquainted with Fr F and his work were obviously mistaken. I must go and defriend these frauds.

Meanwhile, if one's ignorance is not utterly obdurate, what the Augustinian learned from the evil man himself is taken up here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.254/pub_detail.asp

I especially appreciated this from the article by Mansfield.

I have focused on the curriculum in order to make it clear that what Bowdoin lacks is not so much the teaching of conservatism by conservatives, as if conservatives could be satisfied, and the troubles of academia resolved, by giving conservatives their own brief act in the Diversity Circus. Bowdoin's curriculum lacks the academic standards of excellence that conservatives mostly and mainly defend in academia with little or no help these days from liberals. It is conservatives who deplore and resist the brazen politicization of the classroom, the loss of the great books, indeed the disregard of greatness in general, the corruption of grade inflation, the cheap satisfactions of trendiness, the mess of sexual license, the distractions of ideology, the aggrandizement and servility of administrators, the pretense and dissembling of affirmative action, the unmanly advice of psychologists, the partisan nonsense of professional associations, and the unseemly subservience everywhere to student opinion.

To be fair, beginning in the early 1990's the National Association of Scholars represented an alliance between political liberals and political conservatives who were all (or mostly) what one might call academic conservatives--people who actually believed in things like quality, standards, etc.

I saw for myself while getting my PhD how the academic Marxists (for so I will call them unashamedly) who wanted to transform the curriculum into exactly the swamp that Mansfield is describing used political labels against their opposition. Better anything, some seemed to think, than to be called a conservative! So one often saw the unedifying spectacle in a humanities department of a professor who himself was doing sound and valuable work and teaching nonetheless voting for new colleagues who advocated the destruction of the entire discipline in the name of trendy nonsense like postmodernism and "studies." The NAS was a group of people who weren't going to do that.

It does raise an interesting question, though: Suppose that someone believes in equality uber alles. How then, can such a person uphold academic standards? If we are talking about a person who in his politics considers "closing the gap" to be the biggest goal ("he would not mind if the poor were poorer so long as the rich were less rich") how does he avoid bringing this over into the academy? How is it _fair_ that some people get better grades than others, that some minority groups are "underrepresented" in one's discipline, that there "aren't enough women" being read in philosophy classes, and so forth? The identity politics and worship of equality of outcome, measured according to victim group membership, which inform the leftist's entire world of practical politics have to be set aside when it comes to his professional field. I don't wonder that the truly committed leftists, who were willing to make everything political, tried the tactic of taunting their more academically old-fashioned liberal brethren with the accusation that they were crypto-conservatives because they wouldn't "update" their academic discipline according to political criteria.

The upshot is a depressing story that has been often told. I now hear cries from the humanities about how under-valued they are. Do they wonder? Parents and students get rumors of this sort of thing. Why sell their birthright (go into lifelong debt) for a mess of poison? And an unmarketable degree in Chicana Studies or what-not to boot? The trahison des clercs is gradually being found out, in no small part under the stress of economic hard times. Sometimes the innocent are suffering--philosophers who do good work but can't get a job, for example, because funding to the departments has been cut. But that shouldn't make academics circle the wagons on behalf of sub-disciplines that deserve to disappear from the face of the earth.

A few years ago I heard of some philosophy department, I believe it was in the UK, that was being closed down for lack of funding by its university. I looked the department up. It was famous throughout England and the continent as a hub for the study of some postmodern "specialty," I forget now which one. I imagine there may have been one or two people who deserved a job who lost it as a result of the department's closure, but overall, I wasn't crying any tears.

The upshot is a depressing story that has been often told. I now hear cries from the humanities about how under-valued they are. Do they wonder? Parents and students get rumors of this sort of thing. Why sell their birthright (go into lifelong debt) for a mess of poison? And an unmarketable degree in Chicana Studies or what-not to boot? The trahison des clercs is gradually being found out, in no small part under the stress of economic hard times. Sometimes the innocent are suffering--philosophers who do good work but can't get a job, for example, because funding to the departments has been cut. But that shouldn't make academics circle the wagons on behalf of sub-disciplines that deserve to disappear from the face of the earth.

