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Am I The Only One Mad About This?

Stanford’s Math Tournament, the largest high school math tournament in the US and maybe the world, was abruptly cancelled within 36 hours of the event this past weekend. The 2015 competition was the largest ever with over 1000 registrants from across the US, China, Russia and India. It’s safe to say that some of the best young mathematicians in the world were planning to duke it out for the pure love of math.

What happened?

Evidently there was a White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection on Stanford campus scheduled for the same time (Obama was a speaker) and the university decided not to risk…I don’t know what exactly. Too many seriously smart kids doing their thing within 1 mile of White House personnel maybe? Are they kidding?

It seems that everyone except for the SUMO (Stanford University Math Organization) students who organized this world-famous math competition knew about the presence of the White House event on campus for months. So why did university officials notify the SMT 2015 organizers at the last possible minute? The timing couldn’t have been worse.

The Beijing teams were already on the ground when the plug got pulled and many teams were en route.

Luckily, an organization in nearby Santa Clara called A-Star, working in conjunction with Rice University and Johns Hopkins, literally created a math tournament overnight to fill the void. They ended up with a smaller 50 team event but the best players got to compete as planned.

Meanwhile, there appears to be no statement from Stanford about this.

Am I the only one who thinks of universities as sacred sites in the secular world? That education itself is sacred? Universities are there for their students, not to kiss up to any president for any reason. Obama and his team could’ve gone anywhere, but it’s clear that ego won the day and the Stanford president was all too keen to say yes to the DC Big Dogs and no to the best young mathematicians on earth.

I have no particular beef with the US President, but there was that disturbing event over the holidays when a couple had to move their wedding in Hawaii, scheduled for the next day, because the President wanted to play golf at the site on their wedding day. The Feds alerted the couple at their rehearsal the day before. Thank God they were both Army officers and were OK with that decision. And not to worry, Obama called them to apologize and congratulate them.

What, he didn’t offer to pick up their tab? Or send a gift or host them at the White House later to make it up to them? His wife Michelle didn’t say, “You did WHAT??” and then quickly act to make it right, since her own focus is military families?

I guess just a call from a busy president is all it takes to make it all better.

But be honest. If your wedding had to get moved at the last minute because somebody else wanted to play golf, wouldn’t you be angry? Or if you had been planning an A-list party for 1000 superstars for months and your landlord cancelled it the day before because somebody more special than you and yours was in the house, wouldn’t you be angry?

There’s an arrogance here that just dissed high school math stars, the kind of people universities compete for and White House administrations should want to reward. But come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a White House reception for the US Math Olympiad team instead of NCAA basketball or Superbowl winners?

How are these same math stars supposed to think about Stanford now? Maybe when the time comes to apply to college, they’ll remember just how important they were to Stanford on Valentine’s Day 2015.

Whose Privacy Matters More?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Stanford undergraduate students have begun to pepper their admissions office with requests to see their application files. While that seems harmless enough since these are the lucky students among the 5% who were admitted to Stanford, it is shaping up to be much more complicated. Because in addition to the letters of recommendation, guidance counselor reports, transcripts and essays, these file components also include notes taken by admissions staff readers during the selection process as well as any ratings assigned to the applicant. In short, students can read the very documents used to admit them.

it was only a matter of time before this idea, the brainchild of a group of anonymous Stanford students who produce an on-line publication called Fountain Hopper, occurred to college students, given the arcane nature of private college admissions process and all the insane speculation it produces.

At MIT where there are no scared cows, we’d been there, done that long ago.

Enrolled students have always been able to see anything in their original application files except documents they previously waived their right to see. Always ahead of the curve, in the 1990s MIT students began to demand to see not only their files, but also the internal admissions office notes and ratings on their cases. Shocked, we admissions officers were advised by MIT lawyers that we had to share that information since students had the right under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) law to see everything attached to their names.

If you have ever been an admissions officer, you can imagine how embarrassing this could be for all concerned.

