Category: Creativity

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.

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.