Steve Sailer did cover Eva Longoria's Chicano Studies MA.

I have a STEM degree and have some appreciation of hard analytic philosophy, so I do concur on the necessity of analytical rigor in the sciences and liberal arts as I do treasure the knowledge I gained from those fields. I, therefore, do not embrace the liberal "equalitarian" current because I understand from psychometrics that academic fields have varying degrees of cognitive complexity, and there is a minimum threshold needed in order to unravel and understand knowledge that has high cognitive complexity (theoretical physics is the epitome of an intellectually difficult field, but all academic fields do have cognitive thresholds in order to master the knowledge). By accommodating individuals who lack the aptitude to process complex information or creating disciplines that do not require much cognitive ability, educational standards would have to be vitiated, and capable students would not be able to engage in high quality inquiry in an ordinary academic setting.

Yes, Chicano and gay and lesbian studies do have my contempt too, as they are both unmarketable and non-vocational (like the liberal arts in general) and are epistemologically vacuous since they offer no practical, useful knowledge or have any profound philosophical insights.

Actually, I became sympathetic to the far-left precisely because I saw a higher degree of intellectual rigor (such as mastery of economics, history, and foreign policy) and insight in their work than what was apparent in the quality of the messages from "liberal" activists represented in the "mainstream media". All the while when I was an immature young woman in college watching hours of Pokémon a week; if you can, imagine my personality and behavior (and my physique) as Misty's.

I believe there is nothing inherent in liberalism or leftist politics that demands a compromised academic curriculum (although this can be different in practice); it would seem that they would want technically competent and educated people administering the various branches of the government and performing its tasks in order to satisfy the needs of its citizens.

===
I had the impression that Strauss was a weak atheist, and religion only had utility since it counteracted the nihilism and hedonism of liberalism and made the masses more accepting of a (somewhat authoritarian and hierarchical) political regime run by the enlightened and competent. I see Strauss as a Machiavellian, at least in his methodology.

The link did not rebut my impression of Strauss (not that you are obligated to) or give much insight into his thoughts on religion.

I believe there is nothing inherent in liberalism or leftist politics that demands a compromised academic curriculum

You probably cannot be disabused of this delusion, but a delusion it is.

So what is inherent in liberal political philosophy (as opposed to what is practice in predominantly "liberal" academic institutions) that sees a weakened academic curriculum as desirable?

The link did not rebut my impression of Strauss (not that you are obligated to) or give much insight into his thoughts on religion.

It wasn't proffered to rebut your impression of Strauss, but rather your assertion that no "sincerely religious person" can endorse Strauss. I doubt anyone is really inclined to attempt a rebuttal to your impressions; but the earlier assertion, rather bald and dubious in nature, has indeed been rebutted.

BR, you can treat leftism as a family resemblance term if you like. Here is just one of several ways in which it quite naturally leads to the destruction of academic standards: Leftism often recklessly demands equality of outcome in the realm of jobs and economics, which results in undermining standards. Feminism is an excellent example here. The demand that women be allowed to be firemen resulted in judicial orders that height standards must be lowered for women, even though height has an obvious functional role in qualification as a fireman. And so on through innumerable examples. "Underrepresentation" has been a battle cry for something on the order of four decades. If an employer had a test which had "disparate impact" on favored victim groups, the employer was liable to suit and would have to prove that the test was extremely narrowly tailored to the requirements of the job for which he was hiring. Rationally, it should be obvious that sometimes a somewhat intellectual test can be useful for finding good employees in a wide range of jobs, as indirectly testing for various desirable traits such as diligence and intelligence, but that was never enough.

As I say--reckless. What you might call reckless equalitarianism, to use your word. This was not in the academy but in the political realm. Standards which get in the way of equality of outcome were brushed aside with a snort and often with anger as mere excuses for oppressing the victim group.

The application of all of this to academic standards is entirely straightforward. It's just the same approach applied to academics. If there are "not enough" women or minorities in such-and-such a field, they must be found, even if this means creating special sub-disciplines for them with lower standards so as to attract them, even if this means fudging test results, even if this means offering the less qualified the job over the more qualified. The same "logic" is applied to the curriculum. I just read a brand new article the other day demanding that more women be _studied_ in philosophy classes. It said that one state university, I believe it was Georgia State, is starting this fall to require all TA's teaching Intro. to Philosophy to include "at least 20%" of female philosophers in each syllabus!

