Daily Archives: June 24, 2020

Graphic by Jacquelyne Germain / North by Northwestern

As Weinberg freshman Shira Nash waited in line at her local public high school to check in for her first SAT, she felt intimidated seeing students she knew, subconsciously comparing herself to them. The line grew shorter and shorter, and she thought her test anxiety couldnt get any worse.

Then, it did. When Nash entered the testing room, she was immediately struck by the lack of diversity among the students seated around her.

I often was the only person of color in my [SAT] testing room, definitely the only Black woman, said Nash. It was definitely an overwhelming experience.

Along with 40,594 applicants around the world, Nash submitted her standardized test scores as part of her application to Northwestern University. The middle 50% of Northwesterns Class of 2023 had SAT scores ranging from 1450-1550, some of the highest in the nation. In comparison, the 2019 national average score was 1059. Today, Northwesterns Class of 2023, along with the rest of the undergraduate population, reap the benefits of their test scores and other exemplary academic and nonacademic factors, attending one of the top institutions in the country. However, though the SAT is framed as an objective calculation in the college admissions process, the test can be used to foster socioeconomic inequality that is then reflected in the student populations of elite institutions like Northwestern.

A History of Inequality

The origins of the SAT lie within Americas eugenics movement in the early 1900s, which aimed to uphold white supremacy by removing undesirable traits from the human race. Such traits were often associated with lower income minority populations who were victims of forced sterilizations and other oppressive practices of the eugenics movement, according to Scitable.

In the eugenics movement, there is this inherent belief that Black people, African-descended people [and] people from the global south are intellectually inferior to the descendants of Western Europe, said David Stovall, an African-American studies professor who investigates education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Princeton University psychology professor and devout eugenicist Carl Brigham designed the SAT in the 1920s. It originated from Brighams Army Alpha Test, an intelligence test administered to millions of World War I army recruits, according to PBS. In 1923, based on the analysis of the results from the Army Alpha Test by race, he published A Study of American Intelligence. In the books conclusion, Brigham wrote that American intelligence was declining as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive. Brigham further stated that this sharp decline in intelligence owed itself to the presence of the negro in America. Brigham would eventually modify the Army Alpha Test to be used in the college admissions process, renaming it the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In 1926, the SAT was administered to high school students for the first time.

The Impacts of Racist Roots

The tests racist history continues to be reflected today, shown through massive racial scoring gaps.

I feel like [racial scoring gaps] are a reflection of systemic racism and how in Black and Hispanic communities the schools are underfunded and have less resources for students than more affluent schools, said Weinberg freshman Rebecca Covington.

Broken down by race, white and Asian students had the highest average SAT scores in the nation in 2019: 1114 and 1223, respectively, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). The average scores for Black and Hispanic students were lower: 933 and 978, respectively. These disparities are reflective of larger inequities within Americas long history of racial oppression.

Data provided by the College Board (These averages are from 2019 and are based on the new SAT scoring system: scale of 400-1600)

When you start to think about something like the SAT, you also have to think about how racism operates structurally, meaning that as a system, there are strategies that are used to justify the means by which to declare African-descended people inferior, Stovall said.

A 2003 study by national admissions test expert Jay Rosner revealed that experimental SAT test questions that resulted in better scores for Black students compared to white students were discarded by test authors in favor of those that white students answered correctly. Although test developers did not explicitly consider race when selecting questions, racial scoring disparities drove question selection. These experimental questions were then used on future versions of the SAT, giving an upper hand to white students and contributing to a cycle of racial inequality.

Some students, like Nash, found the language of the SAT to be restrictive in this way.

You have to know everything the question is asking and you have to know the answer, and thats not always fair because some words are not in peoples vernacular, Nash said.

These inequities operate not just in relation to race but also to class and students socio-economic situations. Poor students of all races perform worse on standardized tests compared to more-affluent students, according to Education Week.

By requiring students to submit standardized test scores, predominantly white institutions like Northwestern are stifling socioeconomic diversity.

Black, Hispanic and Native American students are more likely to be poor compared to white and Asian students. They also make up the lowest percentages of students at every top 10 institution in the nation, including Northwestern.

In 2014, students with annual family incomes over $200,000 averaged a composite score of 1714, whereas students from families earning less than $20,000 annually averaged a composite score of 1326, according to the Washington Post.

Data provided by the Washington Post (These averages are from 2014 and are based on the old SAT scoring system: scale of 600-2400)

At Northwestern, students coming from households earning $20,000 or less annually only make up about 4% of the student body, whereas 66% of students come from the top 20%, according to a 2017 report from The New York Times The Upshot.

SAT preparation gaps are reflective of such economic inequities as well. Communication freshman Caleb Whittaker recalls an SAT test-prep program called Test Masters in his Texas hometown that cost $700-$800 for its duration. He said that students who did not perform particularly well in school academically could get the high scores needed for admission into elite institutions simply because of their ability to afford these programs.

They learned how to take these tests rather than learning the material, Whittaker said.

In contrast, Whittaker said he himself didnt have many resources to study from for the SAT. He primarily relied on general knowledge from school and some free online test prep materials.

