From this interview with Robert Nozick:
I had been at Harvard as an Assistant Professor in the mid-sixties and then came back in 1969 as a Full Professor. That was immediately after the student uprisings, building takeovers, and so on, at Harvard the previous spring. When I arrived in the fall of 1969, there was a philosophy course listed in the catalog entitled “Capitalism.” And the course description was “a moral examination of capitalism.” Of course, for most students, then, it would be taken for granted that a moral examination would be a moral condemnation of capitalism. But that’s not what I intended. We were going to read critics of capitalism. But we were also planning to read defenses of capitalism, and I was going to construct some of my own in the lectures. Some of the graduate students in the philosophy department knew what ideas I held, and they weren’t very happy about a course being taught in the department defending those ideas. Now it was true that there was another course in the department on Marxism by someone who was then a member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and students did not object to that. But still some students objected to my giving a lecture course on capitalism. I remember early in the fall (I guess I was scheduled to give the course in the spring term), a graduate student came to me at a departmental reception we had, and said, “We don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to give this course.” I said “What do you mean, not allowed to give this course?” He said, “Well, we know what ideas you hold. We just don’t know whether you will be allowed to give the course.” And I said, “If you come and disrupt my course, I’m going to beat the shit out of you!” And the student was taken aback and said, “But you are taking all this very personally.” And I said, “What do you mean, personally? You are threatening to disrupt my course! you can do other things; you can stand outside the room and hand out leaflets. You can ask students not to register for my course. But if you come into my classroom while I am lecturing and disrupt the class, then I take that very personally.” In fact, at some point later in the term, this student and some others said they were going to make up leaflets and hand them out outside of my classroom. I said, “That’s fine; that would be really exciting.” Then they didn’t get around to doing it, and so I prodded them, “Where are the leaflets? I was counting on something special happening with the leaflets.” But it turned out that it was a lot of trouble to write up a leaflet, to get them run off on a mimeograph machine, and so they never got around to doing it. Thus I never had the privilege of being “leafleted” at Harvard. It seemed to me that sort of antagonism only lasted for a very short period of time and diminished fast. There was no longer any strong personal animosity after that. Maybe it was the general toning down of things in the country in the early 70’s, and I just benefited from the de-radicalization of the university.
More fun photos from this old post Forever Young :-)
The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year (~91k out of ~107k total seniors in the state). This generated an unusually representative score sample. Full report.
I'm aware of this stuff because my kids attend a public HS here.
To the uninformed, the results are shocking in a number of ways. Look specifically at the top band with scores in the 1400-1600 range. These are kids who have a chance at elite university admission, based on academic merit. For calibration, the University of Michigan median SAT score is above 1400, and at top Ivies it is around 1500.
Some remarks:
1. In the top band there are many more males than females.
2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test.
3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band.
4. By looking at the math score distribution (see full report) one can estimate how many students in each group are well-prepared enough to complete a rigorous STEM major -- e.g., pass calculus-based physics.
Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, ...) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the rest of the world, ex-China.
This is easy to understand: their base population is about 4x larger and their K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category. The fraction of PRC kids who perform in the top band is probably at least several times larger than the overall US fraction. (Asian vs White in the table above is about 6x, or 7x on the math portion.) Also, the fraction of college students who major in STEM is much larger in PRC than in the US.
This table was produced by German professor Gunnar Heinsohn, who analyzes geopolitics and human capital.
Note, I will censor racist comments.
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Timestamps:
3:24 Interview Starts
15:49 Cactus' Experience with High Math People
19:49 High School Sports
21:26 Comparison to Intelligence
26:29 Is Lack of Understanding due to Denial or Ignorance?
29:29 The Past and Present of Selection in Academia
37:02 How Universities Look from the Inside
44:19 Informal Networks Replacing Credentials
48:37 Capture of Research Positions
50:24 Progressivism as Demagoguery Against the Self-Made
55:31 Innumeracy is Common
1:06:53 Understanding Innumerate People
1:13:53 Skill Alignment at Cactus' High School
1:18:12 Free Speech in Academia
1:21:00 You Shouldn't Fire Exceptional People
1:23:03 The Anti-Excellence Progressives
1:28:42 Rawls, Nozick, and Technology
1:34:00 Freedom = Variance = Inequality
1:37:58 Dating Apps
1:41:27 Jumping Into Social Problems From a Technical Background
1:41:50 Steve's High School Pranks
1:46:43 996 and Cactus' High School
1:50:26 The Vietnam War and Social Change
1:53:07 Are Podcasts the Future?
1:59:37 The Power of New Things
2:02:56 The Birth of Twitter
2:07:27 Selection Creates Quality
2:10:21 Incentives of University Departments
2:16:29 Woke Bureaucrats
2:27:59 Building a New University
2:30:42 What needs more order?
