Alice in Wonderland
As Alice in Wonderland hits theaters, the Patriot would like everyone to reflect on our own Alice, and her adventures.
Trevor Drummond, ’10 wrote Alice in Blunderland in March of 2008. Many of the points raised still hold true today.
One has to wonder whether President Gast is a hopelessly naive fool with regards to her diversity agenda.
An informative essay about the phoniness of diversity and political correctness can be found at the following internet link titled “The Noble Lies of PC”:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2008/10/the_one_aspect_of_american.html
This essay should be required reading for President Gast. She should then be required to answer why she insists on promulgated the Noble Lies herself?
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I note that the “Alice in Blunderland” essay zeros in on Lehigh’s diversity efforts to focus on Blacks and Hispanics.
Well, the grim realities are that Lehigh has done a really rotten job with regards to graduating Blacks and Hispanics.
A fundamental indicator of the educational “success” of a college is the six year graduation rate. This metric is defined as:
Measured by the percentage of full-time, first-time baccalaureate-seeking students who graduate within six years. The graduation rate for any given year is calculated at the end of the academic year based on the cohort matriculating in the summer and fall semesters six years earlier.
Lehigh’s overall rate is around 83% which is a very respectable number.
However the rates for Blacks and Hispanics are as follows:
Black Males 59.3%
Black Females 56.3%
Latino Males 53.8%
Latino Females 80.0%
The only shining light in the above numbers is for Latino women. The rest of the numbers are truly appalling.
The question needs to be asked as to why are most Blacks and Latinos doing so poorly at Lehigh?
The most likely answer is that they are being admitted with lower academic credentials and are unable to keep up with the learning pace which is set to meet the abilities of Lehigh’s overall student body.
Lehigh is NOT doing these students any favors by admitting them with substandard qualifications into an environment where they are likely to fail.
These policies are – to be blunt – rotten and cruel.
The Lehigh administration should be ashamed of itself.
Monsieur Alumnius Publius -
What a strange surname you have, Monsieur. I have never heard it before! Please be so kind as to cite your sources and references when presenting numerical percentages and the like. For all I know you could be bloody making those numbers up to prove your own point. Much appreciated.
Politically and Correctly Yours,
Damien Duff
Monsieur Damian,
The data can all be found at the following website:
http://www.collegeresults.org/
It will take you a bit of work to figure out how to use this site optimally to find the data I discussed. But it is all there.
When on the main page, if you click on “about the data” at the top of the page, you will see that the data come from:
U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The Lehigh data that was input to this system would have been supplied to the NCES by Lehigh’s Office of Institutional Research.
http://www.lehigh.edu/~oir/
Go there and ask Vice Provost Lutz for the SAT statistics on underrepresented minorities versus the overall student body and see if I’m correct about double standards in admissions.
I’ll be willing to bet you will get stonewalled, rather than given the data.
Monsieur A. Publius -
Please, in the future, use a gentleman’s surname when using the title ‘Monsieur’. You are gravely mistaken to put one’s first name after a gentlemanly title.
In response to your statistics, thank you for the references. I have perused them in depth over the past month and I am indeed getting stonewalled. Nowhere do these statistics incorporate the fact that a majority of “underrepresented” or “minority” students (ethnically referred to in your cases as Latino/as and Blacks) do not come from upper-middle class backgrounds such as many Caucasian (read White, in your vernacular) students that attend in Lehigh. In fact you would do well to know that a majority of Lehigh’s minority students are on massive amounts of financial aid or are on athletic scholarships.
Your statistics do not lie. But they also do not tell the whole truth. Thus, statistically, they are inherently inaccurate and not usable since they do not incorporate all sources of error or uncertainties. Many students have family issues that cause them to not be able to re-matriculate or continue their education at such an expensive (and presitigious, I will say) school as Lehigh.
I know a lovely United State that would happily cater to your opposite spectrum view of “diversity agenda”.
Regardless, my original point still stands. I would love to tear apart each of your statistics one by one but it’s quite late here and your drivel annoys me. Cheerio lad.
DD
Mister Duff,
First of all, the statistics are NOT mine. As I pointed out, they had to have come from Lehigh’s Office of Institutional Research. If you wish to quarrel about them go to that office and do so. I am simply a messenger who pointed you in the direction of a source where they are readily available.
I recommend you go back to that source http://www.collegeresults.org and utilize its capabilities even further. When you do so, you will find that the site will allow you to compare Lehigh with similar peer colleges and universities. When you go through this exercise, you will discover that the site will produce a listing of 18 institutions that are roughly comparable in terms of the size of the undergraduate body, median SAT scores, full cost of attending (tuition plus room and board) etc.
When compared to its peers in this group Lehigh is by far the worst performer with regards to the graduation rate gap. In some of these institutions, the underrepresented minorities have BETTER graduation rates than the overall student body. With several other institutions in the list the negative differences are sufficiently small as to be insignificant. Thus, I stand by my observation that Lehigh has an appallingly bad record in this regard.
To paraphrase the noted Harvard sociologist David Riesman: Life is unfair. Statistics merely measure the results.
You seem to have fallen victim to the liberal demagoguery that is so prevalent in academe nowadays. The Lehigh College Republicans a while back sponsored the screening of the documentary film Indoctrinate U. See the website:
http://indoctrinate-u.com/pages/welcome.html
In that film, former Berkeley professor John McWhorter describes the uselessness of Black Studies programs and said:
“Most African-American studies departments elegantly teach you how to be a victim. They teach you how you are a victim in ways you didn’t think about. You nurture the feeling among the black students that it is a racist campus. You pay people basically to tell them that in the classroom and in administrative offices. Obviously, something is wrong, but you get to satisfy your sense of being a noble person by pretending that the black students are victims. That is something that now is not only a personality trait but it is institutionalized on the university campus.”
Your recent invective indicates to me that you are the sort of person that McWhorter is talking about and that you are trying to: “satisfy your sense of being a noble person by pretending that the black students are victims”.
My conjecture in my initial comments to the Patriot is that the “underrepresented minorities” at Lehigh probably ARE victims. I suggested a hypothesis that they were probably admitted with substandard academic qualifications (namely lower SAT scores) and as such were doomed to a lower probability of success.
I would love for you to prove my hypothesis wrong. Surely, the data to do so are somewhere in Lehigh’s Office of Institutional Research.
There are numerous examples throughout academe that the double standards in admissions criteria are indeed the culprit when it comes to the lack of success by underrepresented minorities.
Since you appear to thirst for references and sources, below is a list of essays and papers that you should read for your enlightenment.
McWhorter – Campus Diversity Fraud
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_1_the_campus.html
McWhorter – Who Should Get into College
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_who_should_get.html
Nieli – The Changing Shape of the River.pdf (50 pages)
http://www.nas.org/polimage.cfm?doc_Id=84&size_code=Doc
Nieli – Selling_Merit_Down_River
http://www.nas.org/documents/Selling_Merit_Down_River.pdf
Sowell – Diversity versus ‘diversity’
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2001/11/16/diversity_versus_diversity
Sowell – Multicultural Education
http://www.tsowell.com/spmultic.html
Steele – The New Segregation
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=1992&month=08
Williams – Celebrating multiculturalism and diversity
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2003/01/01/celebrating_multiculturalism_and_diversity