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TripWillis

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Everything posted by TripWillis

  1. You should practice being more of a dick to people before you start your program this fall. Programs really like that sort of thing.
  2. Having now seen what I've seen from the inside, I have a lot of sympathy for ad-comms and grad secretaries. Every time someone posts a result on here, a grad secretary gets a 100 e-mail flurry of "DID I GET REJECTED?/ACCEPTED?/WAITLISTED?" It's quite a burden.
  3. Nope, you mean "your" And to everyone, it's "moran" Get it right.
  4. NO OBAMA WANT$ YUR TAX DOLLRAS FOR IMMIGRENTS! UR STUPID LIBRAL. Edit: to be fair, Man, the corporations want oil to make Cheney money because he is a nazi! UR STUPID CONSERVATIVE.
  5. Well put. We need a lot more than AA in universities to rectify these problems.
  6. I think the strangest thing about this whole thing is that if one is in the position of taking advantage of affirmative action, I imagine that that person has already done quite a lot on their own to transcend our societal problems. What is it Spivak says, if you can call yourself subaltern, you're not?
  7. I know we should move this, but alas, your post is good, and I want to respond. Your post is very interesting. As with you, some of what I know about AA is observational, while some of it has been the product of research. For instance, I have observed my college classes being disproportionately represented with whites of privilege (and seeing as I've always gone to state schools...), which probably informs at least some of my more visceral feelings about AA. I have a clarifying question: did you find that white people in Hawaii were privy to being on the short end of structural inequity? I do not at all doubt the validity of your observations, but would be interested to know more, or if you've ever encountered research on the topic. Knowing nothing, I had just assumed that the indigenous/colonized peoples would be at a disadvantage, as with most cases. I would disagree that achievement is "as" challenging for a white-kid from Detroit (hey, that's actually me! And yeah, it was REALLY challenging, but maybe not for the reasons you think...). All other things being equal, white-kids from Detroit have white privilege, which carries from birth to death, pre-school to grad school, your first job to your last, etc. They didn't ask for this, but it exists, and it is well supported that it exists. I'm not trying to downgrade any white person's accomplishments, but I think it's worth noting that academia and other institutions of whiteness (congress, etc.) are disproportional in representation to US demographics for a reason. So while I understand that AA is imperfect in that it perhaps gives some people a very rare "unfair advantage," there is already a competing unfair advantage called structural bias of favoritism toward whites. (Then you get into the aporia of whether unfair advantages rectify other unfair advantages and this debate gets into being a total mess...)
  8. I don't know about you guys, but all this raucous debate is making me thirsty:
  9. That's the thing; I'm not sure we have a way of knowing that. I couldn't say either way. I'm not sure how anyone can, which is why I'm confused how this whole thing got started.
  10. With all respect, I don't think this forum is "hypersensitive"; I think, especially considering the high-stress of applying to these schools, that this forum is highly supportive and there are two or three characters who like to mix it up with provocative comments that they know are going to get a rise out of people (I wouldn't call them "trolls" -- that would be a bit harsh). I have seen people make fair, frank, and intelligent criticisms of others on this forum and most of the time it is done with tact. Sometimes it's not. (#throwingshade)
  11. This whole protracted debate is obnoxious and rife with cliché. Generally, I agree with asleepawake -- DontHate's original post implied that Keely got into schools because of affirmative action. It was apparently not a personal slight, but since we have no access to the ad-comms or the applications, we truly have no way of knowing, so it's a moot point. Diversity fellowships are not necessarily funded by state or federal sponsored AA programs, either, so unless I knew more, I'd have no way of making a judgment, and I'm not sure why it would be relevant to a more general debate about AA. Having a dialogue about affirmative action and diversity in higher education is obviously important, but rather than starting with offhand assumptions, we should have it earnestly. ((For anyone who's interested, I'm for AA programs. Slavery was only abolished 150 years ago; the south was de jure desegregated about 60 years ago. There are only a few generations between today's minorities and oppressed peoples, and in the case of some groups, there are zero generations. There has been no time for many groups, such as African-Americans, to accrue and pass down wealth from generation to generation, provoking perpetual, snowballing uneven development based on bias. Economically speaking, structural inequity has made achievement institutionally more challenging for some than others. What's worse, certain people have an attitude that we live in a post-racial society just because Barack Obama is president and, thus, they are redacting their support and efforts toward resolving structural inequity. Like with gun control, AA is a band-aid on a more pervasive problem, but since no one is interested in fixing the pervasive problem (it would require an enormous political overhaul), the band-aid will have to do what it can))
  12. This argument may be lazy, but negotiating capitalism in the confines of the university is such a complex problem. Is it an ideological containment zone, or is the university actually expanding the horizons of people's thinking? http://classwaru.org/2012/11/12/studying-through-the-undercommons-stefano-harney-fred-moten-interviewed-by-stevphen-shukaitis/
  13. I used to work in a bakery and I didn't know that was why. I just assumed they were being nice.
  14. If it's anything like past years, professors notify individually. Admissions tend to be scattered. Good luck, Jeremiah.
  15. I'm curious about who got into CUNY. Two posts. See y'all in March.
  16. How am I supposed to pretend? (I'm pretty sure it's "full professors studying romances") Edit: Just checked. I'm wrong. I blame projection, since I want to be a full professor.
  17. Remember that if things don't work out for you guys, you have options. Take a cue from my man Kai, here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4Y7i1ASCS5o
  18. To paraphrase Obama, you spread the acceptances around, it's good for everybody.
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