Ph.D. Octopus

by Nemo

Most observers seem to agree that the CUNY Board of Trustees made a boneheaded move by vetoing an honorary degree that the faculty and administration of John Jay College had planned to award to the playwright Tony Kushner. When you have people like Jeffrey Goldberg and Ed Koch attacking you for going too far with your “pro-Israel” activism, you know you probably went overboard. In fact, the trustees themselves seem to have realized the error in their ways, since they have now decided to overturn their previous decision.

Tony Kushner

Now, there were many reasons to criticize the board’s initial move to deny Kushner the degree. These include its unprecedented heavy-handedness (this was the first time that the board had overruled a motion for an honorary degree), its gross mischaracterization of Kushner’s views on Israel, and the obvious attempt it represented to narrow the range of acceptable debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even some of Kushner’s harshest critics believed that the vote to deny the honorary degree was patently unfair and gave Zionism a bad name. This is to their credit.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Weiner

In one of the better of the 8 billion pieces about reforming American universities, Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books (hey, that rhymes!) runs down what’s wrong with many of the well-known critiques. We’ve been through some of these arguments before at PhD Octopus, so I won’t rehash them here now. Instead, I’d like to point to one sentence that struck me in Brooks’ piece, when discussing Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’ contribution to the discussion, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids–And What We Can Do About It. Brooks notes:

They want universities to… abolish varsity athletics (good again, but even William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton and of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who has studied this subject more deeply than anyone I know of, has given up on that reasonable but impossible task).

This passage hit home, especially since I just witnessed, in person, one of the greatest sporting moments I’ve ever experienced: the Harvard Crimson men’s basketball team defeating the evil Princeton Tigers for at least a share of this year’s Ivy League title (see Kyle Casey‘s wicked dunk above).

You see, I’m a big sports fan. I grew up living and dying with the Montreal Expos (mostly dying), fell in love with professional boxing, and have tended to enjoy most sporting events, always rooting for the underdog. At Harvard, I rooted for the Crimson, and also covered sports for The Crimson, our daily paper. I covered a variety of sports, though my main beats were wrestling and women’s hockey. In my sophomore year I travelled to Duluth, Minnesota where the women’s hockey team, staffed with several Canadian and American Olympians, lost in overtime in the National Championship game to the hometown University of Minnesota-Duluth. Despite the devastating loss, it was a great experience.

As time went on, however, I became a bit disillusioned with varsity athletics. I came to disdain the athlete worship I detected on campus, and felt that Harvard and other elite schools were compromising too much of their academic standards in admitting some star recruits. I read William Bowen’s The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, and Bowen’s follow-up, with Sarah Levin, Reclaiming the Game, and I sympathized with their arguments that the intercollegiate athletics rendered university admissions too biased, and had a pernicious effect on college academics and campus life.

And yet, when I stormed the court last night following Harvard’s win, when I congratulated freshman guard and St. Bruno, Quebec native Laurent Rivard in French (Rivard took a key charge in the waning moments of the game),  I felt one of those sports-euphoria moments that made me forget the institutional criticisms of Bowen’s books. College sports, at their best, provide a sense of school spirit and camaraderie that professional sports can rarely match.

I haven’t made up my mind on this issue. It will probably depend on my mood, and on the circumstances. But last night, I was definitely in favour of keeping varsity sports around. And I still am this morning.

by Weiner

My day has been made. As The Crimson reports, Tyra Banks has enrolled in Harvard Business School.

Of course it’s not a regular MBA, but the “Executive Education Owner/President Management Program (OPM),” some three-week stint every three years for people who have already made it rich. But so what? And frankly, what the hell do the business gurus of HBS have to teach Tyra, really? She’s already done better in the business world than any of them ever could. She should be teaching them how to smize and look fierce.

Also, I attended a taping of the Tyra Banks show a couple years ago, and it was awesome.

For those interested in Banks, this New York Times Magazine article is quite informative.

by Weiner

Everybody and their mother has been commenting on Amy Chua and her recent Wall Street Journal article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” David Brooks tried his hand at it, but came off sounding silly. Columnists and bloggers have been putting in their two cents. Chua has tried to clarify the point of her article, which is excerpted from her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

I just finished the book, and have a few quick thoughts about this:

1) The book is different than the article in the sense that you do see a narrative, and something resembling character development in Chua and especially her younger daughter Lulu. Still, Chua comes off as pretty nutty, but at least moderately self-aware.

2) As Matt Yglesias notes, “many less extreme parents subscribe to some version of this ‘video games bad, classical music good’ view of the world.” Chua takes this to an absurd and possibly cruel extreme, but her basic values are not abnormal among the well educated middle class in the United States.

