Category: Academia

Today is the deadline for accepting college admissions offers. For parents and kids who are disappointed, let’s consider the strategic mistakes that they might have made.

Most obviously, a child who fails to identify as Elizabeth Warren’s cousin (i.e., “Native American”), is at a disadvantage. Same deal for Black, Latinx, 2SLGBTQQIA+, etc. These identifications are often matters of personal choice and colleges and universities have made their prejudice against cisgender heterosexual whites and Asians clear so a failure to identify in some kind of preferred category isn’t excusable.

Some more nuanced lessons from the NYU data leak, from a friend in suburban Boston who is numbers-oriented and fed everything into a database management system:

The real comparison is between “cohorts” – basically they lump people into clusters by zip code, background, interests. NYU admissions rate for our [somewhat rich suburban public] high school was effectively 3%. Way lower than their average admission rate.

Moving to a zip code from which few people apply to the schools of interest could help. Moving to a less elite neighborhood within the same metro area, for example, could actually save a huge amount of money as well as enhancing a child’s admissions chances. Evincing an interest in less-popular majors, e.g., classics, could help. (My friend: “It isn’t enough just to say classics – you need Latin courses, participation in known Latin competitions, etc.”)

(Maybe the ultimate hack would be moving into a zip code that is 99% occupied by The Villages or similar kids-forbidden development. It’s virtually guaranteed that zero other kids will apply from that zip code if kids under age 19 aren’t allowed to live in 99% of that zip code.)

From a different friend whose child attends an elite private school in Philadelphia:

One kid got into [Queers for Palestine League] penn last year for deferred admission because of crew and now [the child’s] class has twice as many kids doing rowing than previous class

Let’s check in with Harvard, where they say that they hate inequality and also that they want as much federal money as possible funded to richer-than-average schools in richer-than-average states. (i.e., don’t send the money to universities in poorer-than-average Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi where the result would be increased equality among states) Layla L. Hijjawi, a Crimson editor:

Mahmoud Khalil, for example, is a green card holder — otherwise known as a lawful permanent resident — who has been detained, apparently for pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration has linked his actions, which ought to be defended by the First Amendment, to terrorism, claiming he poses a threat to American foreign policy.

One doesn’t even need to organize pro-Palestinian protests to become a target; simply attending one is enough to merit condemnation and threatened deportation, as the case of Yunseo Chung makes clear.

Most egregiously, merely publishing a pro-Palestine opinion piece — as many editors of this very paper have — can apparently result in being snatched off the streets and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for supposedly supporting terrorism like Rumeysa Ozturk, another permanent resident of the U.S.

This is a clear escalation of its attack on pro-Palestine speech on campus. Harvard must not yield in the face of this right-wing pressure. The conciliatory approach of Harvard President Alan M. Garber’s email regarding funding review misses the mark by treating the review as being pursued in good faith, ignoring the obvious insidious and chilling intention of the campaign developing under the guise of preventing antisemitism.

Loosely related… (source)

A friend whose child recently applied to NYU downloaded the hacker’s ZIP file of liberated data (canonical link; it may be that this has been getting updated with additional redactions) and found his child’s name and other identifiable characteristics.

Background… “Hacker claims responsibility for replacing NYU’s website with apparent test scores, racial epithet” (New York Post):

A dark web user claimed responsibility for briefly hacking New York University’s website Saturday, and replacing it with what appeared to be student test scores and an apparent racial epithet.

Instead of the usual images of college athletes and the Greenwich Village campus, the site featured a black background with green writing showing a message along with charts of what were purported to be SAT and ACT scores and GPAs for students in 2024, divided by race.

“On June 29 2023, racial affirmative action in college admissions was ruled illegal,” the female hacker’s message reads. “Computer N–gy Exploitation (CNE) reveals NYU continued anyway.”

My friend and his computer-oriented son played around with the data and found an interesting pattern… kids from their local high school were in the database as having applied early with certain SAT scores and GPA. The database showed that they were rejected (perhaps for being white, since their qualifications were above the medians for admitted precious Black applicants). In conversations at school, the kids claimed higher SAT/GPA numbers than they reported to NYU and the kids didn’t mention having applied to NYU (i.e., they kept their rejections secret).

What does it take to be accepted? My friend and his son found a good athlete from a Maskachusetts public high school. His (weighted GPA) was 4.15 and his SAT score was 1550. He’s the wrong kind of Brown (Indian), apparently, and was rejected.

The data download arrives as CSV files, but don’t try opening in Excel. The files are around 3 GB in size:

Whatever the test scores of the carefully-curated-by-skin-color NYU admittees. they can all be on the #RightSideOfHistory (link) with the NYU Queer Union:

There is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia say that they hate more than than the state of Israel: inequality. The flip side is that there is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia love more than the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: equality. Columbia has accumulated $15 billion in profits (its endowment) and, therefore, is near the top of the top 1% of the richest colleges in the U.S. (list; there are about 4,000 colleges and universities total in the U.S).

One would think thank these inequality-haters would be delighted that the Trump administration had decided to redirect money from their rich school, thus freeing up funds to be distributed to comparatively poor schools. Yet instead we learn that folks at Columbia are upset. Example video: “Columbia University staff, students aren’t pleased with $400M cut in funds”.

From the student newspaper:

From the article:

“The AAUP is actively working with our members across the nation in preparation to resist these draconian policies that severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education,” the statement from [union leader Todd] Wolfson reads.

