[228] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: What can we do?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (LeeAnn L Henn)
Fri Apr 27 10:44:33 2001
Message-Id: <200104271437.KAA16726@mint-square.mit.edu>
To: "Alex M. Hochberger" <alex@feratech.com>, mit-talk@MIT.EDU,
spa-discuss@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 27 Apr 2001 10:14:40 EDT."
<1F3774AB3688D4118B1300508BD964151D01B8@CHINA>
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 10:37:56 -0400
From: LeeAnn L Henn <langdon@MIT.EDU>
The extropian's mailing did in fact make the claim that women and underrep'd
minorities were less intelligent and less motivated than white and non-under-
represented minorities at MIT. A lot of their grand evidence for this is
because there are more women in biological sciences than there are in the
more important (to them) and 'harder' sciences such as physics and math. They
seemed to think this was 'proof' of less intelligence and motivation. If those
majors are filled with men who think all the women and minorities are just
there because of affirmative action (please don't jump on me, I'm only posing
a theoretical situation), a person would have to be stupid to want to subject
themselves to that sort of learning atmosphere. And I never quite understood
how lack of motivation really fit in. So what if a woman would rather be
a pre-med and become a doctor than a lonely physicist in a physics lab?
If they had a problem with affirmative action, they should have come up with
more rational and logical arguments than the ones stated above. They provided
no new insight to problems of MIT and only served to further their own claims
and create publicity for themselves by weaving actual questions about the
effectiveness and appropriateness of affirmative action in with their own
ramblings.
I think freshman can handle seeing such racism and sexism in print, but I
think MIT was right in not allowing them to send the pamphlet out in the MIT
mailing. They would never allow a campus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to send
out a mailing. Frankly, the extropians mailing was nearly as bad. A lot of
people accept what they said because it was masked with real questions about
MIT administration. Yet those same people seem to have a hard time realizing
how non-rational the extropian's argument was.
leeAnn
glad she has a good memory
