How do Ivy League universities make sure that they are only admitting reliable conformist tools these days? By incorporating loyalty oaths to liberal group think and political correctness in the application process.
Glen Ricketts and Peter Wood describe the college applications diversity essay in the latest National Association of Scholars newsletter.
The CAO [Common Application Online] at Yale, for example, asks prospective students:
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
That’s virtually identical with what you can expect to find at dozens of other institutions, where “diversity†is cultivated with tedious uniformity.
Let’s weigh this question. The first sentence simply asserts that the “range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences†adds to the “educational mix.†Few people would doubt that, and the sentence is no doubt written to command bland assent. But if we force it to stand up for inspection, it displays a remarkable intellectual slovenliness. When we go to college, we do indeed benefit from encountering people with views and experiences other than our own. But that encounter depends on something else: a shared commitment to the broader purposes of education. The enlivening “mix†that Yale would like to foster requires students, at some level, to put aside differences at least long enough to consider one another’s views.
The “diversity†doctrine doesn’t necessarily prevent that deeper sharing from taking place, but it does cut against it and urges students instead to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale CAO question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity.
The second sentence in the assignment (“Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.â€) is a masterpiece of question-begging. What of the student who has slowly and painfully worked his way out of psychological isolation or social alienation to achieve a sense of identification with the larger community? Such a person would seem to have no acceptable answer to the task of explaining “the importance of diversity†to his own life. Would the Yale admissions office look favorably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.â€
No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbor insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.
These “diversity†essay questions are never innocent. They are a tool to keep college applicants aligned with the dominant ideology on campus, which continues to favor group categorizations over both individuality and the broader claims of shared community.
I would not have gotten in in the current era. No doubt about it.
I would have written a belligerent and full-throated denunciation of group identity and privileges, ruthlessly pointing out its inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisies, making the argument for intellectual diversity, and I suppose I would have attended some very different college from Yale.
Back at the end of October in 2008, Peggy Noonan hurriedly jumped on the express train to the Finland Station, endorsing Barack Obama in quite warm terms, and dismissing regrets or apologies by pointing to the mandate of heaven.
[L]et’s be frank. Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves.
Peggy is still holding on to history’s roller-coaster car for dear life but, happily, the turns of the track have brought Peggy (along with David Brooks and the rest of the establishment commentariat) back to the right side. This week, Peggy Noonan, rather than praising Barack Obama, was delivering the ultimate editorial coup de grace.
On Wednesday, President Obama gave a news conference to share his thoughts. Viewers would have found it disappointing if there had been any viewers. The president is speaking, in effect, to an empty room. From my notes five minutes in: “This wet blanket, this occupier of the least interesting corner of the faculty lounge, this joy-free zone, this inert gas.” By the end I was certain he will never produce a successful stimulus because he is a human depression.
Actually I thought the worst thing you can say about a president: He won’t even make a good former president.
His detachment is so great, it is even from himself. As he spoke, he seemed to be narrating from a remove. It was like hearing the audiobook of Volume I of his presidential memoirs. “Obama was frustrated. He honestly didn’t understand what the country was doing. It was as if they had compulsive hand-washing disorder. In ’08 they washed off Bush. Now they’re washing off Obama. There he is, swirling down the drain! It’s all too dramatic, too polar. The morning after the election it occurred to him: maybe he should take strong action. Maybe he should fire America! They did well in 2008, but since then they’ve been slipping. They weren’t giving him the followership he needed. But that wouldn’t work, they’d only complain. He had to keep his cool. His aides kept telling him, ‘Show humility.’ But they never told him what humility looked like. What was he supposed to do, burst into tears and say hit me? Not knowing how to feel humility or therefore show humility he decided to announce humility: He found the election ‘humbling,’ he said.”
Guy Fawkes arrested in the cellar of Parliament with the explosives.
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot;
There is no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!’
Early in the morning of November 5, Guy Fawkes crept, torch in hand, into the cellar beneath the House of Lords in the Palace of Westminster. In that cellar, he and his fellow conspirators had previously placed a cache of 1800 pounds ((36 barrels, or 800 kg) of gunpowder. Just as he was about to ignite the barrels, blowing himself and the House of Lords to Kingdom Come, the torch was snatched from his hand by a man named Peter Heywood.
Fawkes was arrested and taken before the privy council where he remained defiant. When asked by one of the Scottish lords what he had intended to do with so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered him, “To blow you Scotch beggars back to your own native mountains!â€
So went the attempted Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The intention of the plotters was to use the explosion, timed to coincide with the opening of Parliament, to kill King James I and eliminate much of the ruling Protestant aristocracy. They also intended to kidnap the royal children, then raise the standard of revolt in the Midlands with the object of restoring the freedom to practice Catholicism in England.
Dr. Mercury, at Maggie’s Farm, is on the side of Gunpowder Treason, and serves up a nice video excerpt from James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005).
