Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions-And Affirmative Action- For Donald Trump

Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions- and Affirmative Action-- for Donald Trump

Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University

Donald Trump’s comments that Barack Obama didn’t have the grades to get into Ivy League
Schools shows a profound ignorance of the admissions policies of those institutions. According to Bowen, Shapiro et all who thoroughly researched the admissions policies of elite universities in the US ( and whose conclusions can be found in their 2002 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values) the greatest admissions advantage at those schools goes not to children of alumni, or underrepresented minorities, but to recruited athletes! Not only are their twice as many recruited athletes as underrepresented minorities at these schools, but the admissions advantage accruing to an athlete, whether male or female, is twice as powerful as those given to a minority or a “legacy”.

We are not talking about a small number of students here. At most Ivy League schools, close to 20 percent of the undergraduates are recruited athletes, and at Williams College, they
constitute 40 percent of the student population. Given the variety of the sports encompassed, which go from lacrosse, to golf, to tennis to sailing, to soccer, to hockey along with softball, baseball, basketball and football, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of
“sports affirmative action” are white. Not only are these athletes admitted with significantly lower grades and SAT’s than the university mean, but their grades in college tend to be lower than those of their fellow students. Nevertheless, their incomes after college are no lower than those of their fellow students because a large proportion of them go into careers in the financial sector, which go out of their way to recruit “Ivy league athletes” as key components of their work force.

The populist resentment of allegedly “undeserving” minorities who push hardworking white students out of top college- which Trump is exploiting with his rhetoric- turns out to be misplaced. To put the matter bluntly, there are a lot more white hockey and football players who get into Ivy League schools with SAT’s below the school norm than there are Black and Latino students from the inner city. As someone who spent more than 15 years coaching athletes from diverse racial and class backgrounds in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and 1990’s, I know this from personal experience as well as research. One young woman I worked with, a nationally ranked tennis player who was highly recruited by every Ivy League college, actually got a letter from Harvard telling her that her target SAT score for admission was 1100! Another young man from our community, a highly recruited left handed pitcher, was told that his admission target for Princeton was 1200, with an expected verbal score of 600 because “Princeton has a lot of reading.” Needless to say, both of those young people were white!

So much for “undeserving minorities” pushing white kids out of top colleges! To put this in perspective, I have taught African American Studies at Fordham for more than 40 years and talked to hundreds of Black and Latino students about their college recruitment experiences. Not one of them has mentioned being given SAT targets that low for admission to Harvard, Yale or Princeton!

Donald Trump needs to find a new subject for his demagoguery. If Barack Obama got into Columbia with lower grades and SAT’s scores than the college mean, he was only one of many students- the vast majority of whom were white- who fell into that category. And his success, along with so many others so admitted, should be a warning that traits measurable on standardized tests are not the only indicators of talent and potential that should be considered for university admission. When Ivy League schools admit students, irrespective of the scores they register on standardized tests, they almost never drop out, and usually achieve professional success after graduation. Whether these schools should have as much power as they do in American society is another question, but none of the students they bring in are programmed to “fail.”

Columbia College chose wisely in admitting Barack Obama. His admission was only one small part of a broad policy for creating a student body diverse in talent as well as cultural background from which far more whites than ethnic and racial minorities were beneficiaries

Mark Naison
Aprl 27, 2011

Why Donald Trump's"Birther" Campaign is Dangerous and Why We Should Boycott Everything Trump Owns

Why Donald Trump's "Birther "Campaign is Dangerous and Why We Should Boycott Everything Trump Owns

Professor Mark Naison
Fordham University



The "birther" accusations seized upon by Donald Trump as his fast track to the Republican nomination are particularly toxic because they conflate the historic fear and hatred of Blacks-with all its awesome, subliminal power- with rapidly escalating fear of immigrants and Muslims. Obama, to birthers, is a "triple threat" who combine all their fears in one- Black, Muslim, immigrant! To more than a few white Americans, Barack Obama's ascension to the Presidency is a nightmare of epic proportions, a sign that good hardworking white Christian people like them have been pushed aside and the country has been taken over by imposters. It is paranoia of the highest order, akin to the fantasies of Jewish control and manipulation spun by Hitler durinng his rise to power in Germany, but it is clearly very powerful if an oppportunist like Trump can seize upon it and move so quickly to the head of the Republican field that Sarah Palin has been pushed out of the headlines. At first, I thought Trump was a joke. No more. His campaign is starting to get scary because it is almost entirely based on racial fears of America's rapidly diminishing white majority. That's why I agree with my friend and fellow blogger Helen Burleson. We need to stike quickly, and stike hard and boycott everything Trump owns.

