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Default Post-Genome Princeton

Post-Genome Princeton

Trudie Pert

April 2, 2010

"Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton University and an accomplished molecular biologist, recently spoke about the “vexing issue of race” during a public lecture at Princeton University. The address, “The Meaning of Race in the Post-Genome Era,” was sponsored by Princeton’s Center for African American Studies.


Established in September 2006, the Center for African American Studies
had existed as an academic certificate program at Princeton for 37
years. The center moved to its home at Stanhope Hall in 2007 under the
leadership of its first director, Woodrow Wilson Professor of
Literature Valerie Smith (left), who opened the doors at the
dedication ceremony with President Shirley M. Tighman.

Because of her strong and sustained support for Princeton’s Black
Studies, Tilghman was introduced as, “Sister President."

“Sister President” began her lecture by dismissing as biased the works
of her dead White male predecessors. According to Tilghman, the
Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus, equated race with innate character
and based his conclusions on prejudice rather than observation. The
German physician, Franz Joseph Gall, was the first person to postulate
that the brain was the organ of the mind; he claimed that Europeans
possessed superior skulls. Francis Galton, an English polymath and
cousin of Charles Darwin, proposed “assortative mating" for traits
like intelligence and confused social class with race. Tilghman did
not mention Darwin, probably because his conclusions would be jolting
(See here and here.)

Finally, she criticized the American eugenicist and biologist, Charles
Davenport, for claiming that complex traits such as high intelligence
and personality characteristics were tied to race and for influencing
the passage of the eugenically inspired and restrictive Immigration
Act of 1924.

Tilghman stated that current evidence shows that the genetic
differences between human beings are very small, and that individual
differences are significantly greater than differences between groups.
Predictably, she rejected the possibility of finding distinctive
racial characteristics determined by genome sequencing. In spite of
the enormous variation in physical attributes regarding size, color,
hair texture, etc., she stated that at the level of the genome these
differences are infinitesimal in number when compared with the
enormous number of identical shared genomes. Though one can predict
the geographic origin of today’s Europeans, Africans, and Asians with
great accuracy, genetic distinctions are declining rapidly as
widespread immigration and intermarriage are occurring.

These ideas ignore the work of Frank Salter and Henry Harpending
showing that, although there is indeed more variation within than
between races and despite a great deal of genetic commonality among
all humans, the amount of genetic variation between human races is
significant, and therefore racial and ethnic groups constitute large
storehouses of genetic interests for everyone.

It also ignores research showing important racial differences in
traits like intelligence that have very large effects on achievement
that are so important in contemporary societies. An exclusive emphasis
on human commonality and downgrading the importance of genetic
variation grossly distorts the reality that genetically-based
differences have huge impacts on individual and group performance.

Further, no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as
a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests.
Throughout the world, ethnically diverse societies are marked by
ethnic conflict. Intellectuals like Tilghman have utopian dreams about
a racial future free from conflict and filled with peace and harmony,
but we already know that ethnic diversity increases social isolation
and lowers trust both within and between races.

According to Tilghman, it is the small race-specific component that
constitutes “the challenge ahead” because information on race-specific
genetic influences on traits like IQ could potentially be employed to
“sustain prejudice and discrimination.” The lurking fear of finding
incontrovertible evidence of race-specific differences in important
traits is the “vexing issue” of genetics. But we already have good
evidence that genetic differences are important. When even more
evidence is available, Tilghman and her ilk will doubtless ignore it.
In the end, it's all about politics for these people.

White feminists seem to believe that they share a common enemy with
African Americans, namely, dead and living White men, and have
therefore become great friends of Blacks. They have found that by
advancing the Black agenda they can better further their own minority
position (see: Feminist Coalitions, ed. Stephanie Gilmore, 2008;
Radical Sisters, Anne Valk, 2008). Since becoming Princeton's
president in 2001, Tilghman has greatly expanded Black studies, has
recruited a number of controversial Black faculty, and has encouraged
the extension of the university’s affirmative action admission and
hiring policies.

