Would you undertake to stop using it?
Iâll consider it, but so far I am not persuaded I should. I tend to think this sort of satire is appropriate, and so far if anything I am thinking it was a positive since it ended up with me learning some new things about the history of the Claremont Colleges that I found interesting and useful to know.
Is it not just an abbreviation, with nothing sinister about it?
That was always a possibility. But @NiceUnparticularMan has gone to great lengths to say the quiet part out loud:
I commend him for being honest about it.
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But NiceUnparticularMan didnât coin the acronym, so I am confused as to why his âsaying the quiet part out loudâ has any bearing on the term? You would have to trace the acronym back to its origin to actually understand the meaning behind it. Without that knowledge, you are attaching feelings to an arbitrary organization of characters into a makeshift word. There are few combinations of those letters that form an actual word - three, in fact. In my opinion, WASP was just the first one chosen to represent the 4 schools. Although I donât have any objection to SWAP or PAWS, if you wish to get one of those to catch on
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Iâve no doubt you sincerely believe that. I just happen to think youâre wrong.
Fine, but I think it would take an awful lot of cultural unawareness not to know the meaning of WASP, especially when applied to a group of colleges not at all randomly chosen for their elite status.
Because he did a good job of revealing the hidden meaning.
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To be clear, I have always just assumed that was a satirical joke someone came up with. In fact, what I imagined was this was an evolution of the HYP concept, and so the joke was indirectly on at least those colleges as well.
And perhaps the joke really was on the whole mindset involved in these sorts of initialisms, and related concepts like the Big Three, the Little Three, Ivies, Ivy+, Little Ivies, and so on. I thought âWASPâ might be satirizing the very idea of certain people still trying to identify an elite within the elite, where elitism is defined in a way at least coincident with these sorts of very wealthy private educational institutions that have long stood in contrast to the system of public universities.
A contrast that has frequently been very problematic, not least when seen through modern egalitarian and meritocratic norms. And a contrast that is in fact not entirely done being problematic, as things like the reaction to the information learned in the Harvard lawsuit, and subsequent Chetty study, suggest.
As I noted before, I had the same assumption with SWAMP, meaning I assumed that was conceived as a joke with a similar satirical point.
However, I donât actually know any of that to be true. Maybe, in fact, that was mostly just me projecting my own thoughts on all this onto the term, which is entirely possible.
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Fine. But youâll have to explain to me what connection swamps have to the history of elitist colleges. Without more, the acronym SWAMP sounds less like satire than a complete non-sequitor.
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So there is a long tradition of associating US political-economic elites with swamps. One story is it goes back to Washington, DC, being laid out in swampland; there are also allusions to draining swamps to fight malaria borne by mosquitoes; and there is a general connotation of vile predation and corruption.
My understanding is the earlier usages (going back to the late 19th Century) mostly came from socialists and other critics of the capitalist system, so they would refer to something like âthe capitalist swampâ. But later, and through today, it also started being used by anti-intellectual/anti-government types.
But either way, it would make some sense to see these elite colleges as part of the breeding grounds of such âswampâ creatures. Again, though, the degree to which that is what people other than me actually are thinking when using SWAMP is pure speculation on my part.
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I see.
My angle on the WASP discussion is this - itâs less about what the institutions did or did not do and the accident of their names, and more about the attempted humor and levity that accompanies a particular ordering of their names by those who do it.
As to the former, the schools did what they did, and everybody knows it; and theyâre named as they are, and I assume the individual names themselves are not the subject of great controversy in the way that is W&Lâs - maybe Amherstâs will be someday, but as far as I know the change of mascot has quelled the rage for the time being. But with regard to the latter, it seems advisable to drop the use of any acronym that is basically short-hand for a narrow band of privilege unless it is being used strictly in the critique of said historical privilege. Here, when used as a casual and light-hearted reference to certain elite educational institutions, places to which those who didnât fit the criteria of âWASPâ had very limited or no access, one could reasonably argue it is indeed playing with fire.
We live in a world in which the words we utter are held to the highest account, particularly on matters of race, sexual/gender identity and/or preference, and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and religion (though I expect religion is going to make a run here soon). I am not convinced, for example, that W&L wonât eventually succumb to the pressure to change its name in my lifetime. Against that backdrop, yeah, I can see the point: donât casually use âWASPâ in light hearted or humorous parallels to a former state of affairs in which a narrow band of people had all the power and access. Elite private and small LACs that existed primarily to serve this elite demographic is probably not the best context.
PS: Iâve used WASP many times. But I just talked myself into dropping it moving forward.
