<p>
</p>
<p>This is certainly possible. There was an Asian father who posted on this forum about how his son’s counselor seemed to think he was a STEM applicant who should apply to MIT even though his interests were obviously toward the humanities. Despite being told otherwise, the counselor couldn’t seem to understand that the kid wasn’t a STEM applicant. So stereotypes may color the recommendations.</p>
<p>Well, I notice a number of casual references to Clarence Thomas’ disappointing performance on the supreme court, as if we all know what that is. I don’t. I guess one of our law experts can explain this.</p>
<p>I’m not even talking about stereotypes. I was clearly considered the top boy at my school. There was another kid whose grades were almost as good as mine, but he was pretty universally considered far inferior to me as a student, because he was a STEM nerd type who didn’t participate in a lot of ECs, didn’t engage in community politics, didn’t drink or chase girls with the boys, and didn’t expose himself to butt-kickings by his academic inferiors on the athletic fields. He was a working-class Polish scholarship kid, so it wasn’t a question of ethnic stereotypes at all. Even the math and science teachers didn’t love him – they loved his intelligence and curiosity, but not his lack of manly virtues, and also what they saw as a lack of ambition to broaden himself.</p>
<p>They were wrong about him, by the way. He was shy, socially awkward, and easily intimidated, but he had a real soul. It took him a while to get that his teachers really wanted him to pay attention to some stuff he had been disregarding because it seemed dumb to him. </p>
<p>We were never really in competition for anything. He only wanted to go to a tech school, and one closer to home than MIT. But if we had been in competition, the school would have done backflips to make certain I won, so that students in the lower grades would know to act like I did, not like he did.</p>
<p>sewhappy: Thomas writes few opinions, and they are rarely very interesting. He hardly ever votes differently from Scalia (who writes lots of opinions, many of which are interesting, but fewer majority opinions than a great Justice would). He doesn’t participate in the public discussion of a case that goes on at the argument.</p>
<p>^ In other words he doesn’t play to the crowd but just considers the cases and casts, what we can assume, is a considered opinion. Must Supreme Court justices be loud to be good? Thomas has stated that he does not like to give interviews because he believes that the media has a preconceived storyline in mind for him. He went through what he himself described as an “electronic lynching” when he was up for confirmation. Is it so hard to fathom why he likes to be circumspect? Does that mean he’s dumb?</p>
<p>I have found in life that some of the most eloquent speakers and writers are pretty vacuous upstairs. </p>
<p>My guess is that Thomas is reluctant to craft opinions often because he believes himself a target of the media and the liberal establishment and that anything he commits to print will be scrutinized and found to be evidence that he is . . . dumb!</p>
<p>I see this as analogous to classic bullying. When you’re ridiculed and bullied by a mob, one response – and often the sensible response – is to simply hunker down so as not to attract the mob’s attention.</p>
<p>The irony, of course, is that hunkering down posture is now evidence of being dumb.</p>
<p>I disagree with just about everything Condi Rice did, but I think it would be hard for any one to argue that she isn’t very, very, very smart. Sewhappy, one curious thing about Clarence Thomas is that unlike other justices he never ever asks a question from the bench. It’s very weird and certainly leads to suspicions that it’s because he’s not too swift on his feet. I think he just refuses to do so out of orneriness now.</p>
<p>JHS - you must have missed my post musing about high school recommendation letters - oh, about 100 pages back! ;)</p>
<p>I think I posted something about recs, too. I think there’s a real possibility that some Asian kids get recs that say things like “always well-prepared, studious, polite,” etc. They might look positive if you read them in isolation, and the recommenders might think they are positive. But they might be a problem if the recommendation for another kid says, “innovative, creative thinker, always willing to challenge conventional approaches.” And while these might just be stereotypes that have no real relation to the different kids, it could be that these phrases might represent real differences between kids based on their cultures. It’s odd to say this, but it’s possible that one can be too polite and deferential to authority, at least if your goal is impressing teachers in this country.</p>
<p>sewhappy – Some of that might be true, except Thomas gives speeches all the time to friendly crowds, has written a (pretty good) autobiography, and the opinions he writes are generally ideological screeds, not craftsmanlike consideration of technical cases. Thomas IS a practiced,eloquent speaker, by the way. He has a lifetime appointment, and together with four other colleagues at any point he shares about as much power as anyone on Earth but the President of the United States and maybe Putin and Hu Jintao. </p>
<p>He was an aggressive, ideological bully himself before his appointment to the Supreme Court. Unlike many Supreme Court appointees, he did not come out of nowhere. He was the #1 Republican candidate to replace Thurgood Marshall for years before his actual appointment, and he was publicly shortlisted to replace Brennan. He worked to put himself in that position – it doesn’t just happen to anybody. Practically his whole career has been spent in Washington.</p>
<p>The posture of being the traumatized victim of bullies in the press fits him very poorly.</p>
<p>Maybe when the secret histories of the current Court come out, it will turn out that he was influential on his colleagues, and worked behind the scenes to craft majorities. That’s what happened to Brennan. Everyone knew he was a leader on the Warren Court, but until legal historians got access to the papers of the Justices people didn’t realize how much he had contributed to other people’s opinions, and how much of the Chief’s heavy lifting he had done. But the rumors on Thomas that filter out from those who pay more attention to the Court than I do – conservative as well as liberal – do not portray him that way.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m honestly confused, thought he was considered woefully unprepared for the appointment.</p>
