Woke must be croaked!
We love Madison WI. A more dynamic city does not exist in the Midwest. Forest paths along the lakeshore, opera and stand-up comedy, street musicians, food you don’t recognize from places you can’t pronounce, Raging Grannies and pink flamingos on Bascom Hill. We do enjoy the politics — tie-dyed with a whiff of tear gas. Hemingway would have called Madison a moveable comedy.
What a great place to do conservative missionary work! We don’t want to bleach, steam press, and starch Madison into an upright and uptight place like Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. But we’re old-fashioned enough to believe that diligence and hard work should be rewarded. You can keep the participation trophies.
If not everyone gets an A in our public schools, they’re still a lot like Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average. Thanks to EQUITY!
Madison Metro School District gives no more weight to grade-point averages earned (that word again!) in honors courses than from less-challenging courses. Given that the Universities of Wisconsin automatically admit high-GPA students (thanks to GOP legislation), the A-student in remedial basket weaving gets equal footing with the stellar trigonometry student.
“Our decision to keep what’s currently in place reflects our belief in the importance of a system that supports equity …and reflects our community’s values,” a district bureaucrat crowed, according to Chris Rickert, the best news reporter in Mad Town. EQUITY! (“Schwab!”)
Doctor! Mr. M.D.!
Over at the University, its School of Medicine and Public Health accepts black applicants at a rate six times higher than it does Asian applicants, despite lower average Medical College Admissions Test scores, according to the medical advocacy group Do No Harm. It found that black applicants averaged scores in the 62nd percentile, while white and Asian admits averaged scores in the 86th percentile. EQUITY!
A page on the medical school’s website states that “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are top priorities.” Sounds like the work of former Madison alder Shiva Bidar Sielaf, who is the medical school’s associate dean for “Diversity and Equity Transformation.”
(For the record, UW spokesperson John Lucas told The College Fix that the medical school does not discriminate on the basis of an applicant’s race. Guess the numbers are only happenstance.)
He’s got mail
City government is invested heavily into Equity and the grievance mongering that comes with it. The City is investigating the director of its Department of Civil Rights for alleged misconduct. Along the way, the City actually fired the manager of the department’s equal opportunities division. Byron Bishop, it was claimed, could not be bothered to read his e-mail. EQUITY!
The Department of Civil Rights vigorously pursues the policies and principles of affirmative action, equal opportunities, disability rights, racial equity, social justice, and environmental justice. — City of Madison
Blaska’s Bottom Line: President Trump threatens to send soldiers to restore order in cities outside Washington D.C. Madison police, we read in the most excellent Wisconsin State Journal, are poised to clear out vagrants infesting State Street — “people threatening and throwing items at passersby, fights, and other disturbances.” Brenda Konkel would call these folks “marginalized.”
14 responses to “I gotcher equity right here!”
Oh heck throw in College Football bowl games… I mean ya gotta absolutely stink to not get a bowl game these days.
On Wisconsin!
In the early 90s, as a professor at UW-Madistan, I sat on the school’s admission program for it flagship graduate program in cellular and molecular biology (CMB). We agonized over many of the minority applications we received because they were woefully undereducated in college. To pass the CMB program students had to survive courses such as calculus-based physical chemistry. So many of the black students from HSBUs hadn’t gotten past algebra 1 and would never survive in such courses. We toyed with admitting them on a probationary status, given that they make up their math deficits, but that would take a couple of years before they could actually begin their graduate level courses. We really wanted to give the folks a chance–we wanted to exercise equity but we decided not to force the issue. If a student could not qualify for our courses, we rejected them with a recommendation that they get up to speed in math and try again. I don’t recall ever seen any such second round applications–they probably found easier programs to get into. I am retired now but wonder if enforced equity has caught up to the CMB program. I noticed that med school profs have begun adding their pronouns to their email signatures. Glad I am out of that mess, which actually begins in grade schools and high schools. When you run out of qualified applicants for grad school because the lower levels are not educating them, what can you do but go along with the herd??? I also had grad students do long writing assignments who told me they never had to write a paper of any length in college!!!
The aggressive, mass affirmative action for black students practiced by the top universities in the country, took a lot of quality black students, and set them on a path that guaranteed failure. Wishful thinking could not prepare them to compete against the kids who actually were the top students.
I selfishly thank all this BS equity stuff, which defies logic when it comes to math, medical, and other fields, for the joy I had when my husband retired from UW. He got five years of enjoyment in the pool and sun that might not have been possible if UW had been catering to the excellence he craved as a researcher, mentor, educator, and faculty staff member. Once the bats had gotten into the belfry with all this garbage psycho-babble, he spent way too much of his time trying to undo the damage it was doing to the STEM fields. Now I dread seeking medical help and would rather suffer than deal with an unqualified doctor; and that’s just one ripple from the flutter of that destructive butterfly wing. Cars, planes, home appliances, home builds and surveys, environmental disasters; the list goes on.
westsidesue: We just have to trust that the UW School of Medicine along with other equity-laden institutions is graduating surgeons who know how to stop a hemorrhage on the operating table…
BTW, Harvard University’s admissions office has been routinely discriminating against Whites and Asians for years.
I still remember the piece that Tommy Thompson wrote when he was interim president of the UW. He said it all a few years ago.
Link to it and update: did he ever take action? In a prime position to make change!
crickets. The only good thing TT ever did was bring in the lottery, which he campaigned against
Given the scary information on how med students are being recruited, is it racist to make sure your doctor is white or Asian before entrusting your bodily well-being to him or her? Or is it just a rational approach to self-preservation (i.e., a mere matter of betting that a DEI hire is probably less qualified than someone who got into med school because of their good grades)? Either way, it demonstrates the irony of misguided efforts by med schools to promote ‘equity.’ They can bend the rules all they want in order to admit more black students, but they can’t force patients to entrust their health care to doctors who might have been awarded (as opposed to earning) their MD because of their race.
To add a new wrinkle to the issue, AI is now being used increasingly to establish diagnoses. This cookie-cutter approach is concerning. How nuanced is AI? It’s convenient for professionals to practice avoidance by relying on AI. However, we have had misdiagnoses before this “AI” BS and the same will happen after. Human or artificial medical presentation? Does it matter?
Bottom line: medical resources are still out there.
My guess is the left will pursue the narrative that since AI was mostly developed by White and Asian engineers, that it is inherently biased to begin with.
An interesting point, Patrick.
And don’t forget that those White and Asian engineers are highly proficient in math, which, we’re now commanded to believe, is inherently racist. How can it not be when blacks are so bad at it?
You do have a choice. AI or listen to that roadkill muncher RFKjr. Buy your bleach before the tariffs kick in.