April 25, 2011

The Real Cost of Budget Cuts in a Nation That Has Lost Its Way

The Real Cost of Budget Cuts in a Nation That Has Lost Its Way: A Sobering Visit to Community Board 3

Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University.


Last night, I attended the monthly meeting of Community Board 3 in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. I was there to speak in favor of a resolution to place a plaque on Jennings Street and Prospect Avenue to honor the Chords “Sh-Boom,” the first song by an urban harmonic group to sell a million records, and landmark in the history of Rock N Roll. The resolution passed unanimously, with Board members indicating this was only the first step in a campaign to “landmark” Morrisania’s remarkable musical legacy, which included jazz, Latin music, and hip hop as well as rhythm and blues and rock and roll.


But that was the one piece of good news in a very sobering evening. Before we got to speak in behalf of this resolution, I sat through a public hearing on the impact of coming budget cuts on the Morrisania community, a discussion that quite frankly sent chills through me. To some people, the upcoming state budget cuts are an abstraction, but in the eyes of Morrisania residents, their neighborhood, a 99% black and Latino working class community located in the poorest Congressional District in the US, is Ground Zero for Sacrifice.


The first person to speak was the owner of a small apartment building who was about to lose many of his tenants because of the cancellation of the Work Advantage Program, which cut off rent subsidies immediately to 17,000 formerly homeless individuals and families. This action, the speaker, warned, was not only going to throw tens of thousands of people into the street, but potentially bankrupt small building owners like him who were going to lose half of their tenants. The city and state’s answer was to open 70 new homeless shelters! The prospect of thousands of people being forced into shelters from a successful experiment in transitional housing appalled everyone in the room, but there was nothing they could do about it. It was a done deal.


The next speaker got up to denounce the cuts to youth employment and after school programs. She said that past cuts had already increased violence and drug selling in the community, but that the upcoming cuts would make the neighborhood hell for old and young alike.” By this summer,” she warned,” no one over 30 in this neighborhood will be able to leave their house without dodging bullets or picking their children up off the sidewalk"


Other speakers got up to denounce cuts in school budgets, which were going to increase class size and make it much harder to teach and control students and cuts in Sanitation, which were going to bring back a Rat problem which the City had just began to get under control but perhaps the most heartbreaking testimony came from the Director of the Morrisania Branch of the New York Public library, who which was about to experience cuts which were going to bring it back to the dark years following the fiscal crisis of the mid 70’s. His library, he said, had become a great neighborhood success story, serving almost 160,000 people a year, offering more than 600 classes to neighborhood people of all ages in subjects ranging from computer literacy to writing research papers to English as a second language, some of them taking place in Senior Centers as well as the Library proper. All this was now in jeopardy, he said. The new state budget would reduce financing of his branch to 40 percent of what it was in 2008, forcing him to lay off staff, cancel many and go back to the 1980’s schedule of being four days a week.


As I took in the full weight of this testimony, I began to connect the dots- cut jobs and after school programs for youth, force families into the street, increase class size in local schools, and sharply reduce library access and you are setting the scene for nothing less a wave of violence and suffering. Let’s make no mistake about it, Morrisania, a neighborhood who spend twenty years rebuilding itself after a arson and disinvestment cycle destroyed more than half of its housing stock, has been put on the chopping block by heartless politicians in City Hall, Albany and Washington, who are forcing unspeakable sacrifice on its residents, especially its youth, while refusing to raise taxes on America’s bloated upper class.

Knowing this, I will be having trouble sleeping at night. What about you?