Admissions readers are tasked with reading literally thousands of applications within a very fixed timeframe of six weeks for the early selection process and 8-12 weeks for regular selection. That’s a lot of cases to read per day x 7 days/wk for weeks on end. After the 20th case in a day, one tends to get bleary-eyed. As the weeks go by, one also tends to get more efficient and more brutally honest in one’s assessment of the case. Depending on who the reader is (experienced or a newbie?) and when it was read (at the beginning of the cycle or toward the end, at the beginning of the work day or toward the end), summaries can be warm and glowing or cold and precise.

As with any team anywhere, admissions officers are colleagues who grow to know each other’s biases and personality quirks, which is why all decisions are made by committee so biases can be cancelled out. Since the admissions process at private US universities and colleges is 100% subjective, the preferences of each staff reader are taken into account in committee deliberations.

It’s a normal thing for any one staff’s opinion to be over-ridden by the group on occasion. This is a deeply human enterprise.

I watched many MIT students come into the office and read their files. Most came and went. But sometimes someone got upset by what was written by one of us staff members who got flippant in our summary comments written late one night in exhaustion. I, for example, was famous for my own little drawing of a round bomb with a lit fuse accompanied by the words “tick tick tick”, meaning that I thought for some reason the applicant was unstable and might explode if admitted. (I know I know, but gallows humor does release the steam of judging so many outstanding students.) It was impossible to explain the context of such comments to the student, one of those “you had to be there’ moments. It broke my heart that something that was never meant to be shared was now available and on occasion, when read, undermined the confidence of one of our students. Confidence is so important for college students.

As a result, we shredded all of our internal selection documents thereafter before the next class enrolled. We lost valuable information that faculty would often use to understand their classes better.

We also learned to be more politically correct which can be the death of trust among a team.

Admissions officers need to be truthful in their assessment of applicants and should somehow be protected from the Monday morning quarterbacks who do not admit students for a living. Admitting students is a tough and grueling job that is often deeply uncomfortable. There are months of 12+ hr work days within 7 day work weeks. During reading season social life disappears under the relentless crush of files to be read within fixed deadlines. It can be heartbreaking to fall in love with applicants who will never make the cut. It can also be heartbreaking to fall in love with applicants who are admitted and then choose to enroll elsewhere.

I’m guessing that Stanford admissions was taken by surprise by this and they are about to have their own embarrassing experience. Some Stanford students will be shook up by what they read and have no context to understand. It will raise more questions than can be easily answered and the process will be tweaked accordingly. I suppose that’s a good thing in the end, but in my opinion it’s all so unnecessary.

Even as I write this, college admissions officers are changing the way they write case summaries, cloaking them in caution in case they are read out of context. I’m also pretty sure that some students who are about to read what was written about their application long ago will be in for a surprise.

So my best advice to students is this: don’t look back – admissions comments and ratings were meant for one moment in time for the purpose of evaluating students for admission that year.

In all cases for the students in question, the process worked. There is no need to dig up and analyze the past when it helped launch the student forward.

Worth The Wait

This past year for me has been punctuated with surprises, most of them welcome and a few not so hot. In the latter category, I developed a few niggling medical issues after a life of robust health that sent me on a new adventure, into the jaws of the health care system. I’d never minded seeing a doctor before because I always had excellent insurance. But the Affordable Care Act changed it all up (sorry, kids, but it did) and now the kind of insurance that was perfect for me is no longer available at any price in the state of NY.

Now we’re all HMOs…OMG.

Now I brace myself when I have to see a doctor because there will be a hospital involved somehow and long lines. Lots of long lines. I compensate by bringing my Ipad along and getting caught up on my reading.

Today was typical. I went for an 8am fasting blood panel and sat in a waiting room at St. Luke’s for 90 minutes just to get the paperwork to then go off to the lab for the blood drawing. Getting annoyed after 30 minutes, I tried to do mindfulness exercises and even to meditate to stay centered, calm and patient. There were, after all, many people waiting all around me who were seriously ill. My test was routine. Finally the nice lady handed me my paperwork and off I went one floor down to another office…and more waiting, this time with The Today Show blaring a story about why it’s OK to wear white in winter now (how come that show is still on past 10am?). That almost pushed me over the edge, but NYC has taught me patience and so I endured.

