The comments point to a broader conversation. K-12 was touched on but merits a more central role for colleges who wish, but don't put in the hard work for "diversity." Let's imagine colleges setting up feeder K-12 schools (unfettered by unions) in low-income urban areas. Maybe interview individuals like Connie Morgan at Free Black Thought where charter schools and home schooling is picking up the slack. This conversation was fine but the solution is not going to come from tinkering with the admissions sieve within the colleges themselves. And for a real vision of diversity, go listen to Paul Robeson singing Ballad fir Americans http://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/01/17/remembering-the-ballad-for-americans-a-cantata-for-all-of-us/ .
Good conversation. The affirmative action subject will always be subjective because people have so many different opinions about it. No one will ever be able to have one argument that will solve the issue.
Wow. That's hard to believe. I remember some number of episodes back when Glenn and John were saying that they gave their students A's more or less for just showing up. I'm not jumping on John and Glenn because if it weren't the widespread practice in the Ivy League, they wouldn't have made the admission on a podcast.
When I grew up there was a movie (turned into a TV series) where John Houseman played a law professor at Harvard. The students were terrified of him and he loved to belittle them in class if they failed to study or comprehend the topic. Students had to bust their tails in order to keep up with the course load.
To learn the Ivy League is now basically a checkmark system like in first grade was a great disappointment to me. (Math, check; art, check; geography, check; recess, check) Maybe it was never like the "Paper Chase." Maybe it was always more hype than substance. Either way, it's a disappointment to me.
Could you publish the transcript please? I don't have time to listen to conversations - I skim and read far faster. I do not listen to or watch video feeds of people talking. If they can't take the time to make a transcription or written argument, it isn't worth my time to deal with it. For political addresses I will read the address and comentary afterwards. This will clearly change in the near future when I can feed a conversation into a LLM and first get the transcript and second get a hierarchical summary linked to transcript sections, but we are not there yet.
I did a Physics degree and then a Ph.D. in Engineering in a rather physics related area and have worked in a variety of technical areas in industry for over 50 years. I am still working in the tech sector - and I can't necessarily guess the racial background of the people I am working with - the field has globalized in the past few decades. I don't care about their racial or ethnic backgrounds, but their intelligence, conscientiousness, and technical mastery are critical.
In general, the public schools are not expecting enough of their students and a large fraction of the students and their parents are avoiding testing - I suspect because they do not want their illusions punctured.
I was not satisfied with the public schools and supplemented my kids education - mean dad. "That may be how your teacher taught you how to do it, but you have to learn how to do it my way as well." Parents cannot simply rely upon the schools to teach what the kids need to learn. They are swamped with problems and satisfied with mediocrity. So I held my kids to a higher standard - and we had to live with the restrictions we imposed on the kids - No TV, limited computer usage, ...
When I first went to school I had been raised in a free range style and my peers were all Jewish immigrants raised in a high involvement academic environment. I started out way behind, but once I started reading for content I advanced rapidly. My parents forced the school to test me and I was then moved from the slow class to the advanced class.
We do not do anywhere enough testing to identify the gifted students of any background. The educated parents know how to represent the interests of their kids. The other parents do not.
The schools should be identifying the brightest kids and making sure that they have appropriate classes, not relying upon parents to do the work and supplement their kids education.
Incidentally, for all the fuss about the private schools, one of the best bargains is for kids to do college in high school / running start at a community college and then transfer with their associates. For this to work though, you have to have taken the right classes in high school and take the appropriate trasfer-level classes in the community college. Doing so typically requires knowing what program you are going to try to graduate from no later than your Junior year in high school. This cuts the cost of college in half.
If kids are going to do this in a STEM area they will need to take Calculus no later than what would have been their Junior year in high school, and 10th grade would be slightly better.
There is a button at the top of this page that says "Transcript." It's on every episode with an mp3, and it has been for some time. It's auto-generated, so it won't be perfect. That's the best we can do right now.
South Park did an episode mocking trans women athletes in 2019. Very brave for Gavin Newsom to come out against trans women athletes in 2025.
A leader would be someone who said, on day one: Nah, that ain't right. Nip it in the bud. I've always been disappointed in John and Glenn for their reluctance to state outright opposition. For crying out loud, if you needed someone to run cover for you, Martina Navratilova opposed it from the start.
Most of the episode was about people getting into the "prestige" universities, but they were the worst of the worst. They would not even allow the girls to complain about former-male competitors in their events.