Professor Cornel West was the first to be welcomed to Princeton by
Tilghman after he left a position at Harvard where management did not
appreciate his merits. In 2000, Larry Summers, then president of
Harvard, rebuked West for missing too many classes, contributing to
grade inflation, neglecting serious scholarship, and spending too much
time with his economically profitable projects such as issuing two rap
CD’s, and appearing in several Matrix movies. West, in turn, accused
Summers of elitism, a serious sin to the multi-culturally minded. He
was welcomed into the Princeton fold in 2002, apparently because
Princeton does not limit itself to rarified interests.

Cornel West

The second Tilghman Black studies appointee is Professor Van Jones,
who was recently appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow. An
attorney and environmentalist, Jones was selected by Pres. Obama in
March, 2009, for the newly created post of Special Advisor for Green
Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation, at the White House Council for
Environmental Quality. Jones, called by Time Magazine one of the
“Heroes of the Environment,” was founder of the Black advocacy group,
“Color of Change,” in 2005.

Alas, due to his outspoken manner, his time at the White House was all
too brief. Due to allegations of associations with Marxist groups in
the 1990’s, his published, disparaging remarks about Congressional
Republicans, (calling them “a$$holes”), and several nasty publicized
vendettas, he was too publicly uncouth even for Obama. Jones resigned
from his White House position just six months after he had been
appointed to it. Not to worry – Princeton immediately offered him a
sinecure. The government’s loss is Princeton’s gain.

Tilghman’s sympathy for Black causes is of long duration. In 2003,
Princeton joined an amicus brief filed with the US Supreme Court in
support of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy. The
brief ensured that racial and ethnic diversity constitutes a
“compelling” interest in the admissions process of “selective”
universities like Princeton. In Dec., 2009, she received the W.E.B.
DuBois Medal, the highest honor bestowed by Harvard University’s
W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and American Research, for her
leadership in strengthening Princeton’s commitment to African American
studies. Princeton’s Center for African American Studies was
established under Tilghman’s direction in 2006 after existing as an
academic certificate program for 37 years. Tilghman recommended a
greatly expanded curriculum because she found race study for all
liberal arts students to be an “indispensable element of preparation
for life in this country.” Since 2006 core faculty members have grown
from 2 to 18. Associated and affiliated members contribute another 18
additional faculty. Courses have increased by 40%.

Below are two of the ten courses offered in Princeton University’s
Center for African American Studies, Spring, 2010.

AAS 314/COM 39 Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International
Fashion Models

This course explores the life-writing of American, African, and Asian
women in the fashion industry as a launching point for thinking about
race, gender, and class. How do ethnicity and femininity intersect?
How are authenticity and difference commodified? How do women
construct identities through narrative and negotiate their
relationships to their bodies, families, and nations. Course will
include guest lectures by fashion editors and models; discussions of
contemporary television programs, global fashion, and cultural
studies, and student self narratives about their relationships with
cultural standards of beauty, whether vexed or not.

AAS 339/ENG 339 Josephine Baker and the Modern


What does a black burlesque star have to do with the making of Euro-
American modernity? This course situates the performance art of
Josephine Baker as a dynamic fulcrum through which to trace the
unexpected connections between the invention of what might be called
the “modernist” style and the staging of black skin at the turn of the
20th century. We will study her work in film, photography, and cinema
as an active and profound engagement with a range of modernist
innovations and theories in the fields of film, photography,
architecture, art and literature.

Josephine Baker

What next? Courses to extoll the virtues of O.J. Simpson and Michael
Jackson? To a president who has supported Princeton’s first post
doctoral fellowship in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered
studies, who endorsed the creation of a new LGBT campus center, and
who has acted in a student production of the Vagina Monologues, these
Black studies courses are, no doubt, most suitably diverse.

The Princeton University admissions policy is very welcoming of Black
students. If race is merely a social construct, as Shirley Tilghman
implies in her Post-Genome speech, then Princeton’s admission policy
is most puzzling. Why give admission preferences based on race if
racial differences are only superficial? In their article, “The
Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities”,
Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung, two Princeton sociology
researchers, describe who gains and who loses as a result of admission
preferences. They concede, that “a decision to admit one student
involves a choice not to admit someone else."

