Fire drills always unnerve me. One time, our dean asked me to stand in one of the streets, a standard procedure for fire drills as we escort students to about a one-block radius from the school in case of emergency. As the teachers escort the kids to their designated spots, a black SUV with a rather angry disposition pulls up within a feet of my knees and waits patiently for this drill to end. I stood my ground, waiting for all the students to cross the streets and holding my “Fire Drill” sign in a choke hold. The kids crossed the street, and the SUV grew more impatient, inching closer to my less-than-superhuman legs. My throat tightened up. The man kept yelling about having to get to work. I thought how the man could have just gotten to work early like everyone else and not at 9:30am. None of this mattered. My silence held clenched abs tight against what I felt might have gotten really ugly really quickly. The dean and my supervisor talked the man in the SUV down, and not a second too soon as I could feel the heat careening off the bumper could have steam-ironed my pants. The man cursed us all out as he let his engine growl while I stood my ground. The dean had waved the students back, but I couldn’t move until all the classes got back in the building. Every 30 seconds felt like an hour. When I heard the dean wave the
Earlier this week a group called the Center for Equal Opportunity released a 21-page analysis of undergraduate admissions data from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, charging what they call “severe discrimination based on race and ethnicity.” Wisconsin students protested at a press conference announcing the findings, while one Republican state legislator is calling for a formal investigation of the university’s selection process.
Wisconsin is already a political tinderbox, of course, and this is likely to add fuel to the fire. It’s legal under binding Supreme Court precedent to consider race as a factor in college admissions, but CEO claims that UW has gone way overboard, admitting manifestly unqualified black and Latino students ahead of more-deserving whites.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the last two days examining the CEO study, and I’ve found that it’s riddled with serious flaws. Put plainly, UW admissions data don’t show what CEO’s report says they do, and the group’s
June 7, 2010 by gatorbonbc
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