3) I think that Tenured Radical is right that the real question we should pose here is whether this academically-oriented classical-music emphasizing middle-class parenting is a good thing, or should be applied universally to all children. She laments the fate of “kids who are academically unremarkable but are pushed to excel in conventional ways when they might be happier devoting themselves to sports, art, dance, cooking or hedge fund management.” She goes on to note:

the part that really fascinates me is that Chua’s desire for rote forms of perfection are being derided in a society that is, in fact, devoted to increasingly unimaginative ideas about what counts as intellectual life.  My generation and the several that have followed have mostly gutted anything that counts for progressive education.  As if that was not enough, we have even taken what used to be fairly standard and unremarkable forms of critical pedagogy and gutted those in favor of a national standardized testing agenda.  Languages, classics, art and music have been stripped from secondary curricula.  Students no longer read for fun; they read to satisfy the AP requirement.  We talk, talk, talk about excellence — but we can’t say what it means, beyond winning admission to a “selective” school.  Although Chua isn’t a person I would choose to be my mother (is there a world where you get to choose your mother?) what she describes actually reflects our current winner-take-all philosophy of what education should look like at its best.

Chua has a particularly narrow vision of success, insisting that her daughters can only play the violin or piano, cannot be in the school play, and should not really care about their social life. Obviously, other instruments are worthwhile; so are activities like drama, art, sports, and creative writing. Making friends is valuable too. So is having fun.

4) Insofar as that academically-oriented form of parenting is accepted, there is no question that Asians, broadly speaking, have mastered it. As Chua appropriately admits, there are plenty of Asians and Chinese people who employ “Western” parenting techniques, and plenty of non-Chinese who use the same methods she does (though probably not to that insane extreme), but statistics show that Asian-Americans, especially those of Chinese, Korean, and east Indian origin, do better scholastically. Politically correct people who disagree are living in denial. The secret is not genetic, it’s work ethic. These kids work harder in school. Culture and history matter. When Jewish, Italian, Polish and other immigrants came to the United States 100+ years ago, they left under conditions that had some differences and similarities, but they also came with different cultures, and thus had different academic and economic outcomes in America. The same is true of the post-1960s immigrants from Asia and elsewhere, and of the second and third generations from a variety of lands. Rather than deny this, we should try to explain it.

Of all the commentary on this piece, perhaps the best comes from my the publication I used to write for, The Harvard Crimson. Sophomore Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya argues for a middle road, for “authoritative” rather than “authoritarian” parenting. She notes:

Sorry, Amy Chua, but “Chinese mothers” are not superior. Instead, parents who promote the value of education without sacrificing their children’s autonomy are. It would be ideal to combine the best of both worlds and stress academics while giving them room for growth. It would be best to make them understand that there are more important things in life than impersonating Kim Kardashian, but let them watch enough TV to know who Kim Kardashian is. Not only will they turn out to be smart, competent human beings, but they’ll be independent, socially adept, and self-motivated.

Maybe I’m a sucker for a Kim Kardashian reference, but that balance captures my ideal perfectly. Soon, I’ll have another post about Amy Chua, looking at “The Jewish Angle” (but of course). But since I don’t have an Amy Chua breathing down my neck, it’s not ready yet.

by Weiner

Growing up in Canada, I was never required to read Mark Twain, so I never did (I do remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes where he appears as Samuel Clemens though). With the controversy surrounding the editing of the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I’ve decided to go out and read it. I’ve also realized that as someone who aspires to teach American history, this particular controversy is rather important to me. I know I don’t support the changing of the text, but I do think that teaching the “n-word” is difficult, no matter what the race of the students or teacher. With that, I link to this outstanding essay from Autumn 2005 issue of The American Scholar, “Teaching the N-Word,” by University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard. Here’s a taste:

Over the next 30 minutes or so, Eric and I talk about “nigger.” He is uncomfortable; every time he says “nigger,” he drops his voice and does not meet my eyes. I know that he does not want to say the word; he is following my lead. He does not want to say it because he is white; he does not want to say it because I am black. I feel my power as his professor, the mentor he has so ardently adopted. I feel the power of Randall Kennedy’s book in my hands, its title crude and unambiguous. Say it, we both instruct this white student. And he does.

