[470] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: In Defense of Affirmative Action
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sourav K. Mandal)
Wed May 2 22:50:05 2001
Message-Id: <200105030249.WAA02439@dichotomy.dyn.dhs.org>
From: "Sourav K. Mandal" <Sourav.Mandal@ikaran.com>
Reply-To: "Sourav K. Mandal" <Sourav.Mandal@ikaran.com>
To: mit-talk@mit.edu
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Date: Wed, 02 May 2001 22:49:21 -0400
"Jay P Muchnij <munch@MIT.EDU>" wrote:
> Well, that is one of the the cruxes of the debate, isn't it?
> Whether something that's introduced for the benefit of the majority at
> the macroscopic level but unjust at the individual level is an
> acceptable practice?
Well stated! To see this, one must be willing to apply the logic
behind affirmative action/equal opportunity programs to "bad" things as
well, such as to justify racial profiling. If racial profiling, the
trend analysis of crime by racial/ethnic group, is stupid, why is it
okay to extract information about "disadvantage" by racial/ethnic
group? It's not consistent to have criminal justice work by one
principle of judging people, and university admissions by the opposite.
The individual is everything. Ideally, MIT should have need-blind,
race-blind, nationality-blind, gender-blind admissions; the admissions
committee should have a random drawing when it can't decide among a
group of candidates, to prevent the entry of any bias.
Sourav
------------------------------------------------------------
Sourav K. Mandal
Sourav.Mandal@ikaran.com
http://www.ikaran.com/Sourav.Mandal/