2:31:56 What needs more chaos?
@hsu_steve on innumerate journalists, professors, and politicians:
— Cactus Chu (@cactus_chu) May 3, 2022
"If you are not high [Math], you cannot reason from statistical data" pic.twitter.com/N3glUITCXH
Supreme Court To Take Up Harvard, UNC Affirmative Action Case (Harvard Crimson)
... SFFA founder Edward J. Blum, who has spearheaded more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action and voting rights laws around the U.S., heralded the court’s move. “Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,” he wrote in a statement. “Every college applicant should be judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group.”See previous posts:
... The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard that with some modest adjustment in its admissions practices it might be able to absorb a judgment against it and get on with life more or less as usual. The vagueness of the category on which Harvard was relying to make sure that it kept its Asian undergraduates at the level that it wished, the so-called personality score, is such a floppy nothing of an empty basket — that’s not gonna do anymore.
There is something profoundly disturbing about Harvard using these flaccid categories to achieve something like a quota. The court papers show how the system was invented to keep the number of Jews down in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It’s all pretty bad, and part of the badness is that colleges have been both compelled and allowed to do what they’re doing under the rubric of "diversity," which conceals from view the actual operation of the whole system, and what they are in fact aiming to achieve. It’s substituting one vocabulary for another in a way that creates a climate of dishonesty. What goes on in the admissions office is increasingly mysterious, and what happens once students are admitted — that is something to which little attention is paid by educators themselves.
Are you OK with discrimination against your child? What did they do to deserve it?
Are you going to let virtue-signaling administrators at the university devalue the hard work and hard-won accomplishments of your son or daughter? Are you going to do anything about it?
If you won't do anything about it, then f*ck you. Your kids deserve better parents.
Kenny calls it a Fight for Meritocracy. That's what it is -- a fight. Don't forget that Meritocracy is just a fancy word for fairness. It's a fight for your kid, and all kids, to be treated fairly.
I highly recommend the book. These issues are of special concern to Asian Americans, but should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what is really happening in American education today.
Thursday, April 8 -- Saturday, April 10; on ZOOM
Conference Program:
Keynote Address - Thursday, April 8,
5:00-6:30pm EST
Randall Kennedy, "The Race Question and Freedom of Expression."
Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, preeminent authority on the First Amendment in its relation to the American struggle for civil rights.
Day One: Intellectual Diversity - Friday, April 9
11:30am - 1:00pm EST
Panel 1: What are the empirical facts about lack of intellectual diversity in academia and what are the causes of existing imbalances?
Paper: Lee Jussim, Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, author of The Politics of Social Psychology.
Discussant: Philip Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania, author of “Why so few conservatives and should we care?” and Cory Clark, Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, author of “Partisan Bias and its Discontents.”
2:00pm - 3:30pm EST
Panel 2: In what precise ways and to what degree is this imbalance a problem?
Paper: Joshua Dunn, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado, co-author of Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University.
Discussant: Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, Carleton College, author of “Not A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: Why Left-Leaning Faculty Should Care About Threats to Free Expression on Campus."
4:00pm - 5:45pm EST
Panel 3: What is To Be Done?
Paper: Musa Al-Gharbi, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology, Columbia University and Managing Editor, Heterodox Academy, author of “Why Care About Ideological Diversity in Social Research? The Definitive Response.”
Paper: Conor Friedersdorf, Staff writer at The Atlantic and frequent contributor to its special series “The Speech Wars,” author of “Free Speech Will Survive This Moment.”
Day Two: Freedom of Speech - Saturday, April 10
11:30am - 1:00pm EST
Panel 1: An empirical accounting of the recent challenges to free speech on campus from left and right. What is the true character of the problem or problems here and do they constitute a “crisis”?
Paper: Jonathan Marks, Professor and Chair, Department of Politics and International Relations, Ursinus College, author of Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education.
Respondent: April Kelly-Woessner, Dean of the School of Public Service and Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College, author of The Still Divided Academy
2:00pm - 3:45pm EST
Panel 2: But is Free speech, as traditionally interpreted, even the right ideal? -- a Debate
Ulrich Baer, University Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and English, NYU, author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech and Truth on Campus
Keith Whittington, Professor of Politics, Princeton University, author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech.
4:30pm - 6:15pm EST
Panel 3: What is To Be Done?
Paper: Nancy Costello, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, MSU. Founder and Director of the First Amendment Law Clinic -- the only law clinic in the nation devoted to the defense of student press rights. Also, Director of the Free Expression Online Library and Resource Center.
Paper: Jonathan Friedman, Project Director for campus free speech at PEN America – “a program of advocacy, analysis, and outreach in the national debate around free speech and inclusion at colleges and universities.”