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He didnât pull their scholarships, but he did tell them they wouldnât make the team. Many of them transferred to schools where they could play (and get a scholarship). Throughout the season, I heard former CU players announced as now playing for Oregon, Oklahoma State, some of the Texas schools. They werenât all kicked to the curb.
The NCAA has rules about pulling scholarships, so many of them were protected. (And honestly, many of them shouldnât have been playing in a Power 5 conference)
Holy sub-thread resurrection from November 6th! Deion managed to close out the season by losing 3 more PAC-12 games since I wrote that post you responded to. Itâs funny to be reminded about that, so thanks!
Somehow you failed to respond to my point about his insults towards the players, which was one of the key things that was relevant to a NESCAC discussion comparing him to the former Williams coach.
One thing thatâs particularly interesting about the acronym âWASPâ and those four institutions, they have translated their great wealth into a transformed student body.
Amherst class of 2027, domestic white students: 37%. Pomona: 24.7% white from class of 2026 (lazy google searching here, so I went with whatâs easy to find). Swarthmore, class of 2027, 56% domestic students of color. Williams: admitted 45% students of color in 2027 (not sure who actually came).
At what point do we switch language from âPrimarily White Institutionsâ to âHistorically White Institutions?â On a childâs tour at one of these schools a few years ago, the tour guide was explaining what it was like to be Hispanic at a PWI. And at the level of alums, board of trustees, admins, faculty, yep. But students? No longer.
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I work at a university very similar in prestige and selectivity to those being discussed here, and the composition of these groups is a much bigger deal than the student body and why âPWIâ remains relevant (and will for the foreseeable future). These are the decision-makers and influencers who determine what the experience is like for students. While intentions (and admissions decisions) might be shifting, fundamentally these schools are still wired primarily for white, wealthy students when it comes to student experience.
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Yes, I try to keep that in mind and balance it against the fact that at the beginning of the last century, certain colleges in the northeast were leading the pack in the other direction:
At the time Jewish enrollment was rising, academic performance was the only criteria for college admission. At the turn of the 20th century, applicants began taking the first standardized admissions test, which was meant to bring some order to rather messy applications processes. While the exam was not meant to keep out Jews, its first incarnation was designed around the curriculum at the tony boarding schools filled with White Protestant students, who learned Greek, Latin and other classic subjects not taught in the urban public schools immigrants attended.
Jews were not expected to do well on the test, {Mark E.} Oppenheimer said, but it turned out that they did, and Jewish enrollment began rising at elite colleges.
So restrictions began. Dartmouth, Williams and Amherst colleges as well as Princeton University moved to cap the size of their classes â with what were effectively quotas â as did Harvard, while Dartmouth, Yale and other schools introduced legacy admissions to favor Protestant boys whose fathers had attended, Oppenheimer said.
A century ago, elite universities restricted Jewish enrollment. They created the modern college admissions process. - The Washington Post
We also know, from other evidence, that such restrictions on Jewish enrollment continued at some highly regarded universities well into the 1960s.
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A useful insight, and it 100% maps onto my expectations.
I wonder, though, about the difference in âbrandingâ between HBCU and PWI? HBCU: proud of their history, and acknowledge the important role they have played. PWI: not so proud of their history (nor should they be!!! racist and exclusive in so many ways!), but it is the history that makes them a PWI⊠Iâm also curious; is PWI used at non-elite institutions? (which are equally white in their history, in most cases, but somewhat less elite). All this said not from a position of making a point - more just random musings as the rain keeps falling and keeps me from being outside!
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I have definitely heard the term applied to a variety of publics. Of course during segregation, in relevant states there would have been mandated exclusively white publics. As I understand it, the phrase PWI is usually meant to refer to post-desegregation colleges that remain largely white, but again I have definitely seen it used in application to public colleges that were exclusively white during segregation and remain majority white now, or indeed public colleges that are simply located in places where their student body ends up mostly white.
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I would think about this through the lens of founding purpose of the different types of institutions. HBCUs were founded during Reconstruction to provide paths to economic and social mobility for Black people, in institutions run by Black people. Tribal colleges were founded and run by tribes to propagate tribal culture and educate Indigenous students in that context. There are four other similar designations for other racial/cultural groups, including the umbrella âMinority Serving Institutions.â
PWI is the default term for colleges and universities that arenât any of those, reflecting the fact that most colleges and universities in this country, âeliteâ and otherwise, were, by default, founded by white people for white people. Reproducing the social order was largely the point of these institutions.
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[Aside]
Not a NESCAC, but Bluefield State College in WV has the dubious distinction of being both a HBCU and a PWI at the same timeâŠ
[/Aside]
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