Anonymous Black Woman Genius Puts White Male in His Place

By Nicholas Stix

I recently spent a bit of time at the blog, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School. I see that some writers both academic and on the Web have in recent years come to the sorts of conclusions that I wrote about largely pseudonymously during the 1990s.

100 Reasons is a well-thought-out blog which will, I believe, eventually make its author some money, in the mold of the David Brooks-inspired site, Stuff White People Like. I wish I knew how to do that!

However, it has shied away from confronting the totalitarian political ideology of multiculturalism, which dominates all social relations in academia, and which has turned the social sciences and humanities into rank propaganda. That somewhat limits its effectiveness and accuracy. And the posters tend to be the sort of folks who write “s/he,” i.e., people who would sooner die than challenge multiculturalism, even behind a pseudonym.

On September 6, 2010, 100 Reasons published the blog entry, “5. Graduate school is not what it used to be.”

Grad school is not what it was, because college is not what it was. Before World War II, about five percent of Americans had college degrees. College was not a common experience, but something enjoyed by a minority of people who had access to the privilege of a college education either by virtue of their social standing or because they were genuinely bright. Colleges drew from a small segment of society and could be quite demanding of their students. Latin and Greek were often required subjects. After the war, as American higher education was “democratized,” state-supported colleges sprung up by the hundreds. As more people graduated from college, more jobs required college educations, and hence the demand for higher education grew. Graduate schools had to produce more and more faculty members to staff the expanding centers of higher learning.

Standards, of course, had to conform to the demands placed on institutions of higher education. Latin and Greek were no longer requirements, and just as the genuinely bright or socially established were no longer the only ones with access to college, graduate programs had to grow to include people closer to the middle of the bell curve to meet the demand for new PhDs. The days of wildly expanding job opportunities in academe are long gone, but the large graduate programs are still around. Graduate students today may be above-average in many respects, but they do not represent, generally speaking, the intellectual elite, and modern graduate school requirements reflect this.

David Brooks, take note!

The entry elicited, among others, the following comment. I wish I could call the poster a troll, but there are too many of his ilk at the blog, and his ilk constitutes the lunatic mainstream in the institution formerly known as higher education.

Anonymous said...

Oh, yeah. That "golden age," when the "genuinely bright" went to graduate school. Provided, of course, that they were white, male, and, at the very least, middle-class.

In general, I'm supportive of your project, but this kind of lazy argumentation, which is premised on racist, sexist, and classist assumptions about the ways in which people of color, women, and poor people--all of whom are still underrepresented in most graduate cohorts--have "dumbed down" graduate school with their very presence undercuts, to say the least, your credibility.

November 10, 2010 11:18 AM

I responded as follows.

@Lazy, Anon PC November 10, 2010 11:18 AM

How can telling the truth “undercut” one’s “credibility”?

Most colored people admitted to highly selective undergraduate and graduate programs are manifestly unqualified, and are admitted via affirmative action. This has been shown to be the case so many times that if you truly aren’t aware of it, you’re unforgivably ignorant. However, your assumption of the validity of “disparate impact” theory (“underrepresented”) points to dishonesty, rather than ignorance.

Admitting unqualified people dumbs down an institution, as the night follows the day.

As for your scorn of history, the most demanding undergraduate college in American history was the old City College of New York (CCNY), before it was destroyed 40 years ago, in order to admit semi-literate and functionally illiterate blacks and Hispanics. As James Traub observed in his book City on a Hill, most of the brilliant, predominantly Jewish students who attended City during its glory years (and a great many of whom later attended grad school) endured much worse poverty than the overwhelmingly incompetent black and Hispanic students who succeeded them, and who destroyed City.

December 17, 2010 12:50 AM

My comment inspired the following response which, until I read its very last word, I wasn’t even sure was directed at me.

Anonymous said...

Obviously, author, you have not been to graduate school. Pity.
(For the record, I'm a black woman studying computational neuroscience at one of the top 10 medical research schools in the nation (I don't put race on my applications). My father, an immigrant to this country, studied organic chemistry at a graduate level and was associate director of a *very* large pharmaceutical company before retiring. Suck it Nicholas.)

February 1, 2011 5:31 PM

My response follows.

Dear Anonymous “Black Woman” Genius (“ABWG”),

The only reason I am even aware that your post was a “response” to mine is that you insulted me by name, though you neglected to sign your own. An oversight, that, no doubt.

Your post does not respond to a thing I said. Still, I know that you are a genius, because you left no doubt, and because I know that all black women are geniuses, except for those who have either been held back by racist white male morons like me (please pardon the redundancy), and those (e.g., meritocrats and conservatives) who fail to recognize the genius inherent in being a black woman. Ultimately, I know of black women’s genius, because black women constantly announce the fact.

In your meta-parenthetical, ABWG, you maintain that:

1. I have not attended grad school;
2. You pity me;
3. You are a black woman;
4. You are studying computational neuroscience at one of the top 10 medical research schools in the nation;
5. You don't put race on your applications;
6. Your father is an immigrant who studied organic (presumably for a master’s, since you would have said if he’d earned a doctorate), and was an AD at a pharma giant; and
7. You are the offspring of a wealthy family.

Even if I were to believe all of your variously unsupported, erroneous, and disingenuous assertions, none is in the least germane to my comment.

The literature, both scholarly and journalistic, on affirmative action in higher ed is copious. As a smugly superior BWG, surely you must know this.

And yet, if you are such a genius, why would you post a comment that is full of irrelevancies?

On one point, however, I do believe you: You are a black woman. Certain characteristics are typical of BWGs, including but not limited to:

• Responding to arguments they hate with irrelevancies;
• Displaying toxic levels of self-esteem; and
• A willful refusal to distinguish between the individual case and the class.

I look forward to the next time you deign to school me, ABWG.

Love,

Nicholas Stix
February 7, 2011 10:40 PM

I have not heard from ABWG since.