Canadian Research Institute Hires Prominent MIT Physicist

September 19, 2011, 2:35 pm

Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has lured a world-renowned theoretical physicist, Xiao-Gang Wen, away from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in what the Globe and Mail called “a coup” for the Canadian institution. Mr. Wen will be the first holder of the BMO Financial Group Isaac Newton Chair in Theoretical Physics, which is reportedly the world’s best-endowed chair in theoretical physics at $8-million, and is intended to be the first of five chairs named after the founder of modern physics. The Chinese-born physicist specializes in condensed-matter theory and has held a distinguished visitor’s chair at Perimeter, which is in Waterloo, Ontario.

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Once again, Mr. Kahlenberg is transfixed on the subject of equal opportunity programs for
racial minorities. He risks being labeled a “Johnny One-Note” as he
takes any opportunity to argue that race-based affirmative action is somehow
problematic and should be replaced by class-based affirmative action. He never
accepts the fact that the two are not mutually-exclusive; that there is no zero
sum game afoot, and that colleges and universities can and have assisted both
groups to gain access to the Academy. The University of Michigan’s
undergraduate school used both socio-economic status and race among other
factors that benefited white students (including living in the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan) as criteria for admission. Kahlenberg reflects a “Thus far
and no farther” mentality (to quote the Bible and the late Professor Derrick Bell) that is the stuff of psychology; that the few years post-Bakke are at an end and there should be no more efforts to assist a group that suffered slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, and the effects thereof.

Why the obsession with efforts to promote access to minority students who have
more of a legal claim to equal opportunity programs than others, and why the
specious use of President Obama’s children, who reflect, as an income group, a
tiny minority of African Americans in the USA?

Ironically, from a gender standpoint, there are more colleges and universities in which
women are the majority, and colleges are using a quiet form of affirmative
action to “balance” the genders in their student classes. If affirmative action
is ended, it is white men who may suffer the most. It is also interesting that
the Gratz v. Bollinger, Grutter and Fisher plaintiffs are all
white females, while they constitute the majority at an increasing number of
colleges and universities. Indeed, white women have been the primary
beneficiaries of affirmative action in education and employment.

I suggest that Mr. Kahlenberg find another issue for his considerable talents as a
writer, lest he be viewed ultimately as another misguided tool of the right
wing.

Shirley J. Wilcher
Executive Director
American Association for
Affirmative Action
http://www.affirmativeaction.og
pianiste

All the good and noble causes Ms. Wilcher can piously cite–that AA happens to benefit some non-minority poor students, that women have benefitted from it, that even white men might benefit from it, that Jim Crow is not absolutely dead anywhere and everywhere in this country, etc.–do not, and cannot, obviate that fact that racial preferences (i.e., a student’s minority race) are patently unconstitutional.

Proponents of AA (including those on some courts) twist themselves into pretzels of expedient and tendentious reasoning to justify giving college admission applicants of certain races preferences (extra points, so to speak) based solely on their races.

College admissions are a zero-sum procedure. Colleges don’t expand their freshman classes to accommodate AA minorities; they just cut back on the number of whites and Asians–yes Asians, a minority.