Friday, April 29, 2011

Affirmative Action or Racism?

I can't seem to get away from the politics, but that is all you hear about on the radio, and I need to write something that willl get the commenters busy ( other than waffles).

First, the wedding. yes it takes the horros of teh weather off the front pages, but is it really so terrible to lead with a feel good story once in a while? i think not.

Now on to the latest Trump issue. He is now being called a racist for questioning whether our leader had the grades to get in to Harvard on his own. Huge outcry (from the left, of course, nicely cloaked in the suposed respectability of "mainstream media"), much hand wringing.

Let me ask you something, what the heck did these people THINK would happen when the people who were the beneficiaries of affirmative aaction eventually suceeded? The program championed by the left to help "the little people"? OF COURSE everyone who might have, or did benefit would be suspect, taht is the whole nature of the program. lets push less qualified people in, and once in, see if they can live up the the expectations. There is nothing wrong with that, but the question still remains, did they deserve the push based onthe criteria set up by those institutions.

I remember seeing an article about a doctor who was featured as the success story of the affirmative action programs who had opened clinics in depressed areas. A few years later he had his license revoked for unbeleivable incompetence.

My own case in point was in law school.

I had a minority friend who definitely did not have the grades or the LSAT scores to meet the criteria of my law school. They took him in. He was a phenomenal writer, and my partner for a moot court competition. He was so good that he wrote on to the Law Review, which is no easy feat. I guess he did okay is school ( i didn't discuss grades with him). However, I lost track of him after the bar exam. Never saw his name on the passed rolls, never found him as an attorney, and have no idea what happened to him.

So if he couldn't pass the bar, what was the point of taking the slot away from someone more deserving with the grades and scores who never got the opportunity to become a lawyer? And had he suceeded, would people not have wondered how he got to where he was? And would that human tendency to wonder be wrong? The only thing wrong is that those minority students who DID have the grades and scored would be tainted with the same brush of doubt, wrongfully so.

The problem is not Trump questioning, the problem is that there is such a mechanism in place that allows him to.

3 comments:

irrelivant said...

I heard of a frum boy who got into harvard because his mother is from some spanish country

G6 said...

Interesting that you just wrote this.

Have you seen this article?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html

Dipsy said...

i think it is hard for students that are pushed into places they can get into only through affirmative action. however if they do well there than all the merits are theirs.