Finally I was called back behind heavy doors by the technician from the Islands who silently, efficiently and in about 10 seconds flat drew 4 viles of blood. I hardly knew what hit me. It was surprisingly masterful and I told her so. She laughed and thanked me, saying that most people have a tendency to cry when they sit in that chair. Cry? As she completed her paperwork, she said,

“You know, it’s never about the needle. It’s always so much more.”

She stopped, faced me square on and looked me dead in the eye. ”This is a hard country to live in, you know. Many people are here alone without their families or they have no families at all. Life just builds up on them and when they come in, they can’t hold it anymore and they sob it out here. I just sit and listen for as long as it takes. Sometimes I hold their hand. I just let them cry it out for as long as they need because I know that unless they release all those tears, their bodies won’t give up any blood.”

She went on to say,

“I don’t care how long we have to wait or how many people are out in that waiting room. There has to be human care at moments like that. I don’t know what they are living with or what they are running from, but it’s only decent to respect them.”

And then she smiled at me.

I swear to God, tears welled up in my eyes and I wanted to break down in sobs myself. I suddenly realized how fast I move and how hard I push and how I rarely take a break for myself, relentlessly trying to save the world one child at a time. It was over-whelming. And yeah, in that moment I wanted a Mom to rock me, sing to me, soothe me out and tell me that all is well. These emotions lasted just 10 seconds or so, but I swear I had a healing in that room with that needle-packing Earth Angel, because I walked out with a happy heart.

As I left the hospital, stunned by how moved I’d just been in that moment with that wonderful woman, I remembered the time my favorite teacher, friend and shaman par excellence, Sharon Turner, and I witnessed a powerful moment with another stranger and how

Sharon turned to me afterwards all wide-eyed and said, “Do you think he was real?”

I don’t know, Sharon. But she sure was worth the wait.

Don’t Let the News Affect Your Joy

I know the deaths of so many children in CT is unbelievable. It’s even worse than unbelievable. It’s heinous, heartbreaking, horrifying.

As the news of this is breaking, so many are being admitted early to the college of their choice. They are in hog heaven and should be, since they’ve worked so hard for this moment.

As awful as this sounds, this is how life is…it goes on.

I have lost many loved ones in my life. And each time someone close dies, it’s a shock when the world goes on, as if my parent or sibling or loved one didn’t matter in the most existential way…when my world has come to a complete halt. Or at least that’s how it seems.

If your child was admitted somewhere early, please make an effort not to talk about this awful tragedy. Let them enjoy the moment without guilt or disappointment. Let them have their day. It’s OK for your family to rejoice even as other families are experiencing the worst news possible.

I send the families involved Light and love, and every Sacred Being I can muster, to carry the families through. I have been through a few worst moments but nothing can compare to the pain of the parent of a 6 yr old who was murdered. Unbelievable. Unspeakable.

Thank God It’s Not Me

This is Thanksgiving weekend and here’s what I’m grateful for:

I’m grateful that I’m not applying to college now.

I’m grateful that I don’t have to apply to 12 colleges in the hopes that just one will take me; that I don’t have to write 24-30 short supplemental essays to the tune of hours of work for those 12 applications, totally guessing at what the admissions officers want to read since I have no earthly idea what they are looking for; that I don’t have to respond to endless email requests from colleges that bought my name from the College Board or the ACT in order to show “demonstrated interest” to schools I’ve never heard of just in case I need them as safeties; that I don’t have to pay a boatload of money to visit campuses in order to show same for fear those colleges will not admit me when I apply because I never showed my love by visiting their campus; that I don’t have to do all of that while keeping my coursework up and sports and activities going too; that I don’t have to cure cancer or male pattern baldness to get into the college of my choice.

This is what it’s come to (or at least it seems like that).

I work with all kinds of teenagers. US, international, wealthy, poor and everyone in between. And the one thing they all have in common is this getting-crazier-and-crazier process we call the college admissions process.

I swear, college admissions officers really have no clue what the lives of their applicants are really like.

They think they do, of course, because they read hundreds and hundreds of applications and meet teenagers all the time. But I respectfully remind them that they are reading the virtual applicant and meeting students on their absolute-best-behavior-ever, kids who are dying to be who the officer wants them to be just to get in. Not authentic at all.

