Merit Over Identity
Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the author’s remarks at a debate arguing the resolution, “Resolved, that academic DEI programs should be abolished,” co-hosted by the MIT chapter of the Adam Smith Society and the MIT Free Speech Alliance on April 4. I start from the following...
www.city-journal.org
Heather Mac Donald is the most concise and persuasive pundit in America today on the cancer of preferences. Her facts are discomfiting, her logic irrefutable. It's a good idea to read her work periodically to remind yourself that not everyone in Academe is insane.
A sample:
"In 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 66 percent of black twelfth-graders did not possess even partial mastery of basic twelfth-grade math skills, such as being able to perform arithmetical calculations or to recognize a linear function on a graph. Only 7 percent of black twelfth-graders were competent on those basic twelfth-grade math skills, and the number who were advanced was too small to show up statistically. The picture was not much better in reading."
"In 2021, the American College Testing organization rated only 10 percent of black high school seniors as college ready, based on their combined math, general science, and reading scores on the ACT. Whites were five times as likely to be college ready."