I just heard Marine Le Pen was lawfared out of the next presidential election in France. The seeds of US democracy are spreading far and wide. Maybe Gavin Newsom can next announce opposition to using the legal system to go after political opponents. Not holding my breath.
Navratilova, while addressing the questions regarding the same put forth by Piers Morgan, took the example of Renée Richards. She said, “She’s lived as a trans woman for 40 some years now almost 50 years. Renée now says herself she should not have been allowed to play.”
Navratilova referring to a man as “she”. Ergo, part of the problem. Richard Raskind hasn’t spent one moment of his rotten life as a woman. Whether or not he should have been allowed to play is obvious. He shouldn’t have been allowed in or near the stadium as there are children present.
I don't think so, but tell me if I missed something. Trump's enacting policy they don't like, but I don't know anything about him trying to remove people from the ballot.
Trump boasted about firing lawyers in the Department of Justice, for starters. He views them as political opponents.
Trump touted the firing of Justice Department prosecutors from the stage, describing them as “Marxist”, though he did acknowledge he may have fired some loyal public servants.
“Last month, I fired all the radical left pro-crime US attorneys appointed by Joe Biden. There were so many that were bad, and I know there were some that were probably very good. But there were so many that were so bad and so evil, so corrupt,” he said.
Right, he's implementing his agenda. But nothing to keep political opponents off the ballot, like what happened with him, and now Marine Le Pen in France. There are other examples in other countries. Taibbi and Kirn spoke of others last night. It's like the US lawfare against candidate Trump has become a worldwide fad. Or maybe we adopted the practices of banana republics.
But I don't know any instance of Trump trying to keep a political opponent off of the ballot.
Conservatives are rejecting the idea of diversity. Credentials don’t matter to them.
Conservatives have low levels of trust in the Black voting community.
Martin Luther King Jr. voiced his dismay of the white moderate in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. In a conversation with Harry Belafonte, King wondered if he had integrated his people into a burning house.
Malcolm X said that if the master’s house was on fire, the Field Negro would wish for a strong wind, while the House Negro would try to put the fire out. He also had no love for the white Liberal.
Trump voters see everything as DEI. They are removing photos of Black people, threatening Black history and museums.
The smoke is suffocating.
Conservatives can bask in their win on college admissions as we watch them cheer on masked thugs in plain clothes grab people off the streets.
I invite Mr. Kahlenberg to start a business. A real business, not an NGO or some other pretend business. A business that derives its sole income from satisfied customers.
I invite Mr. Kahlenberg to hire, not the best employees available, but a nice, diversified sampling of employees. That might work, if the work is unskilled. If Mr. Kahlenberg's business requires skilled workers who can keep the customers happy, I give him a year at best before he either goes broke or figures out you can't be playing ideological games in real life or in your hiring.
They call it the Ivory Tower for a reason. I've been there, and I've been in the real world. The real world is not for sissies and ideologues.
My take— affirmative action is a tired old fruitless belief. Diversity is lauded— but diversity of what? Most of those proponents of diversity seem to take their dopamine hits from the fascination with novelty. Academia is best served when it seeks truth and enlightenment.
What's good about diversity? Are Japan or Poland worse than the US? Are countries with an eternal summer worse than places with four seasons? Diversity is not good nor bad; if it naturally exists - it's OK, if there's no natural diversity - it's also OK.
Obviously, the whole game of caring about diversity is just one prominent example of Democrats inventing another theme to present their party as a party of fighters for justice, fighters for somebody they use as needed at any given moment in their necessity to maintain the party's image. In fact, the whole picture of our political system would become clear if we just understand that the one single idea of the continuing existence of Democratic party is just it: always digging up or inventing some groups who seem to suffer from injustice. It starts with reality: blacks, women; then goes further from conventional and conservative: gays; then invents unreal: transgenders. Next will be criminals, then, probably, pedophiles. Who knows what the future will bring? (And, of course, in practice, democrats don't care about all those people, as any honest person can see).
The comments point to a broader conversation. K-12 was touched on but merits a more central role for colleges who wish, but don't put in the hard work for "diversity." Let's imagine colleges setting up feeder K-12 schools (unfettered by unions) in low-income urban areas. Maybe interview individuals like Connie Morgan at Free Black Thought where charter schools and home schooling is picking up the slack. This conversation was fine but the solution is not going to come from tinkering with the admissions sieve within the colleges themselves. And for a real vision of diversity, go listen to Paul Robeson singing Ballad fir Americans http://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/01/17/remembering-the-ballad-for-americans-a-cantata-for-all-of-us/ .