Last year the Common Application underwent a radical upgrade and was a catastrophe for all involved. This year it’s Naviance, a beautiful product that needed no major changes but they did it anyway and now it’s twitchy, leading to more frustration. Oh, and if that’s not bad enough, Harvard et al the elites plan to create a third new application platform (joining Common App and the Universal App) for reasons I don’t quite understand though I’ve read their press release multiple times. I know what’s being said. I just don’t believe it.

Yup, folks, just keep piling on the chaos. The great masses are expected to just suck it up and deal.

Can you tell how frustrated I am that the college admissions process largely serves the wealthy, is ego driven and no longer functions with education at its core? That it teaches young people to be cynical and manipulative, which is the worst crime of all?

My heart goes out to teenagers today who have little time to do anything but perform for adults, who get less than 6 hrs of sleep nightly and have no place to be silly (social media is owned by adults now) without the prying eyes of adults who want to sell them a product or judge and prod them.

People, they’re kids, for God’s sake, and if you haven’t noticed, we’ve left them a world of trouble

because we adults are too immature to get a grip and act like it.

Like I said, I’m grateful I’m not 17 again. I don’t think I’d have the nerves or maturity for it.

On Creating A New Move…

I tend to get cranky when I’m not creating. And I’m not creating when I’m working 12 hr days/7 days/wk and that’s the roll I’m on now. Luckily, my old friend The Universe has a way of intervening with crazy curve balls just when I’m settled in. Like right about now.

The UWS building I live in is being sold and I have to move out by the end of October. WHAAAAT?? This is my favorite neighborhood where I actually know my neighbors and recognize people and their dogs, this being a major dog walking street, a straight shot to Riverside Park and the Hudson River. For the past 2+ years I’ve been living a “Cheers” life where everybody at least knows my face, where my garage guys have my car out and waiting for me every morning so I won’t be late for work, where my nail ladies give me extra long shoulder rubs after any procedure, where the grocery delivery guys from Westside Market stay and chat a moment after dropping my grocery bags in the same place each time. In that human way of connection, I love these people and see them as city-friends.

So really, now I have to move?

Who am I going to make extra meatballs for now that Nadine won’t be my downstairs neighbor?

She gets to stay because she’s rent-controlled, having lived in her apartment for more than 30 years. She’s been such a gift to me.

But this being NYC, things move fast and I need to focus and get creative. When I need to open the creation spigot, I read anything written by Melea Seward, my old buddy who left Brooklyn and moved out to Portland OR. Melea changed my life by encouraging me to own my story, patiently coaxing me out of my sense of stun to dig in and get real again. I joined her “Board of Us” and made excellent friends with other women seeking similar creativity and success. And yes, I also joined the legions of people star struck by her complete and utter genius. Melea must be experienced. She’s one of the Wonders of the World. I just read her last 5 blogs.

So now off I go to find a new neighborhood filled with friends I just haven’t met yet, kinda pumped by the possibilities, surfing that creative surge.

The Game Is Up

If you are one of the loyal jillions who follow my blog, you know that I’ve been warning anyone who will listen how college admissions is based on a business model now, no longer with education at its core. Want proof? Read this most extraordinary descriptionof Northeastern University’s “meteoric rise” on the USNWR rankings, climbing in 17 years from #162 to #49. This ranking creep was orchestrated with singular purpose by NEU’s previous president, Richard Freeland, who began his presidency during the university’s decline, inheriting wide-spread layoffs and declining enrollment. Being a resourceful kind of guy, Freeland saw that the quickest way to stop the downward spiral was to pull a UPenn and “game” the USNWR algorithm.

It’s been done before. The USNWR ranking is well known to be gameable.

As a reader, I couldn’t help but empathize with his situation and imagine what I would have done to improve Northeastern’s situation had I been in Freeland’s situation.

The guy had vision and cojones. But in his calculus to save the school, was he thinking about the future of the nation?

