Asian-Americans make up 19% of Northwestern’s student body compared to a Census-estimated 4.4% of the US population.
In 2005, Yale student Jian Li filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton University. Li claimed that Asian-American students were significantly less likely to be accepted to the university, claiming that Princeton’s affirmative action policies for African-American and Hispanic students constituted “reverse affirmative action” against Asian-American applicants.
Soon after Li filed his complaint, Princeton researchers found that “ignoring race in elite college admissions would result in sharp declines in the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted with little gain for white students.” The study indicated that, were Princeton’s affirmative action program to end, 80% of placements offered to African-American and Hispanic students would be offered to Asian-American students.
Does this reverse affirmative action occur in Northwestern admissions? After Jian Li’s case hit the press, former university president Henry S. Bienen ordered a statistical analysis of Asian-American acceptance. The study found that Asian applicants were not held to higher standards than applicants of other ethnicities at Northwestern.
While Northwestern boasts a 19% Asian-American enrollment, Asian Americans make up only 14% of Brown’s undergraduate student body and 13.8% of University of Chicago’s. In fact, this higher Asian-American enrollment is the only way in which Northwestern’s racial breakdown differs significantly from similarly-ranked schools.
Furthermore, while the percentage of Asian students at University of Chicago and Brown has remained relatively stagnant, Northwestern’s Asian-American population at Northwestern has increased greatly. The class of 2013 was 22% Asian, and Associate Provost of Enrollment Michael Mills estimates that the class of 2014 will be 24% or 25% Asian.
[edits thanks to flawlessfumbles.]
How could anyone have been so wrong?
On one hand, the article is simply a reaction to the majority of “computer pundits” who correctly assessed the internet’s potential. Certainly, some of these futurists were overly optimistic. And some weren’t optimistic enough (take Bill Gates’ most famous quote, “640K ought to be enough for anybody”).
However, Clifford Stoll really got it wrong. Really wrong.
“Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
Let’s be fair. I’m sure Stoll wasn’t the only person who doubted Negroponte’s assertion. And to some extent, these doubters were correct to be skeptical: it wasn’t until the Kindle became “accepted” (if you can even use that word among the swarths of people who proclaim, “I like holding a real book”) around 2008-2009 that buying books and newspapers over the internet became a common practice. And the technology to buy books and newspapers online was viable back in 1995 when Stoll wrote this article. Written word is one of the only things those old modems could deliver in under ten minutes. Online music marketing required much more bandwidth, and that caught on much sooner. People were very resistant to the practice of buying books online (and some still are).
But, if history has shown us anything, it’s that resistance doesn’t last long against convenience and good economic sense.
Here are predictions about the year 2000 from the Ladies Home Journal, December, 1900:
Some are very optimistic. There weren’t as many Americans, no South American countries were clamoring to join the Union, and there are still plenty of street cars in major cities (especially Los Angeles). Some are just absurd: there are still mosquitos and flies; C, X, and Q are still confounding ESL students; and, although “strawberries as large as apples” are probably possible with today’s genetic technology, I don’t think there’s a huge market demand for such produce.
However, the average American was taller. Some trains actually run faster than 150 miles per hour. Cars are cheaper now than horses were then. Although a university education isn’t free to everyone, we do take for granted the incredible advances in scholarship and diversity in schools. When this article was written, my own University had been functioning for fifty years without granting a single scholarship to an underprivileged student.
And, in its way, the article prophesied the Internet.
American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient.
This one sends chills down my spine:
“If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.”
Or a minute later.
The future is complicated. It’s easy to beat up on Stoll, but he was simply being cautious among a sea of rapturous technophiles.
Conversely, it’s easy to be impressed by Mr. Watkin’s list of predictions, but his predictions range from correct in an abstract, approximate sense to wildly, horribly incorrect.
Let this be a lesson: be skeptical about everything you read regarding the future. Nobody knows tomorrow too intimately.
“I can tell people the score of any football game before it starts.”
Can you figure out how?
Hint #1: The speaker’s not psychic.
Hint #2: Lots of riddles depend on grammatical ambiguity.
Spoiler: Before any game starts, the score is always 0-0.
Scientifically speaking, the riddle works like this: the listener presumably aligns the prepositional phrase “before it starts” as a sister to the verb phrase “tell people the score of any football game.”
The trick, of course, is that the speaker aligns the PP “before it starts” as a sister to the NP “score of any football game.”
Thanks to literalminded for the joke and the charts.
This stupid riddle raises an important question: why does the riddle work?
Why do people invariably attach the PP in the same place, yielding a sentence with a surprising meaning? Why is it so much less likely for listeners to place the PP in such a way that the sentence makes perfect sense?
The answer to this question reveals an extremely important point about the way we process language: Our expectations color our grammatical processing.
Of course, utterances often have non-literal meanings. We all understand what a speaker means when he asks “Do you want to come upstairs for a drink?”, but it’s socially uncouth to say “I’m pretty sure I want to have sex with you.” So we use indirect language that’s somehow layered on top of our literal language.
You may have heard of the Gricean Maxims. Paul Grice came up with four conversational maxims that link utterances to what we mean by these utterances in a given context.
One of these maxims is the “Maxim of Quantity.”
- Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
This riddle plays on part I of this maxim. When someone tells us something, we expect it to be non-trivial. Everyone knows that a football game is 0-0 before kickoff. So we expect the speaker not to mention something so obvious.
This riddle shows two things:
Firstly, that we can actually re-arrange our tacit grammatical structures based on conversational assumptions. We expect people to tell us certain sorts of things, and this effects how we process the informational logically.
Secondly, the Maxim of Quantity hold so strongly that we’re more likely to interpret a utterance as supernatural (in the above riddle, that the speaker is psychic) than that the utterance is trivial.
I want your riddles. Give me some more riddles that depend on ambiguity of language. What good riddles do you know?