Good conversation. The affirmative action subject will always be subjective because people have so many different opinions about it. No one will ever be able to have one argument that will solve the issue.
Harvard is offers remedial classes in math:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/9/3/new-math-intro-course/
Wow. That's hard to believe. I remember some number of episodes back when Glenn and John were saying that they gave their students A's more or less for just showing up. I'm not jumping on John and Glenn because if it weren't the widespread practice in the Ivy League, they wouldn't have made the admission on a podcast.
When I grew up there was a movie (turned into a TV series) where John Houseman played a law professor at Harvard. The students were terrified of him and he loved to belittle them in class if they failed to study or comprehend the topic. Students had to bust their tails in order to keep up with the course load.
To learn the Ivy League is now basically a checkmark system like in first grade was a great disappointment to me. (Math, check; art, check; geography, check; recess, check) Maybe it was never like the "Paper Chase." Maybe it was always more hype than substance. Either way, it's a disappointment to me.
Could you publish the transcript please? I don't have time to listen to conversations - I skim and read far faster. I do not listen to or watch video feeds of people talking. If they can't take the time to make a transcription or written argument, it isn't worth my time to deal with it. For political addresses I will read the address and comentary afterwards. This will clearly change in the near future when I can feed a conversation into a LLM and first get the transcript and second get a hierarchical summary linked to transcript sections, but we are not there yet.
I did a Physics degree and then a Ph.D. in Engineering in a rather physics related area and have worked in a variety of technical areas in industry for over 50 years. I am still working in the tech sector - and I can't necessarily guess the racial background of the people I am working with - the field has globalized in the past few decades. I don't care about their racial or ethnic backgrounds, but their intelligence, conscientiousness, and technical mastery are critical.
In general, the public schools are not expecting enough of their students and a large fraction of the students and their parents are avoiding testing - I suspect because they do not want their illusions punctured.
I was not satisfied with the public schools and supplemented my kids education - mean dad. "That may be how your teacher taught you how to do it, but you have to learn how to do it my way as well." Parents cannot simply rely upon the schools to teach what the kids need to learn. They are swamped with problems and satisfied with mediocrity. So I held my kids to a higher standard - and we had to live with the restrictions we imposed on the kids - No TV, limited computer usage, ...
When I first went to school I had been raised in a free range style and my peers were all Jewish immigrants raised in a high involvement academic environment. I started out way behind, but once I started reading for content I advanced rapidly. My parents forced the school to test me and I was then moved from the slow class to the advanced class.
We do not do anywhere enough testing to identify the gifted students of any background. The educated parents know how to represent the interests of their kids. The other parents do not.
The schools should be identifying the brightest kids and making sure that they have appropriate classes, not relying upon parents to do the work and supplement their kids education.
Incidentally, for all the fuss about the private schools, one of the best bargains is for kids to do college in high school / running start at a community college and then transfer with their associates. For this to work though, you have to have taken the right classes in high school and take the appropriate trasfer-level classes in the community college. Doing so typically requires knowing what program you are going to try to graduate from no later than your Junior year in high school. This cuts the cost of college in half.
If kids are going to do this in a STEM area they will need to take Calculus no later than what would have been their Junior year in high school, and 10th grade would be slightly better.
There is a button at the top of this page that says "Transcript." It's on every episode with an mp3, and it has been for some time. It's auto-generated, so it won't be perfect. That's the best we can do right now.
This sounds as if they are admitting black people can't compete on an even playing field, no matter what we do.
South Park did an episode mocking trans women athletes in 2019. Very brave for Gavin Newsom to come out against trans women athletes in 2025.
A leader would be someone who said, on day one: Nah, that ain't right. Nip it in the bud. I've always been disappointed in John and Glenn for their reluctance to state outright opposition. For crying out loud, if you needed someone to run cover for you, Martina Navratilova opposed it from the start.
Most of the episode was about people getting into the "prestige" universities, but they were the worst of the worst. They would not even allow the girls to complain about former-male competitors in their events.
I just heard Marine Le Pen was lawfared out of the next presidential election in France. The seeds of US democracy are spreading far and wide. Maybe Gavin Newsom can next announce opposition to using the legal system to go after political opponents. Not holding my breath.
