Klarinet Archive - Posting 000244.txt from 1999/02

From: Roger Shilcock <roger.shilcock@-----.uk>
Subj: RE: [kl] Women and orchestras
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 04:27:29 -0500

This doesn't happen much in the UK, or not so as it's visible, various
"newspaper" stories in the last few years notwithstanding. I think there
would be a considerable backlash if it did, and it would turn out to be
highly undesirable politically.
To me, it seems morally indefensible, too. Giving a job to or
preferentially shortlisting a (dubiously qualified) applicant because of
his "race" is just as
bad as doing the same for your (dubiously qualified) brother-in-law.
Roger Shilcock

.On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Kevin Fay (LCA)
wrote:

> Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 18:27:58 -0800
> From: "Kevin Fay (LCA)" <kevinfay@-----.com>
> Reply-To: klarinet@-----.org
> To: "'klarinet@-----.org>
> Subject: RE: [kl] Women and orchestras
>
> DHmorgan wrote:
>
> <<<I'm sure if you had polled law professors before they did a controlled
> study of the issue, they would have been outraged at the suggestion that
> they are systematically grading people of their own race and gender higher
> than others--since they were grading nameless papers tracked by numbers only
> and had no conscious idea who the author was--they would have considered
> that a 'jump'.>>>
>
> I'd bet a double tall latte that I am the only person on this list who has
> graded law school blue books. The experience quickly leads me to believe
> that the touted "blind test" was not scientifically accurate at all. In the
> study, I have no doubt that the white male professors graded the white
> students' papers higher on average. This does not tell me that race
> matters--it tells me that the black students did not do as well on the test.
> Did they statistically norm the study based on admissions criteria?
>
> This argument is up there with the assertion that the LSAT is racially
> biased. It's not--it merely does its job all too well. The LSAT is
> designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: to predict how well the
> taker will perform in the first year of law school. If you track LSAT
> scores against first year grades at a law school where there is a
> statistical variation in the class (i.e., not Harvard where a significant
> portion of the class maxes out the test), you will see an amazing
> correlation between the scores and the grades.
>
> The LSAT, and to a large extent, all law school exams, is a test of the use
> of standard written English. Legal writing is nothing more than "proper
> English on steroids"--much of it takes basic grammar to ridiculous extremes.
> There are sentences in the Internal Revenue Code and the Social Security
> regulations that literally go on for pages. Parsing through that muck is a
> learned skill; it should not be surprising that students with higher English
> proficiency simply have a head start at that task.
>
> The truth about affirmative action is that students admitted on a
> preferential basis simply do not do as well, on average, as their
> traditionally-admitted peers. Most of this is due, IMHO, to the disparate
> ability to write standard written English on the way in. One simply can't
> catch up and improve the ability to wordsmith in three short years,
> especially while stuffing your head full of arcane rules about real
> property, crimes and (ick) corporate taxation.
>
> Please do not take the above as a polemic against affirmative action. It's
> not. I strongly favor retaining those programs. But those programs deal
> only with the effect, not the cause, of the problem of educational
> inequality. People waste a great deal of time arguing about whether it's
> "fair" to "lower standards." Affirmative action is about neither fairness
> nor standards--it's about making more minority professionals in the cheapest
> way possible.
>
> Here's what I mean. When putting the Great Society together in the '60s,
> welfare payments were adopted as the method of choice to maintain the living
> standards of the underclass, despite the foreknowledge that such payments
> would lead to dependency (Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted this from the
> start). Why? Because it was cheaper than doing the "right" thing, which
> was to get these people jobs. Direct payments cost less than economic
> renewal; at the time, it was a conscious choice.
>
> Affirmative action for graduate schools is a lame attempt to get the
> end--more minority professionals--without reforming the means. The reason
> that it's necessary is that minority applicants, on average, don't have the
> same undergraduate opportunities as whites. More whites go to college (and
> "better" colleges when they do) because, on average, secondary education is
> better for whites in this country. And on and on down the food chain until
> you end up at the inner city schools, which suck by any measure. Plus,
> students in the inner city are poor, which is by itself a drag on
> educational opportunity. Cultural factors also don't help.
>
> Rather than spend the enormous amounts of money to fix opportunities
> throughout the entire educational food chain--which WOULD be "fair"--our
> society tries (or tried, until recently) to obtain the same results by
> fooling around with the tip of the iceberg.
>
> Sorry to get political--I promise to stop.
>
> kjf
>
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