Nah. Despite his laser-focus on boosting NEU into the top 100 schools, he made no real effort to increase the quality of education there, choosing instead to back-engineer the algorithm and tweak certain parameters like increased number of applications and higher SAT score range. His dogged pursuit of acceptance by Robert Morse at USNWR is just as silly as celebrity nominees kissing up to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote them an Oscar or young women trying to out-maneuver each other to win that rose and the Bachelor’s hand in marriage.

What are we doing here? We have such a short time on Earth to get things right. Shouldn’t we be thinking about our behavior and its long term impact?

This isn’t entertainment. Education is sacred and a deeply serious enterprise.

This whole nation has up and moved to LaLa Land, believing in this illusion of prestige. Is Northeastern really a better university than Ohio State-Columbus (#50) or U. of Texas- Austin (#52)?

Is Princeton really better than Harvard this year who was better than Princeton last year?

Universities just don’t change that fast, so what’s up? No surprise, Morse changes the weighting on certain aspects of that USNWR algorithm every year or two to create “drama”, which is marketing-speak for “selling more product”.

The USNWR is not God. It is not neutral. It wants to separate you from your money by posing as a trusted source, something you need in order to make good decisions. But is it? Look at what they are assessing. Nearly 23% of the ranking is a subjective opinion of US colleges/universities by other university presidents, provosts and deans of admissions. I used to receive that mailing from Morse every year, being asked to review 900+ colleges for their overall quality, and I wouldn’t complete the forms because I didn’t feel qualified to judge. You’re gonna ask competitors about their perceptions of peer institutions and pass that off as objective? You can see right there that the USNWR and other ranking systems serve to support the status quo. Those top 10 schools will always make the top 10 because of the parameters they are judged by. Harvard is the richest and most famous university so it will always be at the top of the list.

The reality is that there is no best school. There is just the best school for you.

The only way we’ll stop living in illusion and regain control of our children’s future is to use that critical thinking we all talk about but few of us seem to use.

Consider this: when things don’t make sense, it’s because there is no sense to make. There’s artifice lurking somewhere.

It’s America, Land of the Spin, where guys like Freeland advance their schools with little regard for truth and integrity and get rewarded for it. Freeland is now the Commissioner of Higher Education for Massachusetts.

How about we start taking the democracy back by looking past illusion to find the truth. How about we start reminding ourselves that education is a process that happens wherever we are, that we resourceful humans bloom where we’re planted, that there is no ‘one size fits all’ in the education of the human species. Rankings built on spin are irrelevant. The match is what matters.

Can MIT Cut the Gordian Knot?

That deep rumble you feel is the sound of foundations cracking and giving way.

The education system as we’ve known it is undergoing a deep change because it can not be financially sustained into the far future. There are too many factors affecting the relevancy of it’s ‘form’ – class sizes limited by the size of housing stock; the standard length of 4 years to earn a bachelor’s degree; required classes per major; unionization of faculty at some universities that enforces professional duties based on job descriptions; the financial aid structure; changing research funding sources; rapidly changing research priorities. Feel free to add about thirty others.

Now once again, MIT is leading the way by admitting that fundamental changes must be made to the undergraduate education provided there in order to maintain fiscal solvency long term.

I’ve been waiting for the elite universities to ‘fess up to this situation, so kudos to MIT.

Even with deep endowments, they are susceptible to the same economic forces that smaller colleges and large state systems have been confronting for a decade. No one is immune now.

This is not trivial. Knowledge is being created at a faster-than-logarithmic pace (what’s faster than that?), when, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the entire human knowledge set doubles every two days. Holy sh*t! Imagine Lucy on that iconic chocolate faculty assembly line. Humans can’t possibly keep up with it all. This includes university faculty whose job is to pass the knowledge torch along to the next generation. No surprise that most schools’ faculties are teaching information that has long since changed. It often takes a generation for new knowledge to work its way into college curricula. Think quantum physics and epigenetics, for example.

Like with most crises, this is the perfect opportunity for the Big ReThink of education. What should college students be taught now? What is relevant? How long should it take to teach it and what form would that take?

What should a first college degree actually mean? What’s its ROI?

We know that college rarely prepares students for specific jobs. It’s supposed to prepare them for a changing employment scenario by teaching resourcefulness and critical thinking.