According to Espenshade and Chung, currently, African-American
candidates for admission at the elite universities receive on average
230 extra SAT points, Hispanics 185 additional SAT points, recruited
athletes, 200 points, and legacy applicants, 160 points. If bonus
points were eliminated, the following would result. African-American
acceptance rates would fall from 33.7% to 12.2%, a decline of almost
two-thirds. In other words, the proportion of Black students would
decline from 9% to 3.3%. Hispanic acceptance rates would fall in half,
from 26.8% to 12.9%, a decline of 7.9% to 3.8% of all admitted
students. The category of recruited athletes and legacy students is
mostly White and negligible.

Asian applicants would be the biggest winners if racial preferences
were eliminated from the admission process. Their acceptance rates
would increase from 17.6% to 23.4%. They would comprise 31.5% of all
accepted students compared with the actual proportion of 23.7%
However, were Princeton to place a ceiling on foreign Asian students,
this number would be much lower. In the absence of admission
preferences and ceilings for Asians, the number of White students
would rise only 2.4%, an acceptance increase from 23.8% to 24.3%.
Jewish enrollment at Princeton is 13%, well below the Ivy League
average of 25%. These figures match up well with the many studies
which have found corresponding average normal racial IQ: Asians 104,
White 100, and Blacks 85 (see, for example, “Is Race a Valid Taxonomic
Construct, by J. Philippe Rushton).

In order to attract minorities to Princeton and the other elite
universities, there is a great deal of money available to fund
financial aid to students from families with low incomes. In their
book, “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite
College Admission on Campus Life,” (Princeton University Press, 2009),
Prof. Espenshade and Alexandria Radford concluded that social class
matters in the admission process, but it is usually given less weight
than race or ethnicity. Having a lower-class family background was
equivalent to having 130 additional points on the SAT. However, the
admission preference accorded to low-income students appears to be
reserved largely for nonwhite students.

Tilghman’s enthusiasm for increasing the number of Black faculty and
Black students at Princeton is exceeded only by her eagerness in
placing feminists into key positions. For some time now criticism of
her many appointments of women, to the exclusion of qualified men, has
been growing. Because she herself had no administrative experience
when she was appointed president, her very selection to that office
caused alarm, as it most certainly was based on gender. And gender
parity is always on her mind.

Once chosen, she moved aggressively to appoint an assistant dean “to
oversee gender equity.” Within her first two years as Princeton’s
president, Tilghman appointed Princeton’s first woman provost, first
woman dean of admissions, first woman dean of the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs, and first woman dean (a
non-engineer) of the school of engineering. Recently she appointed a
second woman to become dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. She favors
preferential treatment of women, and envisions policies whereby women
faculty will be granted a longer tenure review period and subsidized
nannies.

“A decision to admit one student involves a choice not to admit
someone else,” applies not only to student selection but also to
university hiring. When the goal is to achieve race and gender parity,
White men are side-lined. Not only are White males losers in the
racial affirmative action student selection process, they are doubly
cheated when women receive preferential treatment in the hiring
process.

A recent alumni magazine quotes Tilghman bragging, “This is not your
great-grandfather’s Princeton.” What a pity. Princeton was established
in 1747 through the efforts and with the financial resources of mostly
Scottish immigrants as the institution of higher learning for young
Anglo men. Princeton’s association with the Presbyterian Church was
close, and its first thirteen presidents, until Woodrow Wilson, were
clergymen. The beautiful English neo-gothic campus chapel is the third
largest college chapel in the world. Princeton’s sixth president, the
Scottish born Presbyterian minister, John Witherspoon, was a signatory
of the Declaration of Independence.


White men established Princeton University and Whites have continued
to finance the institution which now has the 4th largest institutional
endowment fund in the Ivy League, and the largest endowment per
student of $2,000,000. One wonders why racial descendants of Princeton
founders, i.e., parents and students of European heritage, do not
demand a White preferential admission policy and a faculty and an
administration reflecting their own ethnic heritage."

Trudie Pert is a pen name. Email her.

Permanent link:http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Pert-
Princeton.html
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Default Post-Genome Princeton

On Apr 4, 6:14*pm, Bret L wrote:

It must be horrible, facing a totally obscure end to a petty, hum-drum
little life.

Even I, only a soldier, have positively impacted other people's lives
and will be remembered through them. Likewise Jenn's impact on others
as an educator.

But you, Bratzi? LOL!
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