All the ills–who said all the ills? But, race, gender and class, all have germane roles and contributions to these situations. Further, what you have just suggested is basically the underpinning for every sociology department at every university in the county.
For example–Faculty in the area of race, class and gender are generally concerned with understanding social inequality as experienced by members of multiple social groups, and/or their intersection, at the individual, group and structural level. The faculty associated with this concentration investigate a wide variety of social phenomena associated with social group relations in the United States and internationally from different theoretical and methodological perspectives including ethnography, demography and mixed (quantitative and qualitative) methods. Individual faculty specialize in such broad topics as African and African American studies, Asian American studies, critical race theory, gender and sexuality, health disparities, international migration, intersectionality, Latino/a sociology, race and culture, and individual and systemic racism and anti-racism. Taken from the opening sentence of the Texas A&M sociology department.
That may be but those are points to be brought up with her colleague, fellow house masters and the dean not with her charges. At minimum, she should have solicited other views on the matter, Hey it’s brought up to me that the letter from the dean is infantilizing you guys who are adults. I would like to take it up with my colleague. Do some of you feel differently about that? You accuse students not following normal course of action calmly presenting their views to EC. The thing is EC didn’t present her views to students to begin with. She single handedly decided after listening one group of students.
Here’s a little fable about offense, anger, and proof:
Spouse 1: When I came down this morning, I found that you had left the refrigerator door open AGAIN. How many times are you going to do this, you know it drives me crazy.
Spouse 2: [Offers incontrovertible proof that this time it was Spouse 1 who left the refrigerator door open.]
Are you suggesting that every time one person offends another, the appropriate response is to engage in a sociological analysis in order to determine every societal root for mistreatment? That’s absurd. All people are flawed creatures and therefore make mistakes–a lot of them. Human beings are unique individuals with distinct personalities and life experiences, and therefore disagree with each other frequently. People are often self-absorbed and busy and thus fail to always behave with consideration toward others. And, yes, some people are just jerks. All of this is true regardless of race, gender, or class. A current problem in our society is that everyone wants to attach broader stigma to every thing someone does that they don’t like or agree with. It’s unproductive and damaging.
Igloo, she did ask questions, so students were free to engage her civilly before jumping to the conclusion she was just another white racist. It sounds like some people may have done just that. Hindsight is 20/20. I am not sure she could have really expected a firestorm like what occurred. Screaming, spitting, demands she be fired?
I’m still unclear as to your point in post 781, boolahi. Did I suggest that these kinds of sociological inquiries didn’t have merit? Of course they have merit. Of course racism exists. Of course it’s bad to call people the n word, etc.
If Spouse 1 is a woman and Spouse 2 is a man, then Spouse 2 is in deep doo-doo for offering said incontrovertible proof. Said man must have only been married for a few months, otherwise they’d would have learned that apologizing regardless of facts is the path of wisdom.
But it is true that this incident would gain mythic status as a morality fable since Spouse 1 would remember and repeat the story for the next 30 years.
If Spouse 1 is a man and Spouse 2 is a woman, then your question is unanswerable since the scenario would never occur. Spouse 1 would simply close door, forget about whole thing, and find some tasty potato chips to eat.
“That may be but those are points to be brought up with her colleague, fellow house masters and the dean not with her charges. At minimum, she should have solicited other views on the matter, Hey it’s brought up to me that the letter from the dean is infantilizing you guys who are adults. I would like to take it up with my colleague. Do some of you feel differently about that? You accuse students not following normal course of action calmly presenting their views to EC. The thing is EC didn’t present her views to students to begin with. She single handedly decided after listening one group of students.”
Your interpretation is beyond weird. She didn’t “singlehandedly decide anything.” She offered another point of view.
Single-handedly deciding would have been if - Yale admin called for all the masters to provide their students’ names and Halloween costumes in written form so Yale could decide which ones met standard, and EC/NC decided not to do so. THAT would be “singlehandedly deciding” to take some action (or inaction).
Grown adults are allowed to have opinions without gaining the consensus of everyone around them.
If Spouse 1 is a Yalie, s/he will say its doesn’t matter that I did it this time, because we all know you are the chief refrigerator door transgressor, so I will punish you today anyway with anger and annoyance.
If I’m spouse #1, there’s going to be a lot of unprintable language aimed at myself. My own errors bother me more than anybody else’s. (Though our refrigerator has a door alarm, preventing this kind of marital crisis altogether.)
I would not underestimate the power of students educating their peers on colleges campuses. If the socially dominant group (usually athletes, members of the greek community and the socially adept) could model inclusiveness, that would effectuate change more rapidly than protests. Of course it is most often those dominant groups that are accused of excluding on the basis of race, SES or sexual orientation. I have always thought that efforts directed towards this particular group of students might be very helpful…
I remember an incident in middle school where my son’s hockey team ridiculed members of the school’s chess team. Part of my response to my own son was to gently point out that once he graduates college the landscape changes dramatically - social dominance would more likely be determined by the skill set that the chess team possessed. So be careful who you alienate because if you don’t play your cards right you might just end up working for them. I think he got the message.
There are major differences in the beneficiaries and how each works and is viewed in the university and the mainstream upper/upper-middle class US society.
Being a legacy or developmental admit tends to favor the SES and to a large extent racially privileged due to historical factors and the fact that many private colleges take levels of high financial contributions and alumni service into account.