Read the whole thing. And also read the post from the US Intellectual History blog by Lauren Kientz Anderson which directed me to Bernard’s article.

by Luce

Just wanted to point out a fantastic, extremely thorough post from Jonathan Jarrett at Cliopatria on details of new governmental higher ed policies and resulting protests in the UK, where the government has decided to cut its subsidy of teaching by 80% overall and 100% in the Humanities:

This will, ineluctably, mean the raising of tuition fees on new students, a massive consequent rise in the cost of higher education and its consequent restriction to those who can pay to a much greater extent than at present….If you believe in meritocracy, equal access, a level playing field and so on, there is no way not to be angry about this. If you believe that higher education contributes something to a person, and that academic research and teaching are worth something, this is an attack on that belief, a belief which is clearly not shared by a powerful part of the current government.

Jarrett documents protests in Cambridge and Oxford which I think he rightly sees as sign that the UK government has radicalized a student body that had been very sleepy before. Sustained occupations and protests went on for a week at Cambridge a month or so ago.

You should also for sure read an essay in the London Review of Books by Stefan Collini on the Lord Browne report, which has been a key instigator in the dramatic shift the UK has taken in its funding scheme for univerisites, but most significantly in its approach to the underlying value of education itself:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities).

While I am all for student voice in university government and teaching, a thing that the UK has done much better than its American counterparts with a tradition of student unions, the idea that higher education should pander to the financially-driven demands of its undergraduate population is  ludicrous. Academic critique and original analysis for one depend on an educational system that protects diversity of argument [manifested within a variety of disciplines and offerings] against a contemporary discourse that can tend toward the totalizing. And secondly, if you shape your curriculum according to the perceived desires of your students you reify them into their current incarnations — you take away the opportunity for them to grow. Without that opportunity I’d likely be sitting on the 20th floor of a corporate law office across from Rockefeller Center right now.

Not to get dramatic (though the situation seems bizarre enough), but I’m going to go ahead and quote some Dialectic of Enlightenment on this one:

Subjectivity has given way to the logic of the allegedly indifferent rules of the game, in order to dictate all the more unrestrainedly. Positivism, which finally did not spare thought itself, the chimera in a cerebral form, has removed the very last insulating instance between individual behavior and the social norm. The technical process into which the subject has objectified itself after being removed from the consciousness, is free of the ambiguity of mythic thought as of all meaning altogether, because reason itself has become the mere instrument of the all-inclusive economic apparatus.

[Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Verso, 1979 ed.), p. 30; orig published 1944 as Dialektik der Aufklärung]

Update: Thanks to Greg for pointing out Simon Head’s great essay in the New York Review of Books, which [rightly] argues that the “alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened”

Texas A&M University of College Station, Texas, provides an extreme example of a teaching factory in the making. For the academic year 2008–2009 each faculty member at Texas A&M was given a “profit and loss account” by the university administration, where the “loss” of the faculty member’s salary was or was not offset by teaching revenues brought in by the faculty member in the form of “semester credit hours.” Professors were in the red when their salary “loss” exceeded their teaching revenues. A professor’s research and publication record, and the value of research grants he or she might have received, did not figure in the profit and loss calculations. So Professor Chester Dunning, a tenured historian of Russia with a distinguished research and publication record, was nonetheless judged to be a $26,863 “lossmaker” for the university because his total salary plus benefits of $112,138 well exceeded the $85,275 he attracted in semester credit hours.

by Nemo

As some of us anxiously await our next batch of course evaluations (and worry about what influence they might have on our future career prospects), Tenured Radical offers up some sensible advice. I’m often impressed by the psychological havoc evaluations can produce, so I thought that this observation was especially on the money:

One curious phenomenon is that practically everybody I know can get 99% great to good teaching evaluations, and the one nasty evaluation can have a particularly devastating effect.  Regardless of how incoherent it is, or how wrong, an anonymous student cutting you off at the knees about a course that you poured yourself into can feel like a stab in the back. 

The post goes on to make the point that for all their absurdity, there is often much to learn from student evaluations. While in my grimmer moments I worry that evaluations function as a sort of “consumer satisfaction report,” which contribute to higher education’s decline into a high-class shopping experience, I agree that they can provide valuable insights into one’s teaching. Now if only more students would comment on our actual classes rather than our places on a “hotness” scale.

by Luce

This blog might have a history of ragging on Boston (or Cambridge) in favor of New York, and I might feel a little lousy contributing to it, but after having spent my first “working week” (as opposed to “recovery week/end” of which there have been a few) back in New York since I left it a year and a half ago, I can’t help but feel a very strong reaction to the differences between the two. Fair warning that this represents my most narcissistic, “self-exploration” post since that time I thought really hard about what it means that I can’t remember song lyrics for shit.

