In its simplest version, the process would work like this. The application would involve a checklist of more or less objective, externally verifiable criteria. These might include GPA above a certain cutoff, scores of 4 of 5 on a given number of AP tests, and so on. Extracurricular achievements could be considered. For example, there might be a box to be checked by applicants who played a varsity sport. The application could even ask about socio-economic status, allowing applicants to indicate that their parents had not attended college or that they grew up in a high-poverty census tract.
.. What about diversity? In the long run, the lottery would produce a student body proportional to the demographics of the applicant pool (which would not necessarily be the same as the general population). If universities aimed to enroll classes that more closely reflected the country as whole, they could encourage applications from underrepresented groups or regions and work with K-12 schools to increase the number of applicants who met the benchmarks. Such efforts would correspond to the original meaning of affirmative action and would not require invidious racial distinctions.
.. The lottery plan isn’t perfect. One concern is that alumni would hate it, since it would make snobbery about where they went to college harder to justify. This could reduce donations, forcing universities to make more prudent use of their existing resources.
More broadly, elite university universities might lose a bit of their cachet. They would still attract some of the world’s most brilliant students. But they could no longer claim that their careful selection of an exquisitely curated class gives them special moral authority.
Do Affinity Groups Create More Racial Tension on Campus?
Racial prejudice, in general, decreases with exposure to an ethnically diverse college environment, the report reveals. Students who were randomly assigned to a roommate of a different ethnicity developed more favorable attitudes toward students of different backgrounds, and the same associations held for friendship and dating patterns.
On the contrary, students who interacted mainly with others of similar backgrounds were more likely to exhibit bias toward others and perceive discrimination against their group.
“Ethnically oriented, student-based organizations such as the Afro-American Studies Association or the Latin American Student Association create more [racial] tension,” Sidanius says. “Once students joined these organizations, it increased their own ethnic identification and gave students the feeling that they were being ethnically victimized by other student groups.”
The Lie About College Diversity
If so, you’ve probably noticed how often they promise students academic and social experiences customized to their already-established preferences, tailor-fitted to their predetermined interests, contoured to the particular and peculiar niches they want to inhabit.
There’s a profusion of affinity groups. There are themed living arrangements that allow students with similar backgrounds and overlapping hobbies to huddle together. In terms of curriculum, there’s enormous freedom, which can translate into the ability to chart and stick to a narrow path with fellow travelers whose perspectives are much the same as yours.
.. Shaiko professed amazement at so much toil “to create diverse incoming classes” but so little to “nudge students into interactions outside of their comfort zones.”
.. “College is a place where trust-fund kids, Pell Grant kids and all these people who would not normally be together in our society are living in very close proximity, and we need to take advantage of that,” Carol Quillen, the president of Davidson College, near Charlotte, N.C., acknowledged.
.. More schools would require students to mingle in, and even contribute to, the cities and towns around them. They’d also pay greater heed to how gagged so many politically conservative faculty members and students feel.
The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
In the 1950s, a group of scientists spoke out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Should cryptographers take on the surveillance state?
.. I spoke to Rogaway about why cryptographers fail to see their work in moral terms, and the emerging link between encryption and terrorism in the national conversation. A transcript of our conversation appears below, lightly edited for concision and clarity.
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Kaveh Waddell: Why should we think of computer science as political—and why have many considered it to be apolitical, for so long?
Phillip Rogaway: I think that science and technology are inherently political, and whether we want to think about it that way or not, it’s the nature of the beast. Our training as scientists and engineers tends to deemphasize the social positioning of what we do, and most of us scientists don’t give a whole lot of thought to how our work impacts society. But it obviously does.
.. There is a tradition, especially in physics, of activism. But computer scientists have not tended to be active in the political sphere.
.. Rogaway: My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical. That is very much working in support of a particular ethos, and one simply hasn’t called it forth.
.. Rogaway: In principle, the tenure process should free academics who have already been tenured to venture out and question matters in a way that could offend power. In practice, it doesn’t seem relevant. By the time a faculty member is tenured, it’s likely that his or her way of seeing the world will have already been so set that they’re very unlikely to become political at that point if they haven’t been already.
.. Anyone who really wants to encrypt their communication is going to find a method for doing so, whether it’s bundled with mass-market products or not. When you make encryption harder to get for ordinary people, you don’t deny it to terrorists. You just make the population as a whole insecure in their daily communications.
.. These aren’t somehow the dark times for either law enforcement or intelligence. These are the times of extraordinary information. Nowhere in history has it been so easy to learn so much about everybody. So, in some sense, we’re really talking about protecting the smallest remnants of remaining privacy.
.. Fortunately, criminal behavior has never been such a drag on society that it’s foreclosed entire areas of technological advance.
.. Rogaway: I think that when you’re hiring faculty members at a public university, that it’s fair game to ask them what their social views are, their views of social responsibility of scientists. I think you have to be careful in how you do this that you’re not applying some kind of political test, that the candidates’ political opinions match up with your own.
But part of the purpose of the public university, land-grant universities like my own, is to serve the public welfare. And if a faculty candidate doesn’t believe that that’s a part of the purpose of his or her work at all, then I think that that’s not appropriate.
.. Rogaway: It’s perfectly practical, in the sense that you can be a successful faculty member without accepting DoD funding. You won’t have as many students, you won’t be able to support as large a research group. And in some areas of computer science, and I’m sure in some areas more broadly, the vast majority of funding may be from the DoD.
I remember speaking to a computer architect, asking if there was any person in computer architecture he was aware of that wouldn’t take DoD money, and he said there was not. And he didn’t really believe that such a person could exist and be successful in the field, as there is no access to adequate resources just from the [National Science Foundation], say.
In my own area, cryptography, I think one can do fine living just on NSF money. But you won’t have a group of 10 students, or something.