<p>They’re not preventing Mankiw from speaking or holding his class…they’re just merely exercising their right to express their disagreement through the act of walking out. </p>
<p>I personally don’t see this as anything more than the crowd exercising their own first amendment rights to show disagreement. What’s the big deal? Students skip out on college classes for all sorts of reasons…including oversleeping. </p>
<p>Are you saying he has the right to a captive audience by virtue of his being one of the most famous economists of the world?</p>
<p>“Perpetual” has different denotative senses, some of which necessitate eternality. The sense “continuing without interruption,” however, does not on its face seem to preclude finiteness, in that continuance is relative to some starting point and can exist over a bounded period, within which the continuance would cease just prior to the later limit. Even if “perpetual” were used in an eternality-implying sense, sometimes it may be worthwhile to sacrifice aversion to redundancy for the sake of clarity. My point was that open-mindedness and tolerance are justifiably subject to interruption. Apologies if the strive for clarity backfired with verbosity.</p>
Remember that top schools are only willing to compromise qualifications so much in order to achieve diversity, which is why URMs still make up much less then their representation in the population. Thus, you can’t really tell whether top colleges are already compromising qualifications in order to get 10% conservatives.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s evidence that top colleges compromise to any extent in their consideration of URMs. I’m sure that there are enough URMs whose scores and grades are up to par so that full proportional representation could be achieved. The higher acceptance rate among URMs reflects the lower ratio of qualified URM applicants to proportionally allocated slots. A lessened need to discriminate among subjective factors for URM applicants is not a compromise on qualifications.</p>
<p>Well, that’s why I was suggesting remedial education.</p>
<p>And Mill also said: “I never meant to say that the conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”</p>
<p>you have to understand that hunt sincerely believes (and his past comments confirm this) that–by definition–so-called URMs are less ‘qualified’ than other applicants. he’s actually made this statement on several occasions on this site.</p>
<p>Sure, I will. In my first post, I stated that one frequently cited reason for affirmative action appears not to apply here. This justification is that the relevant group is disadvantaged by admissions policies in ways that do not necessarily reveal a lack of merit, as can be argued for low-income incomes or those who are racially discriminated against. </p>
<p>I then questioned whether another common reason for affirmative action – facilitation of productive diversity – validly applied here. I gave two points in support of the idea that it did not: first, that liberalism by its nature (and if applied appropriately) will give more consideration to values underlying conservatism than conservatism would do for liberalism and, second, that the great liberal majority at top schools may be a contributory factor for the large number of political discussions that can happen on campus because it is less likely that a conservative would be offended. Implicitly, I was supposing that offense was not a valuable factor in discourse. In effect, a better balance of ideologies, even if it could promote higher quality discussion (and the first point questions this), may actually disincentivize discussion itself. </p>
<p>I also suggested that there could be other, more effective means to more fairly incorporate opposing or mitigating viewpoints. The later-proposed idea of subsidizing conservative student groups is one possibility. At the end of my first point, I – like many others – also expect that this policy would recruit a lot of lying liberals even if its intent was to help out an underrepresented group.</p>
<p>This viewpoint would hinge on the accuracy of an assumption that admissions officers’ discrimination among subjective factors is a reliable means of identifying better “qualified” applicants, even when the objective factors would not yield this conclusion. Common sense says otherwise, and no evidence I have ever seen belies this intuition.</p>
I’m sorry to have to follow up my little jab at conservatives to respond to this. I have never said any such thing. What I have said, and it is demonstrably true, is that there aren’t enough URMs with extremely high stats to go around for the most selective colleges–all you have to do is look at the SAT distribution to see that. As a result, the most selective colleges accept some URMs with stats that are lower than those of the average unhooked student. Otherwise, they would have even fewer URMs than they do. As I’ve said many, many times, I think it’s a good thing that they do this. Of course, a minority student who has the same grades and scores as a white student isn’t by definition less qualified–he’s equally qualified. I hope I’ve cleared that up for you.</p>
<p>I would point out that many students who feel very strongly about their conservative values, particularly social values, choose to attend schools with like minded individuals. We have a family friend who wanted nothing more than to attend Biola in California. Others dream of attending one of the BYU campuses, or Wheaton, or Azuza Pacific. There was a thread a while back from a young lady who attended private high school in MN and all her classmates wanted to go the Bethel. She had no idea how to search for something else because Bethel was the expectation of students and school advisors alike. I can’t speculate on whether this would also hold true for more garden variety conservatives, but part of the expectation among some very socially conservative youth is that they will meet and marry someone from their college relatively young. With this in mind it makes sense to go someplace where you are most likely to find that person rather than be the fly in the ointment at Reed on Grinnell.</p>
<p>There are plenty of conservative students on most campuses, though they can be hard to discern. The real campus diversity problem is with the faculty, which on most campuses leans far, far left. This would not be a problem if liberal faculty members were capable of keeping their political ideology out of the classroom and the grade book, but unfortunately that is seldom the case.</p>
<p>Are you saying that this group and conservatives are one and the same? If so, I guess you could kill two birds with one stone. Kind of like Senator Roman Hruska’s famous comment about Clement Haysworth that mediocre intellects deserve representation on the U.S. Supreme Court as much as anyone else.</p>
<p>CASmom - I’m curious in which subjects other than political science, maybe environmental history and women’s studies a bias of any kind might manifest. I certainly was not aware of any slant in the classes that I took in college including things like Calculus, Chemistry, Plant Identification, Physical Geography, American Literature of the Late 19th Century, Physical Anthropology, Survey of Western Art, Comparative Literature and the like. Maybe there’s some insidious message in assigning a class to read Edith Wharton or Kate Chopin but I’m prone to believe that it’s just part of the literary cannon.</p>
<p>Things must have changed since I was in college. I can remember NO ONE, not even the Marxist that taught Money and Banking inserting his/her liberal point of view (or conservative) into any of my classes.</p>
<p>But my children have had both conservative and liberal preschool teachers try to push their agenda on them.</p>
<p>Colleges absolutely need conservative thinkers; representatives of both parties need to be well represented and well educated. I wrote something that I decided was too political so I deleted it. But I will say that we need to respect both parties because we need each other to have the type of society we all really want.</p>
<p>What about those devil’s advocates that can argue both sides regardless of their personal beliefs? Never thought about those kids have you? Also, I have not read the rest of the thread, but how does one distinguish a conservative from a liberal? Most people are neither one; they are all in between.</p>