Let’s start with sleeping. This may be a weird category of analysis, but I seem to need less sleep in New York — I think because New York literally wakes me up. Walk out the door and your pace immediately has to flow in with that of the rest of the crowd. I was doing a Washington Heights to Morningside Heights commute nearly every day and was pulled back into the rapid and impatient pace of morning subway traffic, so that even before I’d settled into the library with my first cup of coffee I was buzzed and awake. Also I was reminded yet again that Harvard’s main library feels like a mausoleum compared to Columbia’s. On the other hand, New York also translates to me being less healthy—less sleep, less running (the commute seems like exercise enough), more bars, more drinking.

Weirdly enough, for a city supposedly built on artifice, I think New York allows for much more naturalized social interactions than Cambridge. In my experience, people in New York are more easily and informally befriended and absorbed into goings-on; social gatherings come together sporadically/organically during a given night while in Cambridge they tend to take a week of pre-planning. Part of this has to do with the crowd — in Boston/Cambridge so far (and this may be my fault) people seem to stick within their occupational crowd, while in New York, friends and friends of friends extend over a variety of interests/activities. Boston seems bubbled, New York networked.

Ok, now for some Cambridge positives. The slower pace of life often allows for more sanity (New York neuroticism is no myth). I am, shall we say, more domesticated in Cambridge than I think I would be in New York. I cook more, I’m more invested in my home environment, my mind is in some ways clearer about what’s going on in my life. Admittedly, I was a feckless undergraduate for most of my time in New York and I spent nearly a year of my working-life living in a cockroach-ed apartment at 151st street, which I mainly avoided by organizing daily happy hours with friends. And my initiation into domestic-heaven may have begun when I moved to Park Slope, where I regularly feared getting pregnant by osmosis. Nonetheless, there is something calmer, quieter, and in some ways more lovely, if not more beautiful, about Cambridge.

Cafes are an interesting question. New York ones tend to have better working environments (Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights, Think Coffee near NYU), and I think this is because, despite the fact that Cambridge has a greater number of cafes around it than Morningside Heights, Harvard Square tends to centralize both a student and work crowd in the same square mile or so, making everything (the square itself, sundry coffee stops) feel distractingly crowded. People in New York tend to be dispersed among any number of cafes/delis/restaurants, which means that each establishment, whatever it is, is saved from being overrun by an onslaught of people seeking the one place they can grab both a coffee and a sandwich.

A key question I’ve always wondered about is which place is better (i.e. results in better work) to do a PhD. I’ll let the other tentacles weigh in on this as I think we’re about evenly divided between the two. Personally I’m torn. I was a less focused undergraduate in New York than a graduate student in Cambridge. The energy of New York can be just as distracting as it is inspiring. At the same time, I think there is more talking going on in New York, and I’ve learned much more about what it takes to actually do history through conversation than through reading (which is partly why I like to engage in talking’s poor cousin, blogging). And it’s possible that the discipline that a PhD demands might give one the ability to harness the city’s energy in the interest of completing a dissertation. In any case, consider the floor open for your opinions, complaints, accusations of urban snobbery, as well as examples of reduction, misrepresentation, and nostalgia to rival my own.

by Weiner

A recent Maclean’s magazine article reported that some white Canadians students worried about the growing Asian and Asian-Canadian presence of university campuses. Originally titled, “‘Too Asian’?” (now retitled “The Enrollment Controversy”), the piece noted:

When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.” …

Alexandra… explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.

Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.” ….

…an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.”….

…“Too Asian” is not about racism, say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids, meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong, being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard for it.”

The article has generated a good deal of controversy, along with spirited defence from Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail and fierce criticism from  Jeet Heer in The National Post (as well as Heer’s response to Wente in The Walrus). There is no question that the original article, by Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Kohler, made some sloppy arguments. As Heer correctly observes, it over-generalizes based on only a few schools and few departments, it lumps Asian foreign students with Asian-Canadians, counts east Asians but not south Asians, dismisses the plight of non-Asian foreign students, ignores working class white students (and any notion of class really) and stereotypes many groups unfairly.

And yet, Heer’s criticism of the article “obfuscates” (to use his word) as much as Wente’s defense of it does. He misses two crucial aspects of the story: 1) the potential pitfalls of Canada’s purely numbers-oriented university admissions system and 2) the very interesting–from an objective, academic perspective–statistical over-representation of students of Asian background in elite Canadian and American universities.

The Maclean’s article, along with Wente’s defense, runs off a number of statistics: 38% of Vancouver’s University of British Columbia students self-identify as white, compared to 43% as Korean, Chinese, or Japanese, in a city in which only 21.5% of the population falls into one of these three groups. In California, Asians make up 40% of the student body in public universities, despite only forming 13% of the state population. In the United States more broadly, Asians are 5% of the population but between 10 to 40% at elite colleges. They make up especially large portions at science oriented schools like Caltech and MIT.