Both take SES privilege…especially of the multi-generational variety. The latter is something far fewer URMs are likely to have versus upper/upper-middle class WASP/Whites due to this very past history that you and many others seem to be dodging around here. Many in that very mainstream either don’t feel this is a serious issue or even strongly approve of this, including some posters on this very thread who are being quite dismissive of concerns and outrage among marginalized groups at Y and other campuses.
On the flipside, affirmative action is an attempt to ameliorate that disparity brought about by those very historical factors…factors whose effects are still being felt to the present. And unlike the former, this factor is one which frequently prompts outrage and denunciations from some of the very same folks who have no issues with or even strongly approve of legacy/developmental admits.
One cannot legitimately argue that URMs have had the same chances to build up multi-generational wealth or had the same amount/frequency of opportunities to have been political bigwigs or celebrities in the US before the Civil Rights Act was passed in the mid-'60s. Anyone arguing or implying as much has either never bothered to study US history even on the cursory level, is in some sort of denial, or is engaging in some level of historical revisionism.
While I have known a few who are more consistent in their arguments for “merit-based admissions” who reject both legacy/developmental admissions and affirmative action, they tend to be a tiny minority.
Moreover, even they oftentimes are more stirred up whenever affirmative action comes up as a topic as opposed to legacy/developmental admissions. This does cause some wondering about how normalized the greater acceptance of legacy/developmental admissions has been in the very mainstream American culture which historically has been shaped and dominated by upper/upper-middle class White cultural perceptions…especially of the WASP variety in the case of the Ivies.
If Spouse 1 is a woman and Spouse 2 is a man, then Spouse 2 is in deep doo-doo for offering said incontrovertible proof. Said man must have only been married for a few months, otherwise they’d would have learned that apologizing regardless of facts is the path of wisdom.
But it is true that this incident would gain mythic status since Spouse 1 would remember and repeat the story for the next 30 years.
If Spouse 1 is a man and Spouse 2 is a woman, then your question is unanswerable since the scenario would never occur. Spouse 1 would simply close door, forget about whole thing, and find some tasty potato chips to "
It’s a cute answer. Note we can all have a sense of humor even though this response stereotypes women as demanding and men as passive?
And she wouldn’t be entirely wrong about this, which is kind of my point.
An anecdote, which may or may not be relevant: when I was a kid, we once went to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. There was some kind of ship’s bell in there, and there was a kid ringing it. He rang it about a million times, and then went away. I went up and rang it one time, at which point a lady from the museum staff emerged and yelled at me for ringing the bell. This is one of the more memorable injustices of my life, but from the lady’s point of view, my one little ring was the last straw that made her pop her cork. (edited to confess mixed metaphor)
I agree with @Hunt that affirmative action is probably at the root of many perceived microaggressions. The YDN comments are full of them–quotes like “What do you expect when you accept unqualified students?” Lower average SAT scores are thrown out there as if they were the absolute determinant of a student’s worthiness to be in college–despite numerous studies that say otherwise. Of course, these same charges are lobbied at student athletes like mine, and even legacy students like Hunt’s. The difference is that my kid can choose, most of the time, to keep the fact that he’s an athlete to himself, at least in the classroom and the workplace. A black or Latina student/graduate walks the world always conscious that someone is thinking “You only got here because your skin is darker than mine.”
At any rate, it’s a pernicious and silly stereotype; with so many qualified candidates, Yale is able to enroll students who are bright and “worthy” but who also provide a diverse spectrum of skills, gifts, and life experiences. In fact, my only quibble with Hunt is that I’d argue that affirmative action has largely been replaced at this point with an emphasis on building a diverse class of similarly qualified students.
I’m in favor of it all–I love that my kid goes to a school with athletes, a cappella singers, tree-hugging environmentalists, and kids from varied ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds (etcetera…). I like the fraternities and sororities existing alongside the cultural houses. I like the rawness of New Haven beside the astounding Gothic architecture of the college. I’m less sure about secret societies, but maybe I’ll come around to those too. All of these people living together, challenging one another are what make Yale a rich center of learning.
What doesn’t contribute to the richness, in my view, is silencing and blanket statements, like “All __________ are more privileged than all _____________ and they don’t know it.” Life and people are just more complicated than that. Then again, I’m 50, not 20.
Here’s why I had a little more sympathy to the students after reading the letter. It has become clear that there’s this pretty drastic contrast between what minority students were expecting or what they were promised before they came to Yale and what they have experienced on campus. Still, I’m not sure if they have “dramatized” the pain for the sake of publicity. If you look at how Yale students on various venues tout their school community and express their love for their experience at Yale, you wouldn’t be too surprised that the administrator didn’t see such deep resentment coming soon enough. Which leads to the notion that there’s also this disconnection between what the school administration’s perception of the racial relationship on campus and how the students feel every day. Erika Christakis’ email read to me idealistic. What happened later was apparently a huge shock to her and her husband. In that letter, students were saying that to ask us to “look away” something that we felt clearly offensive was to ask us to act cowardly but at the same time they didn’t feel they could confront those individuals without being ignored or further ridiculed and challenged. Minority students were essentially asking for help - an HR if you will so they could have a “safe space” on campus. Yes, they are not ready be engaged in that kind of exchanges as proposed by Christakis.
When you walk on the campus of Yale, the picture perfect scenes, the buildings, the courtyards and the beautiful people walking around…, are stunning. To an “outsider” however, it’s also posing this pressure that makes one wonder “do I really belong here?”. Since Yale has been working to diversify its student body and one of their “selling points” remains a fulfilling four year experience for all students, they will have to tackle the racial tension on campus more proactively and more effectively.
All of these people living together, challenging one another are what make Yale a rich center of learning.