Martina Navratilova had "Renee Richards" ie Richard Raskind as a coach in the 80s. A man who intruded on women's sports in the 70s.
Navratilova, while addressing the questions regarding the same put forth by Piers Morgan, took the example of Renée Richards. She said, “She’s lived as a trans woman for 40 some years now almost 50 years. Renée now says herself she should not have been allowed to play.”
Navratilova referring to a man as “she”. Ergo, part of the problem. Richard Raskind hasn’t spent one moment of his rotten life as a woman. Whether or not he should have been allowed to play is obvious. He shouldn’t have been allowed in or near the stadium as there are children present.
Isn’t Trump using the legal system to go after political opponents?
I don't think so, but tell me if I missed something. Trump's enacting policy they don't like, but I don't know anything about him trying to remove people from the ballot.
Trump boasted about firing lawyers in the Department of Justice, for starters. He views them as political opponents.
Trump touted the firing of Justice Department prosecutors from the stage, describing them as “Marxist”, though he did acknowledge he may have fired some loyal public servants.
“Last month, I fired all the radical left pro-crime US attorneys appointed by Joe Biden. There were so many that were bad, and I know there were some that were probably very good. But there were so many that were so bad and so evil, so corrupt,” he said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/14/in-justice-department-speech-donald-trump-threatens-opponents-with-jail
Edit to add:
Trump is suing law firms that took up cases against him.
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/-you-should-be-concerned-historian-warns-trump-s-legal-attacks-mark-push-toward-authoritarianism-235852357596
Right, he's implementing his agenda. But nothing to keep political opponents off the ballot, like what happened with him, and now Marine Le Pen in France. There are other examples in other countries. Taibbi and Kirn spoke of others last night. It's like the US lawfare against candidate Trump has become a worldwide fad. Or maybe we adopted the practices of banana republics.
But I don't know any instance of Trump trying to keep a political opponent off of the ballot.
You seem to argue that politicians can’t be accused of crimes. Any trial of a politician is illegal.
Bob Menendez appreciates your viewpoint.
Conservatives are rejecting the idea of diversity. Credentials don’t matter to them.
Conservatives have low levels of trust in the Black voting community.
Martin Luther King Jr. voiced his dismay of the white moderate in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. In a conversation with Harry Belafonte, King wondered if he had integrated his people into a burning house.
Malcolm X said that if the master’s house was on fire, the Field Negro would wish for a strong wind, while the House Negro would try to put the fire out. He also had no love for the white Liberal.
Trump voters see everything as DEI. They are removing photos of Black people, threatening Black history and museums.
The smoke is suffocating.
Conservatives can bask in their win on college admissions as we watch them cheer on masked thugs in plain clothes grab people off the streets.
I invite Mr. Kahlenberg to start a business. A real business, not an NGO or some other pretend business. A business that derives its sole income from satisfied customers.
I invite Mr. Kahlenberg to hire, not the best employees available, but a nice, diversified sampling of employees. That might work, if the work is unskilled. If Mr. Kahlenberg's business requires skilled workers who can keep the customers happy, I give him a year at best before he either goes broke or figures out you can't be playing ideological games in real life or in your hiring.
They call it the Ivory Tower for a reason. I've been there, and I've been in the real world. The real world is not for sissies and ideologues.
My take— affirmative action is a tired old fruitless belief. Diversity is lauded— but diversity of what? Most of those proponents of diversity seem to take their dopamine hits from the fascination with novelty. Academia is best served when it seeks truth and enlightenment.
What's good about diversity? Are Japan or Poland worse than the US? Are countries with an eternal summer worse than places with four seasons? Diversity is not good nor bad; if it naturally exists - it's OK, if there's no natural diversity - it's also OK.
Obviously, the whole game of caring about diversity is just one prominent example of Democrats inventing another theme to present their party as a party of fighters for justice, fighters for somebody they use as needed at any given moment in their necessity to maintain the party's image. In fact, the whole picture of our political system would become clear if we just understand that the one single idea of the continuing existence of Democratic party is just it: always digging up or inventing some groups who seem to suffer from injustice. It starts with reality: blacks, women; then goes further from conventional and conservative: gays; then invents unreal: transgenders. Next will be criminals, then, probably, pedophiles. Who knows what the future will bring? (And, of course, in practice, democrats don't care about all those people, as any honest person can see).