Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ora!daemon
From: gazit@cs.duke.edu (Hillel Gazit)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Feminism's ill effects on men?
Message-ID: <656121920@lear.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 90 00:05:22 GMT
References: <974@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <1990Oct15.210918.7972@ora.com>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: Nefolet shel nemushot (Fallout of Wimps)
Lines: 58
Approved: ambar@ora.com

In article <1990Oct15.210918.7972@ora.com> mydog!gcf@hombre.masa.com writes:

>In the 1950's, it was widely believed that if Yale, Harvard, and Princeton
>admitted students purely on the basis of merit, a majority of their
>student bodies would have been Jewish.  For various reasons this was
>thought undesirable.  The rules were adjusted accordingly[1], probably
>without overt discussion.  

My *impression* is that they decided that "better Jews than asians".

>wanted to level the playing field, we would devise an engineering
>certification test, and say that anyone who passed it was an engineer,
>whether they got their knowledge from RPI or the public library.  

The drawback of this method is that the screening may be 
based on criteria that have little to do with engineering.

I'll give you an example:
I know a student who is in the bottom 13% in GRE Verbal score,
and in the top 3% in the GRE CS advance test.  If admission to graduate
schools in CS were based on knowledge of computer science, then people
like him will take some of the best places.  Therefore, it was decided
that the Verbal score is much more important than the CS score.

If you would let a central government agency to decide what an engineer
should know, then we may end up with Verbal score, African studies
and some feminism...   (Stop laughing; I met Russian engineers who
knew very little about engineering.)

In short, the field will not be leveled, but an engineering degree will
not be worth very much anymore (for companies that need *engineers*).

>practiced by others.  Out-groups are involved in a structure of
>discrimination or prejudice, or they wouldn't be out-groups.  There
>would be no "out."  It is silly to require them to be egalitarian when
>there is no equality.  

I don't ask them to be egalitarian (I'm realistic...), I ask them to
be honest.  If they want to discriminate then they can call their
laws "Discrimination Against Asians and Poor Whites Act 1990" 
and not "Civil Rights Act 1990".

>I'm tempted to say this is "just tough" -- that it's the inevitable
>outcome of a competitive system -- but in fact I'm not much taken with
>the just-toughness of things.  I think we can ask whether things have
>to be this way.  

I have no objection to other models, just please try them on someone else
first.  I don't object to socialist ideas (e.g. I would prefer to have the 
Canadian health care system, and not the American one), I just object to
socialist (and non-socialist) ideas that have never succeeded,
but people keep trying them on me.

>Gordon Fitch  |  uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf

Hillel                                         gazit@cs.duke.edu                 
"...13 of 17 valedictorians in Boston high schools last spring were immigrants
or children of immigrants." --  US. News & World Report, May 14, 1990