I don’t have access to the data on-hand, but I have no reason to dispute these numbers. Rather than run away from them, however, I think we (referring to those people, regardless of race or ethnicity, interested in higher education) should try to ask questions: what do these numbers mean? How can we explain them? And to what extent, if any, should our investigation affect education policy?

The authors of the Maclean’s article insist, “that Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data.” I’m not sure how “hard” the data are, but I suspect that there is a great deal of truth to this assertion. But this “fact” plays out differently in different contexts. Certain Asian groups are statistically more over-represented in public American universities, Canadian universities, and science-oriented universities (CalTech, MIT) than they are in top American private schools, like the Ivies, Stanford, Duke, and elite liberal arts colleges. Why is this the case?

I’ll try to answer this question with a personal anecdote. When I applied to college, I applied to only one Canadian school, McGill. I wanted to apply for a scholarship there. In order to do so, I needed an “R” score of 33. I was never quite clear on what the “R” score was, except that it was some figure tabulated using my grades in CEGEP (a two-year non-remedial form of junior college that Quebec students attend before beginning their undergraduate career) as well as some grades from the end of my high school career. When I was applying to college, my “R” score stood at 32.9. I thought, surely, at only a fraction of a point under the requirement, some exception could be made. I called the admissions office. My father, who is a professor at McGill, called the admissions office. There would be no exceptions. I tried to tell them that I participated in extra-curricular activities. That my grades had steadily improved, and would continue to improve in my final semester at CEGEP (they did). None of this mattered. Scholarships to Canadian universities, like admissions, are a numbers game. If you don’t make the cut-off, you’re out. My R score was good enough to get in to McGill (which I did) but not good enough to even apply for a scholarship.

This was in stark contrast to my experience applying to American colleges. I applied to all the Ivy League colleges (except Dartmouth, which my parents deemed too goyish). Every one of them read my entire application. Canadian university applications often require only a transcript. American schools want much more. Beyond transcripts and standardized test scores,  elite American schools typically require an application essay (sometimes multiple essays), a CV and letters of recommendation. They also accepted poetry, artwork, musical recordings, and other evidence of extra-curricular talent. I submitted the 100 page non-fiction self-published book on baseball that I wrote at age 13 (my wife submitted her award-winning photography portfolio). I got in to Harvard, and off I went.

In setting up this contrast, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach appear quite clearly to me now. On the one hand, there’s something wonderful about the more purely “meritocratic” Canadian system. School is about academics: those with the highest grades should get in. While the Canadian system favours the wealthy, who benefit from tutors, better schools, more access to books and other class-based advantages, the American system is even more class-biased. Entire industries serve to help richer students best the SAT, write the perfect application essay and sufficiently pad their resumes. Canadian schools also lack the resources to use the more “holistic” approach that American schools do for each and every one of their applicants. Instinctively, I sympathize with the Canadian admissions system, even if I had my own (albeit very minor and ultimately inconsequential) difficulties with it.

There are benefits to the American holistic approach, though. I clearly didn’t suffer because my scholarship application was not considered. But it’s certainly conceivable that some Canadian students do suffer: students from under-privileged backgrounds who have to work jobs which cut into their studying time, or have to help raise brothers and sisters because their single parent is at work. These are the kinds of circumstances that are often communicated in application essays, which Canadian universities, because they don’t require them, never see. Indeed, even if poorer students are too ashamed to mention these things in essays, American schools demand to know the incomes of their applicants’ families, what schools their parents went to, and yes, their race and ethnicity. All these factors are carefully considered in weighing applications. Some students are advantaged by being “legacies,” i.e. their parents went to Harvard, or because they are recruited athletes (by far the most advantaged) and so they get in as well. But others are “advantaged” because they grew up on welfare, or one of their parents died when they were in elementary school, or any other reason that might compensate for a less-than-perfect academic record.

I’m frankly not sure which system is better. But implicit in the absurd and offensive question “Too Asian?” are more reasonable questions as to whether there are other admissions processes which might be more “fair,” at least in terms of admitting people of lower socio-economic status.

In comparing the article to anti-Jewish quotas at Ivy League schools before WW2, Heer misses the irony. Today, quotas in American colleges, which exist more informally than they did back then, serve to INCREASE the presence of disadvantaged minorities, namely Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. At least that is the theory. In the famous 1978 US Supreme Court Case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke which enshrined the principle of Affirmative Action into American law, quotas were rejected, but race was allowed to be considered as a factor in university admissions in order to promote the court-sanctioned goal of diversity.

