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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 8, 2024 2:41:23 GMT
The "problem" with respect to standardized tests is that they cut into the DEI priesthood's degrees of freedom. If she's a member/fellow of the Harvard Corporation, then she and her husband have probably donated and/or raised a ton of money for Harvard, but in a world where there are all kinds of quotas, the idea that her Asian kids never had to worry about whether they could go to Harvard is a little irksome. She wasn't going to send her kids to UMass and give their spots to poor, bright, African-Americans. Palandjian was raised in Hong Kong and came to the U.S. as a teenager.
While an undergraduate at Harvard, she met her future husband, Leon Palandjian, a doctor who worked and invested in life sciences before becoming chief risk officer of his family’s company, Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. His brother Peter, a former professional tennis player who is married to actress Eliza Dushku, is CEO of the $14 billion real-estate conglomerate.
Tracy Palandjian completed a stint at consultant giant McKinsey & Co. before receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School and working at asset manager Wellington Management. She worked for over a decade at the Parthenon Group, a consulting firm that is now part of EY. ... The Palandjians live in a Boston suburb and spend time at a ski condo in the Park City, Utah, area. They have three grown daughters, all of whom have attended Harvard.www.wsj.com/us-news/education/bill-ackmans-friend-inside-harvards-board-99b4bb8c?st=l72v96f5zcnbh1c&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 8, 2024 13:23:34 GMT
If we can just get poor Black kid into elite high schools, then we can predict how they might do at an elite college, even without an SAT score.
But, while Claudine Gay -- and her NYTimes cousin Roxane Gay -- went to Exeter, that's not the case for most.
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Post by doctorquant on Jan 8, 2024 14:10:45 GMT
A while back when I was still working and a member of the faculty senate, our new-ish provost (SERIOUSLY all-in on the DEI agenda) was lamenting how difficult it is to evaluate on a common basis tenure candidates from across the university (e.g., engineering profs vs. liberal arts profs vs. architecture profs, etc.). What she wanted was the faculty as a whole to come up with some "X in engineering = 0.5X in liberal arts = 1.4X in architecture" rubric to make her job easier.
This from her was seriously off-putting to me for a number of reasons. One was the sheer impracticality of it: There's no way in hell the faculty as a whole is going to come up with something that's universally acceptable. Two was the laziness/cowardice it implied: Making those judgements is the fucking provost's job. If it was simply a matter of punching numbers into a spreadsheet and filling out forms as a result, the provost's gig wouldn't be nearly as important as it is.
Finally, I was gobsmacked by the disconnect between her voiced uncertainty re: making decisions that are in her wheelhouse and her absolute certainty that she could equitably effect "equity." If you're uneasy comparing folks along dimensions that are clearly within your metier, how in the hell is it you're so comfortable comparing them along others?
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 8, 2024 15:31:15 GMT
Why is the MSM so desperate to smear any critic of Claudine Gay?
It’s like they want this whole discussion shut down.
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Post by doctorquant on Jan 8, 2024 16:28:18 GMT
I doubt seriously that: 1) the "NO CAUSALITY!" thought escaped the mind of the reviewers of that paper; or 2) said reviewers blew that off because they wanted a Black woman to succeed. The journal's double-blind.
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 8, 2024 16:37:19 GMT
I doubt seriously that: 1) the "NO CAUSALITY!" thought escaped the mind of the reviewers of that paper; or 2) said reviewers blew that off because they wanted a Black woman to succeed. The journal's double-blind.Is that standard? I would point out though that certain topics, and how they're approached, could lead to some pretty educated guesses as to the race of the author.
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 8, 2024 19:24:27 GMT
Defund all of these classes and their professors.
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Post by doctorquant on Jan 8, 2024 19:24:43 GMT
I read briefly through Gay's paper a week or so ago, and I don't recall any particular claims she made re: causality or what-not. But let's stipulate for a moment that she either made a causality claim or came damn close to it. That would be as much (if not more) on the journal as it would be on her. Which is why I seriously doubt that it actually happened.
The journal in question is top-tier, and NO paper gets into such without going through at least one round of serious revisions, etc. At journals at that level, you really are "in battle" with a team consisting of two or more anonymous reviewers AND an associate editor (sometimes more than one). The associate editor takes the reviewers' comments/suggestions and then decides whether to offer an opportunity to revise/resubmit. Authors fortunate enough to get such an opportunity are given ridiculously detailed feedback from the individual reviewers AND the associate editor. These aren't randos, either, but people who are prominent and frequent contributors to peer (or better) journals. These aren't the kind of people who need to be reminded of the correlation =\= causation thing or would let it pass.