An elite academic is truly free only if he/she/ze/they is receiving an unconditional paycheck from working class taxpayers? In a now-deleted tweet, a Columbia grad student wrote that her F31 grant was worth only $100,000 per year in salary and tuition and that this was “pennies”, serenely unaware at the time that quite a few taxpayers would consider $100,000/year to be actual money. (the BLS says that median wage in Q4 2024 for a full-time worker was $1,185/week = $61,620/year)

(Same question about Californians. They say that they hate inequality and then they complain that California purportedly pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending. (Much if not most of this is due, I think, to Californians paying into Social Security and Medicare while working in California and then receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits in retirement after moving to other states.) Californians want money extracted from taxpayers in Mississippi for their gold-plated high-speed rail system, for example, when that is completely inconsistent with their philosophy of promoting equality.)

Another question about Columbia… most of the academics I know who get federal money said that they would leave the U.S. in the event of a second Nakba (Trump victory). Nearly all should be living in Canada or Europe by now. Why are there enough of these folks still at Columbia to soak up so much federal money?

Separately, how is the noble enricher Mahmoud Khalil doing?

Loosely related, a couple of official White House tweets, Shalom Columbia and Shalom, Mahmoud:

Related:

• the Inequality sub-department within Sociology at Columbia (14 taxpayer-funded faculty getting paid far above the median wage in the U.S. so that they can write articles about how it is bad if people get paid far above the median wage)
• “Economic Inequality Cannot Be Explained by Individual Bad Choices” (Columbia Public Health, 2023)
• “How the Trump Administration’s Efforts to Redefine Human Rights Threaten Economic, Social, and Racial Justice” (Columbia Law, 2019): “threaten to harm communities historically marginalized and discriminated against, and to further entrench inequality”
• “More Inequality, More Instability…More Walls?” (Columbia Teachers College, 2017): “border walls create more problems than they solve”

A friend who taught computer nerdism in Hong Kong before joining our lab at MIT used to try to intensify the pain and suffering of graduate students by remind us that the Chinese had an expression “Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD”.

In an age where an average OpenAI employee earns $1 million/year and a receptionist at an NVIDIA branch office likely gets considerably more, UCLA is hiring mathematics professors for “$78,200 – $101,400 annually.” In case the original URL gets memory-holed, here are some screen shots:

Google’s AI says “The average home price near UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles is around $1.3–1.6 million, depending on the source. The median sale price per square foot is around $857–$859.” The same AI says that a 30-year mortgage on a small house near UCLA will cost about $90,000 per year (i.e., roughly 100 percent of what UCLA is offering to pay the proud Ph.D. in mathematics.

Let’s dive into some of the specifics to figure out what a successful applicant looks like. In theory, California government employers aren’t supposed to sort applicants by skin color (the hated-by-progressives Proposition 209 from 1996). Let’s look at some of the language:

We strongly encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and other individuals who are underrepresented in the field, across color, creed, race, ethnic and national origin, physical ability, gender and sexual identity, or any other legally protected basis.

If they don’t discriminate by skin color in hiring then where’s the “strong encouragement” for those who have a favored skin color?

Donald Trump is trying to eradicate DEI from federally-funded universities such as UCLA. Instead, UCLA will have “EDI”:

Statement of contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion that includes previous and planned efforts that advance EDI through formal and/or informal mentoring, especially of Latina students

Are they trying to put together a “Hot Latinas” calendar for their nerd departments?

This search is part of a cluster hire with faculty positions in the departments of Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy who will support UCLA’s goals to achieve federal designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution as early as 2025. … Faculty hired through this search are expected to maintain an active affiliation with the Chicano Studies Research Center and to have a track record or demonstrated commitment to mentoring and encouraging the success of U.S.-based Latinx and first-generation scholars. Since the Latina population is particularly under-represented in physical sciences nationwide, the Department of Mathematics and the Division of Physical Sciences are especially interested in candidates with potential to serve as outstanding mentors to Latina students.

Maybe I could be considered, despite my lack of a math Ph.D., because I consistently use the term “Latinx”:

the Office of the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost have sponsored this search in order to recruit exceptional scholars whose teaching, scholarship and/or mentoring has strong ties to Latinx experiences in the United States.

Let’s have a look at Proposition 209:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

Circling back to the economics… as prestigious as some of these institutions are, how is a math professor earning $78,200/year in his/her/zir/their 30s ever going to be able to afford a family unless he/she/ze/they chooses a job at a school in a part of the country with a lower cost of living? It’s tough to have two children in a studio apartment shared with another adult.

The Yale Alumni Magazine arrived in our mailbox with a cover reminding the Righteous that Yale students were on the Right Side of History (TM) against the “other apartheid regime” (i.e., not Israel) back in the 1980s:

The article, titled “The shanties on the plaza”, never explicitly mentions the noble Palestinians nor the modern apartheid state of Israel, but the parallels are pretty obvious and I think we can all agree on who was in the right back then.

What about the Extremely Unrighteous? From December 2:

The incoming dictator threatened the entirely peaceful hostage-holding Gazans with “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America.” Considering what we did to Tokyo (100,000 civilians killed in one night), Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’m not sure how this promise could be fulfilled.

Related:

• “Nelson Mandela’s support for Palestinians endures with South Africa’s genocide case against Israel” (state-sponsored PBS): “We have stood with the Palestinians and we will continue to stand with our Palestinian brothers and sisters,” Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, said at a pro-Palestinian rally in Cape Town in October, days after the Hamas attack in southern Israel spurred the war on Gaza. Mandla Mandela, an ANC lawmaker, wore a black and white Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck as he spoke to a large crowd.