To a real academic who cares about real standards, this sort of identity politicking and bean-counting is risible and obviously destructive of academic standards, but it is just the same principles that have been applied to business by the American left being ported over to the academic world, and it's been going on now for several decades.

In the academy today it takes a brave Democrat to deplore and resist this sort of thing, and indeed one wonders if he is willing to deplore and resist it there why he does not do the same when it comes to women firemen and employment tests with "disparate impact."

Disparate impact is a tricky subject because of how certain minority groups do on G (general intelligence factor) loaded tests. The average African American IQ is about 1 standard deviation lower than the average white IQ for example. The consequence of that is that any test that truly measures anything that deserves to be called intelligence will end up highly favoring white and asian applicants. In and of itself that's not necessarily a problem, but our society is not yet able to accept the idea that the achievement gap is primarily (or even secondarily really) caused by biological factors. It's just not the sort of idea that most Americans can accept. People ask themselves how the KKK would actually have been right about African Americans all along and dismiss any arguments along those lines. As a consequence, the VAST majority of Americans assume that these tests are biased against under represented minorities, and without Affirmative Action and limitations on the use of such tests they would lose faith in American social institutions. I think that academic results matter, but freezing blacks and hispanics out of elite educational institutions, municipal police forces, and other public institutions is arguably much worse than relaxing standards in some cases.


I'm not saying that the achievement gap is at least partially caused by biological factors, just that most Americans aren't willing to accept that idea. No one can deny that blacks and hispanics do poorly on intelligence tests though. All the data confirms that.

...freezing blacks and hispanics out of elite educational institutions, municipal police forces, and other public institutions is arguably much worse than relaxing standards in some cases.
Arguably is right. Who's freezing anybody out here? You're basically making our point - you're saying outright that it's better (or at least "arguably" better) to relax standards just because...what? It's unfair. It's unequal. It's the great liberal idol again - equality.

" Arguably is right. Who's freezing anybody out here? You're basically making our point - you're saying outright that it's better (or at least "arguably" better) to relax standards just because...what? It's unfair. It's unequal. It's the great liberal idol again - equality. "

I was actually making a rather consequentalist arguments about what would happen if we were to adopt a truly color blind system. I explicitly said that favoring whites and asians was not a problem in and of itself. Please try to keep up.

I think that academic results matter, but freezing blacks and hispanics out of elite educational institutions, municipal police forces, and other public institutions is arguably much worse than relaxing standards in some cases.

Actually, Dunsany, I _so far_ (as far as I remember) on this blog find you rather useful. You don't waste our time in fruitless debate, since you know that we have no common ground anyway, and you state so blatantly some things that I myself say about the left that you serve as a kind of reference source. Now I can just bookmark that comment for the next time someone (like Black Rose in this thread) asks what leftism has to do with relaxing standards. Voila. Just what I was saying about doctrinaire devotion to outcomes and equality.

I explicitly said that favoring whites and asians was not a problem in and of itself.
I quoted what you said word for word. Here, let me fill in the context. You said that freezing out blacks and Asians was not necessarily a problem in and of itself, but we still shouldn't do it because OTHER people would consider the inequality a problem. So either way we're caving in to the great equality god, and it's something you're advocating.

You don't need to bother with the please junk. I'm not interested in the high horse technique.

While some people may find it comforting to view all political issues as battles between liberals and conservatives, I don't think that my comments in this thread were particularly leftist. They weren't really conservative either-they don't fit in neatly on a left/right policy dimension. As a matter of fact, I believe that the first time I heard an argument like the one I made in this thread was when I was reading a paper by a libertarian law professor. It might have been Richard Epstein, but I can't really remember.

Well marcanthony, you seemed to be saying that I was in favor of affirmative action because I think that it would be unfair to do otherwise. That is not what I said.


"So either way we're caving in to the great equality god, and it's something you're advocating."