It is ridiculously unlikely that either: 1) Gay stumbled re: causality and it slipped through the cracks; or 2) the reviewing team simply let such pass because the work came from a Black author. It's much more likely that your twittering "genius" simply doesn't know what he's talking about.
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Post by doctorquant on Jan 8, 2024 23:55:09 GMT
I've now reread Gay's 2001 paper and don't really find anything out of whack causality-wise. The dude's right that there are alternative mechanisms that are possibly (perhaps likely) to be in play in what she observed (principally she observed that when a district elects a Black Congressional rep, white voter participation in subsequent elections appears to decline). But that's the nature of what she and other social scientists study. And she does use language that has the whiff of causality ... e.g., "affects" rather than "is associated with." But the twitterer in question apparently only reads social science research that's of some political notoriety, because almost everybody in that realm falls into that pattern.
The twitterer reminds me a bit of one of my doctoral professors who was also a geneticist by trade. Arrogant as hell, not at all reluctant to crack on other disciplines. One big difference, however, is that my guy actually accomplished a thing or two. The twitterer's string of twitter attaboys is probably 95% of his c.v.
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 9, 2024 14:32:34 GMT
This I exactly right.
"Academic Freedom" should not extend to teaching antisemitic tropes.
Nothing will change at Harvard if they just choose a new President, but fail to address the system they have allowed to flourish.
These classes and professors need to be defunded.
Unapologetic antisemitism — whether the incidents are few or numerous — is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.
The Harvard online course catalog has a search box. Type in “decolonize.” That word — though surely not the only lens through which to view the current relationship between Europe and the rest of the world — is in the titles of seven courses and the descriptions of 18 more.
Try “oppression” and “liberation.” Each is in the descriptions of more than 80 courses. “Social justice” is in over 100. “White supremacy” and “Enlightenment” are neck and neck, both ahead of “scientific revolution” but behind “intersectionality.”
Though word frequency is an imperfect measure and the precise counts are muddied by duplicate numberings and courses at MIT, this experiment supports the suspicion that the Harvard curriculum has become heavily slanted toward recent fashions of the progressive left.
For example, “intersectionality” was almost unattested before the year 2000, while published uses of “decolonize” have more than tripled since then.
Merchants of hate are repurposing these intellectual goods that universities are producing.
When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.
While Harvard cannot stop the abuse of our teaching, we, the Harvard faculty, can recognize and work to mitigate these impacts.
The political bias in our faculty is now widely accepted. One solution is to use a kind of affirmative action program for conservative thinkers to change the faculty, but that idea is noxious and misses a crucial point.
Professors should not be carrying their ideologies into the classroom. Our job as teachers of “citizens and citizen-leaders” is not to indoctrinate students, but to prepare them to grapple with all of the ideas they will encounter in the societies they will serve.
Instead, individual faculty might diversify what they teach. Committees and departments could enforce a standard that curricula exhibit intellectual diversity and a variety of agreed-upon topics and techniques.
If done correctly, it would not infringe upon individual academic freedom to allow our faculty colleagues to have a stronger role in shaping each others’ syllabi and curricula. Nor would it be improper for the Board of Overseers — with its elaborate Visiting Committee structure — to weigh in on the evident political biases and ideological vectors in our educational program.
As obvious as this all may sound, it would be a big change from the present.
Over the fifty years I have been on the Harvard faculty, the expectation has evolved that individual Harvard professors are free to teach whatever they wish to whomever they wish. It was once the norm for faculty to rotate through courses of unpredictable size and with stable curricula, but now enrollments are predetermined quite rigorously and even introductory courses may change their reading lists and lecture topics drastically when new professors take charge.
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 9, 2024 14:50:42 GMT
This is also true.
It’s one thing for Claudine Gay to go after her colleagues at Harvard who offended her sensibilities.
But it’s unthinkable that a grievance against her, coming from an Extension School graduate would even he given a hearing.
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Post by TheSportsPredictor on Jan 10, 2024 23:38:52 GMT
Where's oop?
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 11, 2024 0:41:23 GMT
He conceded to my superior intellect, and slunk away in shame. I actually have a fondness for oop. I bet he's a nice guy, and I hope we see him again soon.
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Post by TheSportsPredictor on Jan 11, 2024 1:05:43 GMT
He conceded to my superior intellect, and slunk away in shame. I actually have a fondness for oop . I bet he's a nice guy, and I hope we see him again soon. Probably on vacation visiting castles.
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Post by YankeeFan on Jan 11, 2024 1:13:31 GMT
He conceded to my superior intellect, and slunk away in shame. I actually have a fondness for oop . I bet he's a nice guy, and I hope we see him again soon. Probably on vacation visiting castles. Would be ironic. But, the Paris trip, where I avoided oop, and the “castle” trip, were two different trips.
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