re: #417 Obdicut

I think it’s a complicated issue, and hard to boil down. As Professor Bell pointed out, real-world experience working on civil rights cases was seen as less important in getting a professorship than was completely academic legal work.

I do think you’re absolutely right that universities need to support their underprepared students a hell of a lot more, even if they have buttloads of natural talent.

It’s interesting to compare the experiences of minority students admitted to elite schools on the rationale of diversification to the experiences of minority students in black colleges. There are pros and cons. But what I’ve seen is that their is a very heavy toll on students who go from being effectively one of a majority (living in a black/minority community) to being plucked into a situation where suddenly they are truly a minority, surrounded by people of completely different backgrounds, and with an entirely different skill set that translates much better to success in an academic environment. And I’ve seen academia be very, very resistant to making fundamental changes that are necessary to help those students be more successful, despite an ostensibly laudable goal: when the rubber hits the road, they tend to be not willing to make changes that would require real sacrifice, to make the real trade-offs that would need to be made. They just kind of admit students and then they’re shocked and dismayed about the “achievement gap.”

Yeah - it’s really complicated.