And so we get to the crux of the matter. Are Asians “disadvantaged” and do they promote or stifle “diversity”?”

Of course this is a matter of opinion. The important opinion here is those of admissions committees at selective American schools. Without all the data, I can only speculate as to their criteria. My suspicion is that Asian immigrants might be treated as somewhat disadvantaged, and thus given some preference, while the evidence seems to show that native born Asian-Americans are penalized because there are so many strong applicants that fit that ethnic profile. I don’t know if the different immigration policies in each country lead to large differences in the make-up of the Asian communities therein. Canada tends to favor educated, middle-class immigrants, so it’s possible that Asian-Canadians already have a leg-up, though I’ve heard similar theories about Asian Americans.

Again, it’s important to remember not to lump all Asians together: Chinese and Korean and south-Asian students perform better, on average, than Filipinos and Pacific Islanders. I don’t know the data for Cambodians, Thai, Vietnamese, and other groups. But the point is that even among Asian groups, and within those groups, large differences exist.

Also, while students of colour (in Canada, called “visible minorities”) face racial discrimination, many of these students at elite universities come from relatively privileged backgrounds. So determining who if anyone deserves preferential treatment in admissions requires looking at race and class. Some even argue that class-based preferences make more sense, to make sure that the iconic white “coal miner’s daughter” is not passed over in favour of a wealthy suburban African American or Latino applicant.

The take-away here is: the issue is complicated. Canadian universities’ relatively simple “meritocratic” approach avoids these difficulties. This is another huge point in its favour.

At Harvard, they used to say that they could fill their class with people who got 1600 on their SATs, or people who went to Stuyvesant High School in NYC, but that wouldn’t create the diverse student body they’re looking for. This leads to questions as to what the university’s mission is all about: is it to educate in the classroom and prepare students for careers that require some form of expertise, or is it to expose them to different cultures, to build future leaders and active participants in the local, national and international community? As an aspiring academic, I’m sympathetic to the former goal, though I also understand the desire for the latter. My impression is that in Europe, higher education seems to be about the schooling, not about “campus life.” In the United States, it’s the opposite: a rite of passage on the way to adulthood. Canada might be somewhere in the middle. And maybe that’s the right place to be.

Last, there’s the issue of explanation. Why do some Asian and Asian-American and Asian-Canadian groups perform so well in school? There are probably lots of good historical, cultural and socioeconomic explanations. But the point is that we should work to answer these questions, rather than run away from them. Let me refer to the 2004 essay by historian David Hollinger, which argues that “the failure to pursue this question implicitly fuels largely un-expressed speculations that Jews are, after all, superior.” Hollinger is right. And if you switch Jews for Asians then you have the Maclean’s story. So lets ask the question, and try to answer it.

Postscript: Since I began writing this post, Maclean’s has responded to the controversy surrounding the initial article with an emphatic defence of “merit.” It reiterates the claim that Canadian universities are “pure meritocracies.” The editors “find the trend toward race-based admission policies in some American schools deplorable.” They write:

Our article notes that Canadian universities select students regardless of race or creed. That, in our view, is the best and only acceptable approach: merit should be the sole criteria for entrance to higher education in Canada, and universities should always give preference to our best and brightest regardless of cultural background.

Again, this is true and isn’t: Canadian schools may not not discriminate based on race or creed, but they still do favour the middle and upper classes, who apply with distinct advantages. Still, I think the Canadian university admissions system is probably more fair than the American version. Last, I think the Maclean’s editors are right: Asian and Asian-Canadian academic success, like all academic success, should be celebrated. That way, humour like that of the Family Guy clip above becomes funny rather than offensive.

by Weiner

Here is my review of The Social Network. I guess I should start by offering a spoiler alert.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. While I may not have been as impressed as the countless critics who have heaped mountains of praise upon it, I found it extremely entertaining and thought-provoking. Unlike many movies nowadays, The Social Network was not overly long (a brisk two hours), and though it could probably have been a tad shorter, I was never bored. The acting is excellent all around. The dialogue is slick and fun if occasionally a bit forced and contrived. I will say that the movie will undoubtedly be more enjoyable to those with some affiliation or knowledge of Harvard, but I would recommend it to all, especially to those 500 million of us who use Facebook.

It’s important to distinguish between the real Facebook and the fictional Facebook of The Social Network, just as it’s important to distinguish between the real and fictional Mark Zuckerbergs and the real and fictional Harvard Universities.