Mark Naison
April 13, 2011

Small Business Nation-Understanding the Social Base of Tea Party America

Small Business Nation- Understanding the Social Base of Tea Party America Dr Mark Naison Fordham University Before he moved away after a bitter divorce, I had many an interesting conversation about politics with my Long Island neighbor John, a union carpenter and life time “Bonacker” (resident of the East End of Long Island). A tough navy veteran with a crew cut who still, in his mid fifties, looked in fighting trim, John would stop by every time he saw I was in and hold forth on all his pet peeves- which were many- while we went through the beer in my refrigerator. Among his favorite targets were politicians, the government, his wife’s relatives, rich people in the Hamptons, and lawyers and insurance companies. John was still raging that he had never collected any money from an accident he had several when he fell off a roof during his home repair job, an accident that had left him with chronic back pain. Nevertheless, John continued to do “side jobs” on the weekends, ranging from painting houses to repairing fences, because his salary at the lumber yard couldn’t pay for the “extras” in his life, ranging from fishing trips, to family vacations, for his daughters acting and dance classes. He was tired, angry, hard pressed, glad he had me he could vent with, a need that became even greater when he discovered his wife was cheating on him. Since he moved out just before the 2008 election, I never had chance to explore his attitudes about the Obama Presidency, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, like one of my other LI neighbors, a postal worker, he became a supporter of the Tea Party. A glimpse at John’s life suggests why it is a perilous venture to look at Tea Party affiliation strictly as an example of false consciousness, of people voting against their own interests. While the Tea Party movement was funded and has been supported by powerful corporate interests, its popularity was not manufactured. It’s anti-government, anti-tax message has struck a powerful chord with millions of white middle class and working class people who feel embattled and pushed to the edge and whose identify with business, rather than labor, because small scale entrepreneurship is the only thing that stands between them and poverty. To understand this, you have to get to know people in small town and suburban America and see how they patch together income. As real wages have stagnated during the last thirty years, more and more people have depended on performing “side jobs” as independent contractors to maintain a middle class standard of living. They drive cabs, paint houses, do child care, fix computers, teach golf, take people on fishing trips, exploring whatever “niche” in the local economy allows them to make extra income. Some jobs they take –bartending, waitressing- involve working for others, but more and more people create their own one or two person businesses to bring in needed income. This is the hidden side of the “Wal Martization” of America. We all know of how people have used credit card debt and second mortgages on their homes to finance middle class levels of consumption, but what is less known is how many people have developed small “side businesses” to supplement their main jobs. If John is any example, the stress and risk associated with this can be pretty high and the margin for error quite small. Given this, is it any surprise that people who run small individual businesses see any tax increase as a threat to their livelihood, and are deeply resentful of government workers who have job security, pensions and an income that can support them starting a business on the side? How else do you explain the huge Republican votes in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, states whose economies once featured auto plants and steel mills and now have more jobs in Wall Mart, Auto Zone and McDonalds than factories. Small individual business, along with consumer credit, have been the only ways working people have maintained a decent standard of living, and they see government as more an enemy than an aid in that effort. Beneath all the racism, and the voodoo economics in the Tea Party movement, there is genuine desperation, and a cry for help. Until we address the causes of economic insecurity in their lives, progressive politics in America may be stalled for a generation Mark Naison April 10,2011