There was pushback from the Pentagon press office, and in a piece by Jonathan Weisman in a Wall Street Journal blog, pooh pooh’ing yesterday’s report from two major Indian media outlets, the Press Trust of India (PTI) and New Dehli Television (NDTV), that an entire US carrier group of 35 ships had been dispatched to hover off Mumbai to inderdict sea lanes and potentially provide air cover for the presidential visit.
The Pentagon press officer characterized the reports in the Indian media as absurd.
I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy — some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier — in support of the president’s trip to Asia,†said Morrell at today’s Pentagon briefing. “That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.â€
The US Navy does not provide on the Internet direct indications of the present location of US carrier groups. But general news reports indicate that at the present time there are, in fact, two US carriers, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) in the US 5th Fleet Area of Responsibility.
Thus, 20% of the American carrier force was already in the neighborhood.
It would not be completely surprising if one of the two groups was tasked in addition to its normal duties with operating special patrols looking for terrorist ship traffic approaching Mumbai and assigned air patrol duties in connection with the Obama visit.
Wikipedia says: “On October 17, 2010, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) and guided missile cruiser USS Cape St. George (CG 71) arrived off the coast of Pakistan to support the coalition troop surge in landlocked Afghanistan”
If you have a carrier group “off the coast of Pakistan,” it is indeed in a suitable position to interdict the sea lanes off Mumbai and to provide air support in the region of that city.
How reasonable presidential security measures are, and how justifiable their cost, is inevitably a matter of opinion. A recent video taken in Seattle during a campaign visit just before the recent election by President Obama gives some indication of the scale of ordinary domestic security measures. Watch the video and tell me you don’t think they’d put a carrier group on alert.
Theo Spark labels this video “Obama Goes for Pizza,” but the French source merely says that Obama Has Quite an Escort.
The video’s British title, referring to going for pizza, like the Indian press reports, may feature an element of exaggeration in phraseology. Obama may simply have been traveling anywhere in Seattle or leaving for the airport. The carrier and its 34 escort ships were clearly already somewhere not terribly far away.
But all you have to do is look at the video and read about the tunnel and the removal of coconuts and you know that, give or take a shade of self-indulgent reportorial emphasis, the substance of the story was not wrong.
Obama didn’t “take” a carrier group with him. It was already in the general area, but New Dehli and Mumbai are not Republican strongholds. The Indian media has no dog in domestic American political fights, and if they felt moved to poke fun at the scale and expense of security measures going on in their own backyard for the presidential visit, their reaction was not partisan or contrived. They really were amused.
An American president visiting a foreign country needs to bring along some staff, equipment, and a protection detail. Brarack Obama seems to need a little more staff and protection than most presidents. He needs 800 rooms worth of staff and requires a fleet headed by a carrier for protection.
The White House will, of course, stay in Washington but the heart of the famous building will move to India when President Barack Obama lands in Mumbai on Saturday.
Communications set-up, nuclear button, a fleet of limousines and majority of the White House staff will be in India accompanying the President on this three-day visit that will cover Mumbai and Delhi.
He will also be protected by a fleet of 34 warships, including an aircraft carrier, which will patrol the sea lanes off the Mumbai coast during his two-day stay there beginning Saturday.
Barack Obama’s planned visit to Mani Bhavan —the Gandhi museum — on November 6, soon after he reaches Mumbai. On Monday, US secret agents visited the museum to plan Obama’s security detail.
They were accompanied by officers of Mumbai Police and civic officials of the D ward (where Mani Bhavan is located). While inspecting the route and the buildings lining up the route to the museum, the Americans detected a skyscraper near Peddar road and also found the area to be highly populated.
Since it is difficult to monitor such a congested area, they came up with a quick solution which left the Indians accompanying them amazed: A bomb-proof over-ground tunnel — to be installed by US military engineers in just an hour.
The tunnel would be a kilometre long and measure 12ft by 12ft — enough to let Obama’s cavalcade pass through. The tunnel would be centrally air-conditioned, fitted with close-circuit television cameras, and will be heavily guarded at every point, including, of course, its entry and exit.
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Even with his own personal tunnel, there remained a coconut threat to be neutralized.
While President Obama may have taken one on the jaw in Tuesday’s elections, officials in India are seeing to it he doesn’t take one on the head during his upcoming visit.
City officials in Mumbai have ordered the removal of all the coconuts from the trees around a museum dedicated to Gandhi for fear one could come loose and fall on the President’s head.
“We told the authorities to remove the dry coconuts from trees near the building,” Meghshyam Ajgaonkar, executive secretary of the museum, told the BBC. “Why take a chance?”
Three Iowa Supreme Court justices lost their seats Tuesday in a historic upset fueled by their 2009 decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry.
Vote totals from 96 percent of Iowa’s 1,774 precincts showed Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit with less than the simple majority needed to stay on the bench.
Their removal marked the first time an Iowa Supreme Court justice has not been retained since 1962, when the merit selection and retention system for judges was adopted.
The decision is expected to echo to courts throughout the country, as conservative activists had hoped.