The real Facebook has its critics, mostly on issues of privacy. Nonetheless, I am a huge fan of the website. Its practical uses are numerous: keeping in touch with old friends, making new ones, sharing photos. For my purposes, Facebook has also served as an intellectual forum. My friends share thoughts and articles, others respond and raucous but intelligent debate often ensues (the debates are sometimes mindless and annoying, but overall a net positive). Indeed, it was because of these very Facebook wall posts and debates that Wiz approached Wotty and me to start this blog: he accurately noted that it was something that we already did on Facebook, so we might as well make it more organized and official. I share all my posts through my Facebook and Twitter accounts. So for those of you who enjoy PhD Octopus, you have Facebook–and Mark Zuckerberg–to thank.

As for the real Mark Zuckerberg, I can only offer limited comment. Though we overlapped at Harvard, I never met him, though in the interest of full disclosure, I did go on two dates with his sister Randi (I had a good time and I think she did, though nothing ever came of it). But since I never met him, I can only go by what I’ve heard and what I’ve read. I’ll admit that in most articles, especially this one from The New Yorker, he comes off very badly. The judgment of a 19 year old is not the same as that of a more mature adult, but it’s also true that many people don’t change all that much of the course of their lives.

One thing that the real Mark Zuckerberg and the fictional Mark Zuckerberg seem to have in common is that they aren’t all that concerned with money. For Harvard graduates there are plenty of tried, tested and true routes to financial reward, the most common being investment banking and consulting. But from what I’ve read, it seems that Zuckerberg did not invent Facebook for the money so much as for the power, and for the desire to leave his mark on the world. To me, that’s somehow more admirable, or at least less douchey.

Apart from this similarity, there appear to be obvious differences between the real and fictional Mark Zuckerbergs. Other critics who know more than I have documented the movie’s falsehoods more effectively than I will here, but suffice it to say that Zuckerberg never had any real interest in Final Clubs and had a serious girlfriend throughout most of the time depicted in the film. He did not invent Facebook to get back at one girl or win over another, or even to become more popular. He did so to fill a demand of Harvard social life–I remember people were annoyed they did not have access to other dorms’ interal university-run facebook sites–and because it was a great idea with potential for growth. Facemash, the first Harvard site Zuckerberg invented that was deemed sexist in The Social Network, in fact had pictures of both men and women.

This inaccuracy has led critics to point to the movie’s misogyny, and they raise a good point. If the story of Facebook is not a male story, it is a story whose principal characters are all men, and Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher would probably have been wiser to give women an even smaller role than to portray them in the offensive manner in which they did.

My own prejudices led me to sympathize with the fictional Zuckerberg. The character, portrayed brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg, is at the center of a story that may not have gotten Facebook’s founding right, but certainly painted an accurate, if exaggerated portrait of Harvard undergraduate life.

I can attest to the spectacular lameness of AEPi parties. Alpha Epsilon Pi, the Jewish fraternity, has a mixed reputation nationally, but an especially bad one at Harvard, where frats are considered the poor man’s Final Clubs. In some ways, this was literally true: the frats at Harvard, because they did not have fancy mansions right by campus, appealed to a less elite, or elitist, clientele. As a result, they were generally eager to attract members, and were basically inclusive rather than exclusive. I never joined one, but appreciated them for that.

The Final Clubs were another matter. If the wild party depicted early in The Social Network was a bit over the top, it’s also true that clubs were well known as places to get alcohol when bars were closed, along with cocaine and other drugs. A member always guarded the door, filled with undeserved power and authority, determining which students could enter, always preferring women to men (the more attractive the better) and generally distinguishing between the cool and the undesired, from the Club’s perspective of course.

The sexism and misogyny of the Clubs is real and has been written about extensively. It is both unacceptable and pathetic. Yale’s Skull and Bones is co-ed now, as are Princeton’s Eating Clubs. I have no doubt in a generation or less, the Final Clubs will finally admit women as well.

The shameless classism bothered me much more. After all, female Final Clubs did and do exist at Harvard (with much less power and money and their disposal), but their membership is, in my mind, just as unpleasant as the male variety: generally obnoxious and wealthy. This was not universally true, and some Club members were good people (some of my best friends were in Final Clubs!) but as a general rule it held. I had no desire to join one. Moreover, I could never afford to be in a club on my own, and I was not about to ask my middle-class parents for a few hundred dollars a semester so I could get drunk with a bunch of d-bags and prey on similarly unappealing women. And that’s if any Club would have deemed me cool enough to be a member, which is highly unlikely.

With my own anti-Club bias, I found The Social Network‘s relatively favourable impression of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss upsetting. I never knew the cartoonish would-be villains in real life, but I have a hard time imagining that they were anything other than sensational douchebags.