Teaching Is Relationship Building-Something School Reformers Often Forget

Teaching is Relationship Building-Something School Reformers Often Forget Dr Mark Naison Fordham University One of the most pernicious examples of the tunnel vision of school reformers is the “school turnaround” concept incorporated in the Obama Administration’s “Race To the Top” legislation and currently being implemented in school districts throughout the nation. “Turnaround” strategy proposes that a school designated as “failing”-invariably on test scores- be closed and either replaced with a charter school or reopened as a new school, in the same facility, with a different principal and no more than fifty percent of the current teaching staff. Not only does this concept presume that “bad teachers” are the primary cause of a school’s alleged failures, but it places no value on relationships that teachers build with students and their families, relationships that often last far beyond the time they were in class and are integral to student success and help sustain teacher morale even in the most daunting conditions Anyone who has been a teacher knows that building up the confidence of students and giving them the courage to realize their potential and find their voice involves more than classroom learning. It often requires individualized instruction and mentoring, joint participation in extracurricular activities and trips, and a commitment to maintain communication long after the student leaves your class. When this happens, students come to see relationships with their teachers as sources of strength throughout their lives, a form of “cultural capital” that allows them to surmount obstacles and realize their dreams. In working class and poor communities, where families are under constant stress, lifetime communication with teachers can be the critical factor enabling students to stay in school in the face of crises that would crush most people. Janet Mayer’s wonderful new book, As Bad As They Say: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx, provides example of example of how this longtime Bronx teacher supported her students through personal challenges that included evictions, murders, rapes, heatless homes, unemployed parents and responsibilities for raising younger siblings. This influence didn’t just take place when students were in Mayer’s classes. It often went on for fifteen or twenty years after they left her school. And it led to students who could have easily fallen through the cracks becoming productive, successful citizens, some of them teachers themselves. The power of relationship building- something that cannot be measured by student performance on standardized tests- is something I have experienced over and over again in my own teaching at the college level. The most transformative moments in my teaching have not taken place during class sessions, or on midterm or final examinations, but it individual encounters with students where they confront obstacles and with my help, confronted strategies to overcome them An example of this, from the late 90’s remain etched in my memory. M was a Fordham basketball star from an Irish working class family in New Jersey, who along with some of her teammates, had enrolled in several of my Black history classes at Fordham . She was incredibly shy, never saying a word in class, but one day, she showed up in my office and started crying. “Dr Naison,” she said, “I don’t belong at this school. I only got 800 on my SAT’s and I feel like everyone here is so much smarter than me. What am I going to do?” I took a deep breath, prayed I wouldn’t screw this up, and started developing a strategy. “M, they aren’t smarter than you, they just have more educated parents and went to better high schools. But we are going to overcome that. Every time you write a paper, hand me a rough draft a week before and I will edit if for you. Before every test, come with your friends to my office and I will give you a strategy for studying as a group. And in return, you and your friends can work with me on my crossover and spin moves!” The last comment drew a reluctant smile from M and she went to work. Little by little, she went from being a C student, to a B student, to getting B+’s and A-‘s in the last class she took with me during the second semester of her senior year. But the best part of this transformation was watching M find her voice. By the time she graduated, she was not only participating regularly In class discussions, she was being perceived as a leader by her fellow students, including those who came in to the school with much higher SAT’s and grades. After she graduated from Fordham M’s confidence only grew. After playing pro basketball in Europe for several years, she returned to New Jersey and became a teacher and coach, using her own hard won confidence to build the confidence of others. In my forty years at Fordham, I have built many relationships with individual students I have taught, some of whom have gone on to become mayors of cities, leaders of government agencies, world renowned scholars and journalists, but no teaching or mentoring experience has been more satisfying than the one I had with M. Why? Because M represents the majority of students attending schools in America’s poor and working class communities. They not only lack the skills that upper middle class students acquire in their families and the high performing schools they attend, they often suffer from a crippling lack of self-confidence in approaching the tasks that schools present. That confidence deficit, I am convinced, is at least as important as the skills deficit and it cannot be overcome through test prep drills and group instruction. It requires individual attention from teachers, and not just in a classroom setting. It requires extra work and encouragement after school, on weekends, and sometimes long after the student leaves the teachers direct care. If you rotate teachers in and out of schools at a dizzying rate and create pressures that drive them out of the profession after a few years, you will destroy the relationship building component that is at the heart of great teaching. Ironically, under the pressure of federal mandates, this is being done in the very communities that have the greatest need for inspired teaching and mentoring. Dr Mark Naison Fordham University One of the most pernicious examples of the tunnel vision of school reformers is the “school turnaround” concept incorporated in the Obama Administration’s “Race To the Top” legislation and currently being implemented in school districts throughout the nation. “Turnaround” strategy proposes that a school designated as “failing”-invariably on test scores- be closed and either replaced with a charter school or reopened as a new school, in the same facility, with a different principal and no more than fifty percent of the current teaching staff. Not only does this concept presume that “bad teachers” are the primary cause of a school’s alleged failures, but it places no value on relationships that teachers build with students and their families, relationships that often last far beyond the time they were in class and are integral to student success and help sustain teacher morale even in the most daunting conditions Anyone who has been a teacher knows that building up the confidence of students and giving them the courage to realize their potential and find their voice involves more than classroom learning. It often requires individualized instruction and mentoring, joint participation in extracurricular activities and trips, and a commitment to maintain communication long after the student leaves your class. When this happens, students come to see relationships with their teachers as sources of strength throughout their lives, a form of “cultural capital” that allows them to surmount obstacles and realize their dreams. In working class and poor communities, where families are under constant stress, lifetime communication with teachers can be the critical factor enabling students to stay in school in the face of crises that would crush most people. Janet Mayer’s wonderful new book, As Bad As They Say: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx, provides example of example of how this longtime Bronx teacher supported her students through personal challenges that included evictions, murders, rapes, heatless homes, unemployed parents and responsibilities for raising younger siblings. This influence didn’t just take place when students were in Mayer’s classes. It often went on for fifteen or twenty years after they left her school. And it led to students who could have easily fallen through the cracks becoming productive, successful citizens, some of them teachers themselves. The power of relationship building- something that cannot be measured by student performance on standardized tests- is something I have experienced over and over again in my own teaching at the college level. The most transformative moments in my teaching have not taken place during class sessions, or on midterm or final examinations, but it individual encounters with students where they confront obstacles and with my help, confronted strategies to overcome them An example of this, from the late 90’s remain etched in my memory. M was a Fordham basketball star from an Irish working class family in New Jersey, who along with some of her teammates, had enrolled in several of my Black history classes at Fordham . She was incredibly shy, never saying a word in class, but one day, she showed up in my office and started crying. “Dr Naison,” she said, “I don’t belong at this school. I only got 800 on my SAT’s and I feel like everyone here is so much smarter than me. What am I going to do?” I took a deep breath, prayed I wouldn’t screw this up, and started developing a strategy. “M, they aren’t smarter than you, they just have more educated parents and went to better high schools. But we are going to overcome that. Every time you write a paper, hand me a rough draft a week before and I will edit if for you. Before every test, come with your friends to my office and I will give you a strategy for studying as a group. And in return, you and your friends can work with me on my crossover and spin moves!” The last comment drew a reluctant smile from M and she went to work. Little by little, she went from being a C student, to a B student, to getting B+’s and A-‘s in the last class she took with me during the second semester of her senior year. But the best part of this transformation was watching M find her voice. By the time she graduated, she was not only participating regularly In class discussions, she was being perceived as a leader by her fellow students, including those who came in to the school with much higher SAT’s and grades. After she graduated from Fordham M’s confidence only grew. After playing pro basketball in Europe for several years, she returned to New Jersey and became a teacher and coach, using her own hard won confidence to build the confidence of others. In my forty years at Fordham, I have built many relationships with individual students I have taught, some of whom have gone on to become mayors of cities, leaders of government agencies, world renowned scholars and journalists, but no teaching or mentoring experience has been more satisfying than the one I had with M. Why? Because M represents the majority of students attending schools in America’s poor and working class communities. They not only lack the skills that upper middle class students acquire in their families and the high performing schools they attend, they often suffer from a crippling lack of self-confidence in approaching the tasks that schools present. That confidence deficit, I am convinced, is at least as important as the skills deficit and it cannot be overcome through test prep drills and group instruction. It requires individual attention from teachers, and not just in a classroom setting. It requires extra work and encouragement after school, on weekends, and sometimes long after the student leaves the teachers direct care. If you rotate teachers in and out of schools at a dizzying rate and create pressures that drive them out of the profession after a few years, you will destroy the relationship building component that is at the heart of great teaching. Ironically, under the pressure of federal mandates, this is being done in the very communities that have the greatest need for inspired teaching and mentoring.

