After 300-Plus Losses, This Team Makes Opponents Nervous

February 14, 2011, 9:54 pm

The Caltech men’s basketball team has strung together one of the worst losing streaks in college sports: 25 years of losses in the NCAA’s Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The last time the program beat a conference foe, Mikhail Gorbachev was in office.

Caltech’s streak has to end sometime, though, and that’s why the Beavers have opposing institutions’ presidents running scared, reports The Chronicle‘s Lawrence Biemiller, who sat courtside for Saturday’s Caltech-Whittier College match-up.

Around the time Caltech started losing, I was warming the bench on a jayvee basketball team in Ohio that started its season 0-19. I had played on undefeated teams before, but the lessons I took from Coach Moran and all those losses were far more lasting than anything I ever learned by being on top. (For one thing, you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, especially if you have a four-inch vertical leap.)

For Caltech’s players, one lesson may be this: They have bigger things to worry about. That’s definitely the case for sophomore Mike Edwards, whose breakaway dunk sparked a second-half run against Whittier. If last summer is any indication, the mechanical engineering major will make a far bigger impact after he graduates than with anything he does on the hardwood. Through an internship at the Institute’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and with the assistance of a NASA grant, Edwards helped develop new platinum-based alloys for use in hydrogen-air fuel cells.

Unfortunately for Caltech, which lost by 20 Saturday, its streak is still alive. But Edwards and his teammates are going places.

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yoyoid

I would think it’s better than the candidate who doesn’t say anything.
11901736

Faculty hiring is a matter of “primary faculty responsibility” at an institution that adheres to the AAUP/AGB Statement on Government. Administrations have the prerogative of declining to fund lines for weak departments, and of redirecting those lines to units that can be depended on to make strong hires.
tuxthepenguin

I don’t know the specifics of the situation, but it seems odd that faculty members would get upset over Dr. Evans stating his opinion. I just don’t understand the problem. I’ve been on numerous search committees.
copesan

If there is a problem here, its that there are always faculty members who regard any action of an administrator as categorically evil or controlling or the first step to dictatorship or whatever, and will decide to oppose the administrator’s decision regardless of its merit (this opinion is often couched in some leftover sixties jargon).
tuxthepenguin

LOL. That’s true. I just wish they’d do what’s in the best interest of everyone than what makes them feel more powerful.
ktucker

Seriously now, that’s ridiculous. So what if that candidate dominates the discussion? How about him/her actually being the smartest in the room? Wouldn’t you want to have someone who’s smarter than you in your team? Isn’t the opposite just promoting mediocrity? How about adopting some of the corporate growth mentality? At the end of the day, it might even help us bring some sanity into public finances around campuses. I’d rather hire fewer “smartest in the room” folks than a growing bunch of mediocre ones who’s daily agenda before they get off bed is “how do I push this item off my agenda and on to someone else’s.”
11236504

If you need someone to dominate and make every decision, great. If you are looking for a team-player, collaborative, considerate, willing to learn context before offering solutions and rule changes, then think twice about hiring the person that seems to be self-proclaimed as smartest in the room.
oldphilprof

If a candidate is naturally a chatty-cathy and fears s/he may not be able to control it, ask questions! Pontificating will not endear you. Being (or at least appearing) interested in others is much more attractive.
vceross

In my experience, the observations made here are true: underrepresented students will aim for local colleges that are attended by their friends or that are near their homes. One thing that needs to be understood, however, is that this isn’t merely “aiming low”–it also has to do with feeling the need to continue working and supporting one’s family, as well as negotiating the expenses of traveling across the country: no easy feat for economically challenged students. Also, once you coach and mentor a young person and successfully get them into college, they face all of the same issues once again, and universities seldom have good programs for mentoring such students over the years. It can be devastating for an underrepresented student, particularly one of limited means, to get to an upper-tier school, know no one, feel utterly out of place, and fail: an enormous setback all around.
realeducator09

As a mother of three young black men, two have graduated from college, one is still matriculating, these young men absolutely must have the academic skills necessary for successful college completion. This begins much earlier than high school and expands beyond the counseling realm. Unfortunately in the k-12 arena, ample development of reading, writing, math and critical thinking skills have been replaced by scant standardized testing teaching. And…teachers absolutely must stop stringing these students along and giving them grades just because they see some motivation. Honestly, k-12 educators have to get real with themselves, be truthful, stress the basics and beyond and re-implement rigorous study. Not just for this population but for all students.
dlws8607

I wish news organizations, and especially ones that target higher education, would stop the sexist and racist practices demonstrated in the title of this article, “Redefining Admissions ‘Success’ for Black Males.” How often do you see the “F” word, “female” in articles and titles of articles on this site? Why is it that when referring to men it is common practice, and almost universal, to use “male,” and when referring to black men it is especially common practice to use “black male?” If the editing standards are to avoid the F word, than they should also be to avoid the M word.
robert_wyatt

????