Society is a modus vivendi, sometimes we have to accept that we can't convince the people that disagree with us and then work out a way to allow society to keep functioning anyway.

What's pretty funny, Dunsany,is that on other issues you're willing to use propaganda and as much force as is necessary to make people, even recalcitrant people, do what you want. The fact of the matter is that if the organs of public opinion--the universities, news outlets, and the like--were okay with not engaging in affirmative action, either ideological affirmative action (you've got to read at least 20% female authors) or hiring or recruitment affirmative action, they could quite easily convince the public to be okay with not engaging in it either. The truth is to the contrary: The public has had to be bludgeoned again and again, in practice, to force them to engage in affirmative action. The picture of affirmative action as merely some kind of caving to general public opinion because the people "aren't ready" to do without it is a kind of joke, to anyone who has watched affirmative action moving forward in society. Gazillions of cities and towns would have been quite happy, for example, to stick with an all-male fire brigade. It took lawsuits to "convince" them otherwise. Many businesses would have continued with their "disparate impact" tests had not the EEOC gotten on their case. And so forth. The American people would have "lived with" either the absence of affirmative action or a great deal less of it just fine, thank you very much. They weren't the ones demanding it. And even now, if the academic and cultural elites wanted to turn back the tide, they could make a substantial move in that direction in the public consciousness in less than five years. The fact is that they don't want to, because they are wholly on board with affirmative action in every area--indeed, with more and more of it all the time--for ideological reasons.

I think that academic results matter, but freezing blacks and hispanics out of elite educational institutions, municipal police forces, and other public institutions is arguably much worse than relaxing standards in some cases.

There might be a difference between favoring better socioeconomic outcomes for underrepresented minorities (URMs or NAMs in HBD-speak) and promoting academic rigor. I do indeed regard academic rigor in certain intellectual domains as "sacrosanct", but since "elite education institutions" are associated with upward mobility (I believe because an "elite" credential signals "g" to firms because those institutions high average SAT scores), the presence of URMs/NAMs in elite institutions is not to initiate ill-prepared people into academic inquiry and debate but to bestow them with a prestigious credential that enables respect and upward mobility (at the expense of a "qualified" person from a non-AA demographic who would have attended the university if there were no AA policy). Of course, if we do acknowledge a detrimental effect for the whites and Asians being displaced from elite schools due to policies mandating increased URM/NAM presence, then this would mean attending an elite school as some social or economic value-- what college one attends matters more than what one learns. This allows a critical distinction between the economic and academic aspects of higher education. I believe most of the favorable economic effect of attending elite institutions is due to economic signaling and networking, not instruction, since it would be preposterous to believe that Ivy League students are exposed to some "esoteric" knowledge in their curriculum that an intellectually competent and conscientious state university student would not have access to through the use of a university library system. An HBD-aware liberal might not believe URMs/NAMs collectively lack the ability to be intellectually enriched by a rigorous academic curriculum, but they do want URMs/NAMs want to reap the economic and social benefits of higher education, such as better material living standards and increased political influence, not to mention a psychological self-esteem boost.

===


It wasn't proffered to rebut your impression of Strauss, but rather your assertion that no "sincerely religious person" can endorse Strauss. I doubt anyone is really inclined to attempt a rebuttal to your impressions; but the earlier assertion, rather bald and dubious in nature, has indeed been rebutted.

Fine.

And putting less qualified URM's into elite schools by way of affirmative action isn't, of course, going to have the _slightest_ effect upon the academic standards of said schools. No sirree Bob. After all, it's all just about giving them the economic benefits of going to the schools.

Oh, btw, Black Rose? Some years ago the major accrediting organizations began really playing hardball: They started complaining that universities weren't graduating enough URMs and that that would be watched in future. So, y'know, there was a very strong push-along perverse incentive there: First you engage in AA to recruit them so as to give them economic benefits, and then, oh darn!, they don't do well enough on their own to graduate, so now we have to maybe put a little strong-arm pressure on the teachers to give them better grades than they deserve or to make the classes easier so that "enough" of them can graduate.