So how will tenured faculty who are their own CEOs be pressured to change their ways? What’s the incentive for them to drink from that fire hose of new knowledge and decide what must be taught now? Will department heads and Provosts be strong enough to demand the highly focused teaching of relevant material in order to shrink that standard 4 years for a BS/BA to 3 without creating the illusion of a watered-down curriculum? Because that’s what it will take to create an affordable residence-based college experience by decade’s end.

How does a university break the Gordian Knot of the modern era?

It’s a moment for real ingenuity and MIT is all that. Fingers crossed for them to get this right for the rest.

The Power and Destruction of MSU*

We’ve all been there, finding ourselves in a situation that didn’t make sense, without a full set of real data, leaving us confused and worried. To regain a sense of control, we start connecting the pieces of info we do know, filling in the gaps with our imaginations. In other words, we Make Sh*t Up (MSU), creating the reason for this situation that’s confusing us. Believing that we now know what is going on, we proceed to act on the story we just MSU’d. And we make our own weather. And it’s always wrong. We screw it up and make the situation worse.

MSU is the basis for soap operas, failed love affairs, international relations and college admissions ranking systems.

MSU brought that Malaysian Airliner down over Ukraine. MSU makes Israel and Hamas launch bombs at each other and kill children and completely innocent citizens who would actually like each other if they were allowed to mingle and connect as human beings. MSU shatters half of the nation’s marriages. MSU is the reason why the average private college applicant applies to 12 schools now, sending the entire college admissions process into imbalance, leading to more MSU.

Making Sh*t Up always leads to heartache because when we’re left to figure out what the other party is thinking and doing, we’ll always default to the fear factor.

Examples? How about:

Why didn’t they text me back? (MSU= I knew they didn’t like me.) Why did they walk right by me when I said hello? (MSU= they’re a snob.) Why did that school put me on the wait list? (MSU= they just rejected me because I’m not good enough. )

In reality, they didn’t text you back because they were in meetings all day and haven’t gotten the chance to get back to you. They walked by you because they are myopic and don’t like to wear glasses in public. They put you on the wait list because they want to take you after May 1 if they have the space because wait list is “admitted pending space” and not a “soft rejection” as urban legend would have it.

Our culture trains us into the MSU mind set, asking us to vote online to judge people and situations we know nothing about. It encourages opinions at the end of news articles and allows the anonymity of haters. It has raised celebrity gossip to a high art, dishing the dirt over the air waves about the perceived foibles of public people. We make sh*t up about strangers and friends alike, judging them with great emotion. Feeling all righteous and right.

But MSU is stupid. It always leads to the wrong conclusion, bringing misunderstanding and pain. Worse, it reinforces the notion that there are good people and bad people in the world, instead of the real truth that there are just people, each of us wired to be both good and bad.

It makes imperfection a sin when, in fact, imperfection is the genesis of creativity.

So the next time you find yourself making sh*t up (you can substitute ‘stuff’ if you aren’t vulgar like I am), stop and ask yourself what you actually know to be true. Do you know that they didn’t text you back because they don’t like you? Do you know for a fact that they are a snob? Do you know that you were just rejected when in fact you were actually waitlisted?

Time to use our gray matter. Clarify instead of MSU.

When Right is Short-Sighted

In a conservative blog The Campus Fix (“Student Reported. Your Daily Dose of Right-Minded Campus News and Commentary from Across the Nation”), a young reporter interviews a UCLA faculty member who has written a book about the use of race in admissions at UCLA. Since The Campus Fix is covering it, you can assume that this particular faculty member disagrees with how things are done at his school. In reality, Prof. Tim Groseclose, is a conservative political commentator and author about liberal bias. He used to be on UCLA’s admissions oversight committee and had reason to believe that the staff there was violating CA state law by using a more “holistic” selection process to increase the number of black and hispanic students enrolling at that top state university.

As Benjamin, my hair dresser/favoriterabbi would say, Oy Vey.

In my long experience doing college admissions, I found that most faculty who join an admissions oversight committee have agendas; some have children who have entered high school and they want to learn how admissions works, some are frustrated by the quality or composition of the student body. At some schools, it seems, a few fall under the Groseclose-nightmare-category of committed partisan who is looking to write another book to supplement his media career.