5713 results

Black and Female in the Academy
By April Gregory

Foreign and Female on the Job Market
By Shabana Mir

Courting Female Donors
By ERIN STROUT

Why ‘Female’ Science Professor?
By Female Science Professor

Female Athletes on the Campus

Harvard to Encourage Female Professors
By ROBIN WILSON

A Hothouse for Female Scientists
By ROBIN WILSON

Wanted in Sweden: Female Professors
By BURTON BOLLAG

Female Undergraduates Continue to Outnumber Men, but Gap Holds Steady
By Andrea Fuller

Female Scientists Trail Men in Earning Patents
By SAMANTHA HENIG

Increase Projected in Female Merit Scholars
By JASON HUGHES

Female Placekicker’s Lawsuit Against Duke Is Reinstated
By WELCH SUGGS

etc
vsuprof1

Do you have any research that demonstrates that black males are “unambitious”? This is offensive; the rest of us are living in 2011!!!!
old nassau’67

First: Using dlws8607′s question as a starting point, one reason the “f” word – and the “J” (Jewish) and the A (Asian) – words do not appear as frequently in articles dealing with academic achievement is that other identifiable minorities do not have the scholastic difficulties of the “black males”. Two example articles:

“Fifty-seven percent of all students who enroll in four-year, nonprofit colleges earn diplomas within six years, but the graduation rates for different groups of students vary vastly. On average, 60 percent of white students who start college have earned bachelor’s degrees six years later. But only 49 percent of Hispanic students and 40 percent of black students do.” (http://chronicle.com/article/Reports-Highlight-Disparities/123857/)

“But for the past five years the graduation rate for black men has improved by one percentage point and now stands at 36 percent……This year the college graduation rate for black women rose by one percentage point to 47 percent.” (http://www.jbhe.com/preview/winter07preview.html)

Second: the term “underrepresented”. By what criterion? Population? Income? High School Graduation? Apply to College? SAT’s? GPA’s? Is there some law stating that the % of a group admitted to college must = the % in the population?
burger1376

There are many underrepresented groups in higher education for which there are no statistics done for them. For example: the poor whites of the appalachian region, the mixted white/native American groups of the East coast, the pacific islanders who are usually mixed in with Asian, the single parent families where there is only a dad and no mom, coal mining families, cajun famlies, etc. Using statistics that focus on race is inherently racists. It ignores many other underreprested groups while it also includes a lot of non-underrepresented blacks in with the underreprested blacks, mainly the difference between rich blacks and poor blacks. By the way, I wonder how many Amish who left the family are represented in colleges like Harvard or Yale? Maybe we should give them handouts like we do the blacks.
AbdulKareemaWheat

Good article.

Add this factor to the mix. How many remedial classes do “…black males and other underrepresented students” attend in their first year at State U or XYZ College?

This is important for the very obvious reason(s) that, time spent in remedial classes burns through money–the student’s, Pell grants, school money, etc.–while piling up exactly 0 credit hours toward graduation.

Put another way: how ready are “…black males and other underrepresented students” for post secondary work?
AbdulKareemaWheat

I can assure you that Alaska Natives and their success/failure in college are studied to death here in Alaska. Some meaningful results have been obtained from such studies (a Native-centered engineering school at the Univ. of Alaska Anchorage, for example, makes an attempt to keep like-race, like-cultural individuals together in a course of study), but generally the studies only serve to highlight and quantify failures.
burger1376

Yes, but I think you missed my point. Don’t take offense; I am not sure if you missed my point, but I am just assuming. My point is that you can’t use race when the group is too diverse. Whites are not all in the same catagory, but studies done on race would put them all in the same catagory. Blacks are certainly not in the same catagory as some are rich and some are not. Richer blacks and richer whites are closer to each other and poor blacks and poor whites are closer to each other when it comes to being underreprested. However, racist studies would not show that. As for Alaskan natives, the group is (I am assuming here, because I am not a scholar on Alaskan natives) small and relatively homogenous.

If we really want to study inequalities in America, we have to stop using such vague groups and start using real groups based on many more factores such as income, wealth, region, religion, histories, etc. Until then, the liberal academics will continue to be puzzled as to why their studies create no results. As they focus on blacks, they will use more policies to help blacks. But yet, those policies only help richer blacks become richer while neglecting both poor whites and poor blacks. Liberals lack logic and a sense of reality. But at the same time, liberals control academia.
prasadjacob

It’s funny. Sooner or later crackdown of Saudi Arabian protests would extend to these campuses too. “Bahrain’s Crackdown on Protest Extends to Academe, With Interrogations, Firings, and Expulsions”. If it can happen in Bahrain using Saudi military under US sponsorship why Saudi
itself be an exception.
jim68243

Yes, there is a quiet confidence that speaks to maturity. I don’t see this very often but it is refreshing when it appears. mechanical engineering internships