<p>JHS, I would just caution that our ideology can really drive our judgements on people. Maybe we need more of an ideology-blind society?</p>
<p>Maybe I’m tending to side with the argument that bias against Asian kids exists because my own was very “Asian” in his application profile – stats, earnest student, well behaved, not a big athlete, not super popular . . . just a really good student. I think I suspect deep down that if he’d checked the Asian box and his surname was Lin, he would have ended up waitlisted and rejected to a number of places that accepted him.</p>
<p>I think JHS is talking about a different kind of “preparation” for the appointment. Perhaps “positioned” is the word to use.</p>
<p>Nobody said that Scalia, Alito, or Roberts was unprepared. They did say it about Harriet Miers, though. But Thomas was an interesting case, in which the injection of race made people say things that were blatantly untrue. </p>
<p>But just to bring it back to the topic–nobody thinks that Thomas was chosen for the Supreme Court in order to atone for past discrimination against blacks, or to represent the point of view of most black people. I suppose, in a sense, he was chosen for the purposes of “diversity,” because there was this sense that this was the “black” seat on the Supreme Court. But Thomas would not have made the top 50 candidates if he had been white. Was this good or bad use of a racial classification? That’s a political question, I guess.</p>
<p>No more WASPs on the Supreme Court. Which in a sense is a good thing, because no one can complain that the good-ol-boy-WASPs are still the power-elite, at least as to 2/3 of the highest levels of our govt.</p>
<p>sewhappy, as I said above, Thomas was appointed at a very young age, and with no (or little) relevant prior experience, to a series of increasingly high-level jobs. The last, at age 40, was to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, at which point there was little doubt that President Bush considered him a possible Supreme Court appointment. As Chair of the EEOC, he was very high-profile and very controversial, mainly for his public opposition to most of what the agency was doing. He wasn’t considered a transformative leader, though – more a self-promotional ideologue who walled himself off from the agency he was supposed to be heading, and created a lot of chaos while scoring points off his subordinates. Other Reagan appointees had similar hostility to the historical direction of their agencies, but turned things around and did a bunch of things that they considered valid. I don’t think that was Thomas.</p>
<p>That’s why he was both high-profile and underqualified. He had been an unqualified Assistant Secretary at DOE for a short time, an underqualified Chair of the EEOC for a number of years, then an underqualified Court of Appeals judge for two years. Contrast that resume with the resumes of other recent Supreme Court appointees from either party, and you should notice the difference. He was younger, and had accomplished far less, than anyone else.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Correction noted and accepted. I applaud your honesty in saying this as well as acknowledging pages back that "URM"s are getting in not because of their “sterling qualities” in holistic admissions but because they are "URM"s.</p>
<p>
</p>
<ol>
<li><p>But Justice Thomas often expresses his views in separate concurrences (e.g. Grutter, Gratz, and Parents Involved).</p></li>
<li><p>From 1994 to 2003, Justices Souter and Ginsburg voted together 85.6% time compared to 86.7% of the time for Justices Scalia and Thomas. Is either Justice Souter or Justice Ginsburg a leech off the other?</p></li>
<li><p>As I pointed out before, both Justices Brennan and Marshall were also known to be quiet on the bench. Does their stoicity likewise suggest underqualification?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>My point in bringing up Justice Thomas isn’t to derail the thread but rather to highlight what I view as an inconsistency. poetsheart, at least, seems to have acknowledged that.</p>
<p>I just took a look at Sonja Sotomayor on the internet for a cursory sense of her qualifications. Please explain to me why hers are adequate but Thomas’ were not.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is such an eye opener, and such a sad story. Manly virtues? ROFL!!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Totally happens. That’s why I think recommendations are subjective BS.</p>
<p>
I’m sorry I said anything about Thomas. Your question was answered, by me and others, on the politics forum that was shut down.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>She is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa, and winner of the Pyne Prize, which the University describes as “the highest general distinction conferred on an undergraduate.” She also had 11 years experience on the U.S. Court of Appeals. If you cannot see the difference, you have my sympathies. </p>
<p>There are so many conserative jurists who are more qualified than Thomas. It pains me that someone like Richard Posner was never nominated. Frank Easterbrook is another who is more deserving. That this question is even being debated is silly.</p>
<p>This thread has allowed many thoughtful and well-reasoned opinions to be expressed on a dividing issue. However, mostly because of its length, we also realize that the original discussions have now been replaced by endless repetition of the same opinions. We believe that everyone has had ample chance to make his or her voice heard on this subject. </p>
<p>We also were forced to note that the quality and scope of the discussions have been harmed by increasing acrimony and ad hominem attacks.</p>
<p>Since CC’s objective is to remain a friendly and welcoming community, we have made the decision to close this thread as well as threads that are addressing very similar issues concurrently. We thank you for your participation </p>