Our undergraduate program is racist
Another day, another virtue-signalling post by someone who offers absolutely nothing to solve any real problem. I feel compelled to take it apart, so here goes.<p>Amy Ko, the author, says:<p>&gt; As an administrator, I spend most of my time identifying the racist structures in our program and trying to dismantle them.<p>Interesting. So here we have a very privileged Asian-American woman working in a reasonably prestigious university. She is absorbing a healthy middle-class salary, paid for on the backs of student tuition, taxation, grants, and other public money. Sometimes we wonder why university is so expensive - well, it is no doubt in part due to the number of people like herself who are absorbing a solid middle-class salary doing something that doesn&#x27;t actually accomplish the goals of the university nor serves the needs of the majority of the actual students in her faculty, who pay her salary while receiving her contempt simply for their genetic background. Highly ironic.<p>She goes on to detail a number of efforts that are in place to ensure that her university does not simply use a meritocratic process of merely allowing the best students in; ironically the effect of all of these efforts is massive _underrepresentation_ by Asian-American students who perform excellently on all measures and would occupy far more seats under a system that discounted background and treated each person as an individual with the goal of recruiting the best talent possible.<p>Let&#x27;s go over her four racist structures.<p>&gt; Students can’t join our undergraduate program until they’re admitted by the University of Washington. Therefore, we inherit any forms of racial bias embedded in that admissions process and all the structures that come before it.<p>This essentially denies the existence of her colleagues who are similarly doing whatever they can to change the admissions process as a whole. They have a difficult job, of course, because they have to somehow come up with an admissions process that _looks_ fair while not _being_ fair, because it starts with arbitrary expectations of what the student cohort should look like in order to be &quot;equitable&quot; under some definition, and then develops selection criteria after the fact.<p>Of course, as anyone who has looked at this knows, the net result is that plenty of local people who have grown up assuming they&#x27;d be able to attend a local university cannot, even if their grades are good enough, even if they&#x27;re not racist or offensive or badthinking people, merely because their skin is the wrong color to correctly fill out a quota. Amazing.<p>&gt; Somali refugees in our city arrive, there are many racist things they encounter. First and foremost, they are suddenly, for the first time in their lives, considered Black in America, and begin experiencing all of the individual racism that comes with that. Second, they must learn English, and quickly, and support their parents in navigating largely English-centric public and private worlds<p>Expecting refugees to learn the language of the country that has taken them in, and is feeding and clothing them, is hardly racist. No doubt Amy Ko&#x27;s forebears, or she herself, had to learn English at some point as well in order to be able to compete in America. You&#x27;ll find that baby Americans also have to learn it; and that it is a very tolerant language, where accents and poor grammar are forgiven more easily than in virtually any other language. This is not racist; it&#x27;s just practical. Universities can hardly expect their professors to all learn fifty languages in order to teach.<p>&gt; Even if they do, which is far less likely than youth at schools near Microsoft, what are the chances that they’d ever hear about The Information School and our Informatics major?<p>Wherein we encounter the first of many instances of Ko employing the &quot;soft bigotry of low expectations&quot;. That&#x27;s right, how could we possibly expect these Somalians to hear about university? All of the outreach and advertising in the world... but at the same time we expect potential students to write their life&#x27;s story of striving and volunteering down in order to have a chance at an entrance. Should not the basic qualification of &quot;seeking out post secondary education&quot; be a reasonable filter? Are we really going to pretend entire communities simply don&#x27;t know about university at all? If you manage to make it through Grade 12 with grades high enough to get into university, how could you possibly remain ignorant of this? If you do, are you really university material? Some amount of selection filter is surely necessary, as it&#x27;s not like every single person in the city can pack into the lecture halls.