You know this kind of person…the “believing is seeing” kind,

the one who feels they are the only rational person who will speak out about this. The one who believes that numbers, alone and out of context, can fully describe a human’s past experience and future performance. Thank God I didn’t have this type on any of my Committee on Undergraduate and Financial Aid (CUAFA) committees over the years. Thank God MIT faculty are legitimately interested in fact first and then make rational and mature decisions from what is learned through a human perspective.

I’m sorry to hear that UCLA Admissions refused to supply Prof. Groseclose with the data he requested. My philosophy as dean was that members of CUAFA should have complete access to everything in admissions including all data because they were our check and balance, we all wanted to do the right thing and there was nothing to fear.

It just kills me, though, when guys like this – white, entitled, highly educated – judge people who don’t look like them as ‘other’, refusing to see that every coin has two equal yet different sides, that everyone’s unique experience in this world affects their behavior in life. I’ve read some of Groseclose’s writing and he has this simplistic thought process. He seems to believe the SATs mean something and are predictive of future academic performance. He also doesn’t seem to accept that racism/sexism actually exist and that we humans compulsively judge each other by how we look.

Well, the data is out there if he wishes to find it.

Black kids are treated different from white kids in the US, just as asian kids are treated different from white kids.

The difference is that the stereotypes about these populations are not the same, having much to do with how they came to US shores. White people love to say that slavery is over and should have no place in the conversation, but that is just not facing reality with the respect it deserves. The legacy of this terrible national trauma is a lingering PTSD in the form of a concept called ‘stereotype threat’ in which the descendants of the traumatized absorb the culture’s view of them in a deep way. The same can be said for some hispanic populations who are assumed to be illegal because of a history of border wars and illegal immigration patterns.

The worst thing about Prof. Groseclose, though, is his short sightedness, his lack of long term vision, his failure to think deeply about how his actions will affect the lives of his descendants. In an era of insecurity, people like him seem to be winning the day.

Here are the facts. We know that in America, education is the fastest way into the middle class. We know that societies with broad, deep middle classes thrive in peace and prosperity, because people with homes and kids and jobs they love do not want to go to war. We know that what we adults do now will affect life for the generations to come.

We also see with great alarm that as education has been usurped by a business model and colleges make admissions decisions based on reputation-building by leveraging their ranking on USNWR and no longer on what is good for the nation, the gap between the upper and middle classes is growing. Precious financial aid funds that should go toward needy students are increasingly awarded by colleges in the form of ‘merit aid’ to affluent students whose parents can afford the cost of tuition. Every dollar spent on students who do not need funding is one dollar less for students who do.

Projected outward a generation, the US is clearly moving into a society of extremes.

Societies with little or no middle class, societies with extremes, are unstable and dangerous. The truth is that we are becoming agents of our own demise.

If universities do not educate all races and socio-economic groups, do not dedicate themselves to moving students from the lower classes into the middle class, democracy as we know it will be done within 50 years. We will have dissension in this country that will bring hardship and danger to our grandchildren.

Is this the legacy we want to leave them?

Affirmative action works, folks. We are into the second generation of an evolution that will take a full three. It’s a long-term solution to a long-term problem.

The real problem is, in modern America we’ve lost the knack of investing in a future that we will never see.

We have been acculturated into immediate gratification, which is not only selfish, silly and a relinquishment of our human obligation to leave this world better than we found it, it’s also a damn shame.

No black student is taking an education away from a white student. There is plenty for everyone.

It takes moral courage to do the right thing here. It takes university presidents who are willing to be educators and not Salesmen-In-Chief taking huge salaries and benefits to satisfy the needs of their trustees, 1/3rd of whom are business people with sharp pencils focused on short-term gains so characteristic of American capitalism 21st century style.

Education is not business. Education is the ‘why’ to business’s ‘how’. It is sacred to the human race.

I’m still looking for that university leadership to rise. I’m looking for university presidents to understand that they are in service to the Nation , to Humankind itself, and not just to their own turf.