The direct impact of perverse incentives of this kind is quite obvious all over the place, not only in affirmative action: Viz. My own town several years ago had a group of do-gooder donors who set up an entirely private fund which promised full payment of tuition to the local Large State University for any kid who graduated from the local public schools. Any student at all. Pretty much instantaneously, the university weakened its academic admissions standards so that all of those $$ could come into their coffers. They wouldn't want to be leaving any child behind, you see, and not getting that outside scholarship money. Those are "hard dollars."

I must admit that I find it a little amusing that BR started by saying, in essence, "I cannot imagine what political leftism could possibly have to do with the lowering of academic standards" and was indicating complete comfort with affirmative action for purposes of conferring economic benefits upon under-represented minorities within, oh, three or four more comments or so.

I never stated I supported using educational credentials as a way of conferring economic benefits to URMs/NAMs, only that there is a distinction between academic rigor and the economic benefits of educational credentials.

But the two are tightly bound up together as, when one confers academic credentials for reasons entirely separate from academic qualification, this leads inevitably to the lowering of standards of academic rigor, especially if one does so systematically or on any large scale. That should be obvious.

Lydia, I implore you not to regard me as an affirmative action proponent or a typical liberal; I never formed an opinion or became personally invested on affirmative action, so I am not injecting my (non-existent) personal opinions on it, and I thought my language here was neutral enough not to convey any normative position on the AA issue.

Giselle: There's somethings you just can't learn in school, and that's a good lesson! http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqg5eu_pokem9_shortfilms?start=1160

My stated position, which was not intended to offer suggestion on a more optimal public policy or elaborate on the flaws of existing policy, relies on a crucial distinction between the economic and intellectual benefits of education. Of course, those who have sufficient aptitude, enthusiasm, and discipline would certainly benefit from a rigorous academic curriculum, but that "benefit" of education has no direct utility in the economic realm -- it is a sense of fulfillment and intellectual enrichment one experiences when learning profound and insightful content from a multiplicity of intellectual domains. Since we all fairly intelligent, we can all testify about these moments of intellectual enlightenment. In contrast, a recurring theme on Half Sigma/Lion's blog is that vocational fields are deemed "prole" and regarded scornfully because they are pursued not for intellectual growth or exploration but for practical, material, and economic purposes, and consequentially those fields are not as intellectually demanding nor deal with unpractical, theoretical abstract content.

My position relies on the concept (coined by me) of "educational nihilism"; it is not a contradiction to say that (incompetent) minorities economically benefit from attending elite institutions (or graduating from college in general) even if those benefits are severed from the content of curriculum, while respecting academic standards and intellectual inquiry for those able to master cognitively complex material.

People are limited by what they can do economically by their score on g-loaded tests (since it is a critical labor market signaling, although indirect, via college admissions), not necessarily by the educational establishments' inability to instruct them. ... I am an educational nihilist: the content of education doesn't matter; the factual information in a curriculum is primarily irrelevant economically, except as a means of signaling g and personality traits, such as conscientiousness, to employers.

The influence of the SAT (and ACT) is omnipresent in American tertiary education and labor market; it seems to be the alpha and omega of American education and meritocracy. While Protagoras stated that man is the measure of all things, the SAT is the measure of man. It is the gold standard, immune to the printing press of grade inflation.
...
g is the the main predicative variable for future academic and job performance, not whether a student was able to complete homework assignments or recall material for an exam. That's why g is important or the perception that it is important (as it is shown with the preoccupation with college prestige in elite employers).

...
One's teacher performance is irrelevant when considering one's future socioeconomic position. It is precisely that due to the intractable nature of augmenting g through education that teacher performance is meaningless. As I said before, I am an educational nihilist, and consider the SAT to be an important psychometric instrument, not because it predicts academic outcomes by being g-loaded, but simply because it is a good measure of g, and that is also valued outside of an academic setting.
...

To me, the current system is quite "successful" since it does an excellent job, especially with the instruments of standardized tests and differential college prestige, of signaling high-valued aptitude and personality traits (not knowledge content of educational instruction) to employers through credentials. This "success" does not concern the economic well-being or intellectual development of the students, but it does satisfy the systemic need of allocating human capital throughout the economic. Some fields do value specific knowledge, but it is mostly the relatively immutable "aptitude and personality traits", that can be signaled through education although it cannot be acquired through instruction, that are valued precisely because they are somewhat scarce commodities in the labor market.

