@hebegebe feel free to replace “a hundred million” with however many million you think it might be. Are they all “zero thinkers”? Or are the issues possibly more nuanced, with some room for people-who-think-above-zero to disagree?
There is, I believe, a majority of people in the US - so let’s say a hundred million just for fun - who think that one reasonable way to address racial injustice is to tinker with racial preferences. (Hence the broad, but not universal, support for AA and similar policies).
Are they ALL “zero thinkers” in your estimation?
If so, then OK, I see where you’re coming from. But that goes WAY further than a handful of student protesters.
For the students in this case, sure, they are all zero thinkers in my view.
What they are asking for and what they are fighting against are juxtaposed, yet they seem to think they are aligned. I would say that represents zero thinking in this case. Kind of hard to get people on your side when what you say does not even promote your own self-professed values.
They first need to get into an old-fashioned drum circle and figure out what they really “hate” and what they really “want.” And I suggest that those two things not be the same things because they are currently the same.
Poll numbers vary dramatically depending upon how the question is asked.
In an older Pew research poll, 70% favored “affirmative action programs to help blacks, women and other minorities get better jobs and education”, but only 31% for programs that “give special preferences to qualified blacks in hiring and education”.
Many of the items seem very reasonable, which is interesting to me because I am/was firmly in the ‘these kids are nuts’ category. In particular, the second demand for things like affinity housing, and some other working space on campus really cost nothing, and are a great way to encourage community. The third is mostly reasonable, but I personally would object to a required diversity component of GenEd, simply because at $40 a year, thats a $4K class - a little too high a burden for a focused area. This feels to me something that should be available to meet and existing requirement. For the final demand, I’ll give them credit for essentially negotiating ‘We will go away if you won’t punish us’ - a smart and classy move on both sides, but I do hope the next time they throw the book at them since the students also asked for the rules in writing which are already on the school website. And lastly, for the first demand, this one is still in coco-puffs world, but it reads like a lot of lip service from the school, so I am curious how this plays out. My gut says that the students think all this will come to fruition, and the school thinks they have essentially said no.
If a group, eg. black students, are feeling marginalized on campus, how does segregating themselves in affinity housing and special rooms in the student center further their goals of greater recognition, participation, and campus-wide appreciation of their views? Minorities have to decide if they want to be viewed just like everyone else–and that includes being seen as just as socially worthy, academically qualified and emotionally strong as the alleged whites they claimed are privileged–or if they want to be viewed as wounded, vulnerable, and needing an array of special help and accommodations like their own safe spaces.
AA students also need to decide if they want other students to view black culture as monolithic or not. Based on the Harvard microaggression campaign last year, black students strongly dislike any assumptions of common cultural identity. For example, they considered it an insult if someone assumed a black person liked rap music or hip hop. They were also offended if people wrongly expected them to talk in a certain way. If that’s the case, then what exactly is the culture they will celebrate? Does the African immigrant student with brown skin whose ancestors were never slaves belong in their black cultural room? Does the privileged AA prep school student with physician parents belong in the same cultural room as the poor kid from the ghetto whose two brothers are in jail? And what dialect will they speak? I’ll venture there is no Caucasian room on Princeton’s campus, and rightly so because there is no common culture and language shared by all white people. So any minority who demands a cultural room needs to make a case for what constitutes their culture (and the answer cannot be skin color, since skin color does not equal culture), and this minority will then forfeit the right to later claim they are not being treated the same as white people.
I do not believe that it is “the same” to be in favor of AA vs. to be in favor of some form of segregation/discrimination against Blacks. The races simply are not in equivalent starting positions in our country. It doesn’t matter what metric you use, Black people are starting “behind” and getting mistreated at most steps.
I do not know the details of these protests, and it’s likely I would be opposed to a lot of the foolishness. But racism is real and present and needs to be addressed, particularly on college campuses.
I found it very offensive, this line of thinking that the poster here disagrees with the protestors, hence the protestors are idiots, hence they’re probably not smart enough to have gotten in on their own merits, and many are Black, so let’s indict all AA programs.
For the record, I attended M and was myself irritated by protests in my day. But I would not have said that those who did protest lacked critical thinking skills.
I guess my own bias shows up in my interpretation of this. At S1’s school, there is affinity housing for international students. But it is structured such that each room is one US and one non-US student. The goal is to create community and my take on the program is that it aimed at students that sincerely want to understand and be willing to ask the non-PC questions. I assumed the Princeton setup would be similar.
They do not lack thinking skills because they protest, and they do not lack thinking skills because they are black.They lack thinking skills because they think it was appropriate to take over the President’s office as a pretext for making demands. I hope the press gets a hold of the name of every student in the President’s office and publishes it. Future employers would be very interested.
And Princeton’s President failed badly when he didn’t 1) Send in security for the purpose of getting everyone’s names to verify they are all Princeton students, 2) Announce that negotiations will start only when the students leave his office, and 3) Anyone not leaving within two hours will be subject to severe disciplinary measures. That is how you lead and still address students demands. Not by letting students walk over you. He is highly weakened now.
No one is perfect. To avoid this mess, all universities should avoid using names of person, instead using some neutral names for location purpose, Harvard should be named University of Massachusetts at Cambridge, Brown should resume its name as college of Rhode Island. etc…