The December issue of MIT’s alumni magazine, Technology Review, arrived. this includes a special sub-magazine that is only about things that happen on the MIT campus or that are done by MIT alumni. The cover story: “MIT’s new chancellor laid a foundation for leadership through her groundbreaking research on politics and racial justice.”
What else was in the issue? “Discrimination by the numbers”:
When Phyllis Ann Wallace reached Yale University, in the mid-1940s, she was used to facing obstacles and proceeding anyway. Women weren’t expected to go into economics, especially at the graduate level, and for Black women like herself, breaking into the field decades before schools, buses, or workplaces were legally integrated was practically unheard-of.
Her book MBAs on the Fast Track chronicled how the experiences of men and women with equal education differ, and why women work longer hours for the same compensation.
She arrived [at MIT] as a visiting scholar at the Sloan School and quickly moved up to become the school’s first female professor, in 1975. In her office overlooking the Charles River, she wrote books and papers on women in the labor force, particularly Black women, often inviting students to coauthor or co-edit. She worked to ensure that male MIT students were aware of equity issues, believing that “if you can really educate them now, hopefully they will go out and bring about the revolution wherever they are.”
(Note: Americans upset by “why women work longer hours for the same compensation” and who want to work for just one hour and earn a lot more than the average MBA can refer to “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” and/or the $2.5 million tax-free example of Hunter Biden’s plaintiff (she didn’t waste time getting an MBA!))
Anything about Science (the new capitalized-like-God version)? A brief interior article noted that David Julius, Class of ’77, “shared the 2021 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about how the body senses touch and temperature.” In other Nobel-ish news, a current MIT professor won the Nobel in economics.
Speaking of elite university experts on comparative victimology, “‘Rhodes Scholar’ claimed she grew up poor and abused — then her story started to unravel” (New York Post):
In November 2020, when University of Pennsylvania graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton won the prestigious and highly competitive Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford — one of just 32 scholars selected from a pool of 2,300 applicants — she was praised by the Ivy League school’s president in a newsletter.
“Mackenzie is so deserving of this prestigious opportunity,” declared president Amy Gutmann of the 23-year-old from suburban St. Louis. “As a first-generation [to go to college] low-income student and a former foster youth, Mackenzie is passionate about championing young people [and] dedicating herself to a life of public service.”
Multiple college consultants told The Post that the college application process now features more questions about overcoming obstacles. The 2021-2022 essay prompts from Common App, the organization that oversees undergrad applications for more than 900 schools, include “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure.”
Categorizing herself as a first-generation, low-income student with a history of horrific abuse — who also earned nearly straight A’s and was student body president in high school — Fierceton certainly fit the bill. She was admitted to Penn in 2015 to study political science, then began studying for a clinical master’s degree in social work in 2018.
When Fierceton’s Rhodes Scholarship was announced, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled the academic star in November 2020, noting that she “grew up poor, cycling through the rocky child welfare system [and] bounced from one foster home to the next.”
As Fierceton said in that story: “I would trade [the Rhodes honor] to have been adopted and have a family.”
But after that Nov. 22, 2020, profile ran, an anonymous accuser sent an email to Penn and the Rhodes Trust, claiming Fierceton’s story was “blatantly dishonest.” The email reportedly alleged that Fierceton grew up in St. Louis, Mo., with her mother, an educated radiologist; that her family was upper-middle class; and that she had attended a fancy private high school and enjoyed such high-end hobbies as horseback riding.
According to Winkelstein’s subsequent report, Fierceton was raised in an upper-middle-class household; it also notes her mother is a radiologist and that her grandfather had graduated from college.
The Penn victimological bureaucrats criticize the young student for purportedly lying, but take no responsibility for their own incompetence. These are paid full-time victimologists and they can’t distinguish between true victims and the child of a radiologist? How are ordinary Americans supposed to accept the Ivy League say-gooders as experts on social and racial justice?
It’s official: MIT is done for as a decent school. Now “fresh MIT graduate” on resume has moved from “neutral” to “avoid” on my hiring preferences list. Heck, these days I’d take an autodidact hacker kid with track record of actually making something useful over any STEM M.S. or PhD from any American university. (And, yes, I’m a CEO of a high-tech company.)
…I wish this blog platform had editing for comments… I often notice typos or grammar issues after hitting “Post”.
> …I wish this blog platform had editing for comments…
@averros: Oh, my goodness. 🙂 What would I be with editing ability on this blog? Lol.
I’ve found in recent months that the “POST once and forever” system here has improved my posts, which is a good thing. Now I use Notepad++ to write them, and I try to edit them with more care before unleashing them on this corner of the Infinite Elsewhere. Sometimes structure is good! I actually like it. This is how people really are! They make mistakes as they think, then go back and hopefully correct them. It strikes me as fundamentally more honest. It’s like that Eminem song: “You only get one shot…” It can be annoying/embarrassing but it has made me a better person (and you only know some of the reasons why.)
It’s an atrocity, though, that the rot has reached the brain, as it were, as far as MIT and many other places are concerned. We’re going to suffer for that and we already are, and that’s on purpose.
“[Starting in 1975] She worked to ensure that male MIT students were aware of equity issues, believing that “if you can really educate them now, hopefully they will go out and bring about the revolution wherever they are.”
I think we can safely say that the long march through the institutions has worked. U.S. universities now have admission policies like in communist East Germany, where one had to prove one’s working class background in order to be admitted. As in the U.S., children of party functionaries were exempt from that rule.
If the U.S. reaches the non-white nirvana, what will happen? Historically, white males have been the only ones who protected women’s rights. If there aren’t any left, will we revert to a non-white patriarchy? Is this what Democrat women want?