Why The City of Berlin Should Buy Tacheles and Preserve it as A Public Resource

My German Friends

As a scholar, and cultural activist, who has developed a deep affection for the City of Berlin, I would like to urge that the City of Berlin purchase the land on which Tacheles is located at the upcoming auction in April. Tacheles is not only a tremendous economic and cultural resourcefor the City of Berlin, it has been a source of inspiration for arts groups around the world seeking creative use of once abandoned urban space

I have seen this operate first hand when a musical group I helped bring to Berlin, Rebel Diaz, who performed several times at Cafe Zapata in Tacheles decided, upon their return to the Bronx, to transform an abandoned candy factory in the South Bronx into a community arts space. This has been repeated by arts groups around the world. Tacheles is an international symbol of popular creativity in the face of political upheaval and economic hardship. To artists and cultural workers, it is as important a symbol of Berlin as the Tower or the Brandenburg Gate

To allow this incredible cultural space to fall into the hands of developers and be transformed into an upscale shopping center or luxury hotel would

be an unspeakable tragedy, a negation of the creative spirit that has transformed Berlin the premier cultural center in Europe. It would also deprive Berlin of a precious cultural

resource, a center of artistic and musical create and a symbol of a heroic period in the global struggle for Democracy when ordinary people took history

into their own hands

So my German friends, please make sure that Tacheles survives in its current form, as a public resource. Now, with the global economiccrisis creating vacant commercial spaces crying out for creative uses, we need Tacheles more than ever

Sincerely

Mark D Naison Phd

Professor of African American Studies and History

Fordham University,

Principal Investigator, Bronx African American History Project

Founding Member, Bronx Berlin Youth Exchange.