Not only did they enjoy tremendous inherited wealth and privilege, and the undeserving prestige that comes from membership in the Porcellian (regarded as the most elite Final Club), but they also benefited from excessive athlete worship, ever-present at Harvard, if not as pervasive as at places like Duke, where Fuck Lists are made that venerate varsity athletes as demi-gods. I am reminded of Alexander Portnoy, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, who lamented the existence of WASP men, “engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift and powerful halfbacks for the college football teams called Northwestern and Texas Christian and UCLA,” guys who always got the girls ahead of the alienated Jewish intellectuals.

And so I couldn’t help but root for the fictional Zuckerberg, who put the WASPy athletic Winklevii in their place. There is a Jewish angle to the film, mocked by Nate Heller as “a Jewish underclass striving beneath the heel of a WASP-centric, socially draconian culture.” And yet I think the tale the movie tells, if not quite accurate as a portrayal of Harvard in 2003, is nonetheless important when looked at through a different lens.

There’s a sense in which “new money” is “Jew money.” The Jewish immigrant, first from German lands and later from eastern Europe, had an enormous and disproportionate impact on the American economy.  And so the fictional Zuckerberg enters the Harvard universe as a dorky outsider, only to turn the WASP world upside down, to the point where he mockingly proclaims that he could buy a Final Club himself.

This Zuckerberg’s most astute observation may be when he remarks that the old-money Winklevii weren’t upset about not getting their website or their millions, but they were upset because for once in their lives, things didn’t go their way. The word “entitlement” comes to mind, and no scene better encapsulates this than their meeting with then Harvard president Larry Summers, who tells them to quit whining and come up with their own idea.

The real Larry Summer is some kind of genius. He is also a man without many social graces, and actor Douglas Urbanksi captures this perfectly. Though Summers has been criticized on this blog, and I’m no fan of him as an economist, I liked him as president of Harvard, as did the majority of the undergraduate population. I admired his opposition to the anti-Israel Divestment campaign, his drive to increase financial aid, his belief in over-hauling the Core Curriculum, his support for the hard sciences and and his skepticism towards area studies. I also loved the way he would down 4 slices of pizza in a sitting at off-the-record sessions with The Harvard Crimson, and I find it hilarious that he frequently falls asleep at meetings.

Beyond all this, however, the character of Summers–Harvard’s first Jewish president–fits in perfectly with Sorkin and Fincher’s anti-WASP narrative. As reviewer David Denby of the The New Yorker describes the movie’s Summers-Winkelvoss encounter:

one can feel, in this seemingly unimportant scene, history falling into place, a shift from one kind of capitalism to another. Fincher and Sorkin wickedly imply that Summers is Zuckerberg thirty years older and many pounds heavier. He has the same kind of brightest-guy-in-the-room arrogance, and little sympathy entitled young men talking about ethics when they’ve been left behind by a faster innovator.

It would be nice to think of Zuckerberg as a sort of Jewish Horatio Alger type in 2003. Truth gets in the way of course: the real Zuckerberg comes from an upper-middle-class Jewish family; his sister went to Horace Mann and he went to Exeter. When I was at Harvard, many Jews were on the inside of Final Clubs looking out. The same is true today. Jews are over-represented (based on their proportion of the population) and extremely comfortable at America’s elite institutions.

Nonetheless, the story in the movie works, though Sorkin takes some license to make it work especially smoothly: Divya Narendra, the Winklevoss’ South-Asian sidekick, is portrayed as something of a nebbishy outsider himself: the real Narendra is athletic and handsome (I met him in the summer of 2002, before any of this went down). At the very beginning of the movie, Zuckerberg makes fun of a fictional ex-girlfriend “Erica Albright,” noting that her last name used to be Albrecht, as her family too sought entry into a more elite, more gentile realm.

Zuckerberg’s opening conversation with Albright may be the most realistic scene in the movie, not for the too sharp yet entertaining dialogue, but for the disdain that so many Harvard students hold towards less selective universities and the people who attend them. I noticed this when I was there, I notice it even more today. I’m an elitist, and I think a certain amount of elitism is ok and even good, but Harvard probably goes to far, telling its students over and over that they are “the best and the brightest” from day one. It often turns smart people into worse human beings. Though economist Greg Mankiw disagrees, Matt Yglesias notes, “most Harvard undergraduates are pretty unlikeable.” I think an important reason for this is because Harvard becomes the most important part of their identity. This effect can be resisted, but only with difficulty. The best treatment is repeated and constant exposure to less elitist individuals, though it can take several years to cure. This, more than anything, is what Sorkin and Fincher got right about The Social Network.