...

I believe the US is a meritocracy primarily based on "g" as is the thesis of The Bell Curve. However, this only begs the question of why "g" is correlated with income and occupational prestige. Like the Venerable Half Sigma, I believe that the primary economic utility of "g" resides in its signaling ability to signal intelligence to mainstream employers through superior educational credentials (defined as a degree from an institution with a high mean SAT/ACT score), not from any advantage from increased workplace productivity (which would be rendered moot if superiors are able to transfer your extra value to themselves and their shareholders).

Yes, I really do believe this: it is perhaps the primary reason why I didn't care about my grades in college and watched Pokémon episodes among other things after I was initially exposed to HBD by reading The Bell Curve and various HBD writers. Ah, the ying of childish innocence and naivety and the yang of sophisticated adult cynicism and callousness: the former mindset where activities are valued for its own sake even if they are frivolous; the latter mindset where only things with demonstrable economic, social, or political utility to advance one's self-interests are valued.

If you're an academic nihilist I don't know why you would care about academic rigor for its own sake in any event.

The only way in practice to give incompetent people the economic benefits of a credential is actually, y'know, to put them in the classes and pass them and graduate them, even though they are incompetent. This is not generally compatible with giving those who are able to profit the intellectual benefit of a rigorous education with high standards. And, in fact, the economic benefit relies largely on deception if those benefiting are merely being given a social pass and a social graduation. After all, the credential would hardly be worth anything economically if we simply said, "All underprivileged minorities eighteen years of age and over, please show up at Harvard on the third Saturday in May and we'll hand you a Harvard minority honorary B.S. degree for which you didn't actually have to do anything." Once we start admitting that we're just giving people the credential to give them economic benefit and without their actually having acquired intellectual information and skills by the process, the economic benefit goes bye-bye.

I agree Lydia that is the reductio ad absurdum of attempting to reward minorities with the economic benefit of college degrees; of course in practice a semblance of selectivity and rigor need to be maintained so the credentialing process would not appear blatantly farcical. Yes, the economic benefit of degree are, at least in part, precisely because they are rare commodities and correlated with ability (since their primary economic purpose is ability signaling). I do agree policies to increase the admission and graduation rates of academically unqualified minorities drastically would involve some deception in order to be successful; this deception cannot be maintained on a large scale, but on the smaller scale of the marginally qualified people, it would benefit those people tremendously at the expense of mild credential inflation and marginally qualified whites and Asians. But with no affirmative action, there would be fewer routes for marginally qualified minorities for socioeconomic advancement -- this is Dunsany's point; it only elaborates on the consequences of public policy, not the desirably of "equality", and even then, by my reasoning, it would be impossible to obtain "equality" on a large scale.

... our society is not yet able to accept the idea that the achievement gap is primarily (or even secondarily really) caused by biological factors. It's just not the sort of idea that most Americans can accept. ... I'm not saying that the achievement gap is at least partially caused by biological factors, just that most Americans aren't willing to accept that idea. No one can deny that blacks and hispanics do poorly on intelligence tests though. All the data confirms that.

But if there is no biological connection their non-acceptance would be evidence their faculties are working quite well.

Scientists haven't considered race a scientifically viable concept since at least the 1930's if not earlier. Aristotle warned against the idea of classifying people by their physical characteristics. It wasn't because he thought it wasn't a nice thing to do. He said so because he though it was not scientifically viable. Modern science has confirmed this long ago, not that you can ever tell than to Charles Murray. Thomas Sowell has shown over and over that social groups position according to IQ changes over time radically. Groups that were low in the past are high now.

And on and on. Why would it be a good thing if Americans could believe something born of 19th century psuedo-science that wasn't widely believed before the middle 17th century and was refuted afterwards? Doesn't that mean their faculties are working well? The idea that innate intelligence might be true idea only survives among those who still favor 19th century ideologies.

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