Medill freshman Jordan Mangi had a similar experience preparing for the SAT. She was able to take the test for the first time because it was offered for free at her high school during her junior year.

I didnt have a prep book or anything. I didnt go to an SAT test prep class. That wasnt really an option for me, Mangi said.

Resources like SAT test prep classes and private tutors are more accessible to affluent students. According to CostHelper, instructor-led SAT preparatory courses can range from $75-$1000, while private tutoring can cost $75-$250 per hour on average.

Although low-income students are often eligible for fee waivers to mitigate costs associated with the SAT, the College Board, the non-profit organization that develops and administers the test, charges students every step of the way.

The SAT costs $52 without the essay and $68 with the essay. If a student registers after the initial deadline or needs to change test dates, they are charged an extra $30. Sending a score report to colleges costs $12 per institution. If a student is crunched for time and needs to rush order these score reports, there is an additional $31 fee. If the website crashes when scores come out due to increased website traffic and a student is anxious to view their score, for $15, they can call and get it over the phone.

[The SAT] makes rich communities where students are able to pay for tutoring or take it a bunch of times look smarter, but in reality its just about how much money you have, said Medill freshman Onyekaorise Chigbogwu.

Medill freshman Ellisya Lindsey was able to afford a private SAT tutor and said tutoring was helpful as she navigated the test-taking process. Her tutor provided her with an SAT study book containing practice questions and was able to walk her through the layout of the test, what the questions would look like and how to go about answering them.

Without a tutor or without any sort of resources whatsoever, you would not know what youre getting yourself into and youd definitely be underprepared, Lindsey said.

Moving Forward

To combat these issues, in August 2019, the College Board introduced an adversity index called Landscape that provides colleges and universities with background information to use in conjunction with a students application. The information includes basic high school data including locale, senior class size and the percentage of students eligible for free/reduced lunch. It also includes test score comparisons within each high school, as well as high school and neighborhood indicators such as median family income, education levels and crime rates.

But Stovall said that Landscape is not enough, referring to it as a Band-Aid on the initial concerns of the test. He advocates for a more holistic portfolio review of students and their achievements by colleges and universities that doesnt revolve around standardized test scores.

Northwestern ranks standardized test scores as a very important academic factor in its admissions decisions, according to its 2019-2020 Common Data Set. Standardized test scores take precedence over other factors such as a students essay, recommendations and extracurriculars, ranked lower as important factors.

Though in response to COVID-19, a day after seven of the eight Ivy League institutions went test optional for the 2020-2021 application cycle, Northwestern also decided to go temporarily test optional for the Class of 2025. Other schools have chosen to permanently ditch the requirement, recently the University of Chicago and the University of California system. Other test-optional universities include DePaul University, New York University, American University, George Washington University and more.

I feel like who you are as a person and your work ethic and things you really believe in and are passionate [about] are very good things to focus on, said Medill freshman Kacee Haslett in reference to factors that should be valued more in the admissions process.

Stovall emphasized the need for the college admissions system to reconsider how it evaluates socioeconomic scoring disparities, referencing Gloria Ladson-Billings, a School of Education professor at the University of WisconsinMadison who studies critical race theory.

Instead of looking at gaps between test scores for certain racial, ethnic and economic groups, she says we can consider a debt, Stovall said. What debt is owed to folks who have been historically isolated and marginalized and what would the payment of that debt look like? When we start to think about that, now how do we construct admissions policies and how do we construct access for historically marginalized groups?

Northwesterns Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion refers to access as one of its defining strands along with equity, enrichment and wellbeing. Though these values guide its framework and operation, standardized tests with discriminatory origins, practices and outcomes continue to be used as an objective measure of student aptitude in the admissions process. To some, the SAT is far from an unbiased calculation.

While youre in the test, sure, its the same for everyone, everyones going to do the same questions, Nash said. But we have to think about what happens before the test and after the test, that I think is not equal at all.

Read more:

Race, class and SAT scores: The connection between testing and NU's student body - North by Northwestern

One strip from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's "Oshiete! Moyawin" manga series featuring a Charles Darwin-like character arguing for the need to revise Japan's Constitution based in evolutionary theory. (Image from the Liberal Democratic Party website)

TOKYO -- The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)'s debut of a manga featuring a Charles Darwin-like character tying the push to revise Japan's pacifist Constitution to evolutionary theory is drawing a torrent of accusations that the party understands neither evolution nor the danger of applying the theory to politics.

In the four-panel manga "Oshiete! Moyawin" (Please teach me, Moyawin), a character resembling Charles Darwin but called "Moyawin" states, "This is what the theory of evolution says. ... It is not the strongest who survive, nor the cleverest. The only people who can survive are people who can change." Moyawin adds, "I think that to develop Japan yet more going forward, constitutional revision is needed now."

Three of the strips were tweeted by the LDP's public relations account on the evening of June 19, and also appear as an ongoing series in a new section of the party's website.

However, these passages do not appear anywhere in Darwin's revolutionary work "On the Origin of Species" (1859). Rather, they are drawn from a U.S. economist's own interpretation of "Origin" included in a paper penned in the 1960s, and widely considered an "abuse" of Darwin's ideas.

The manga triggered a quick pushback on Twitter, with users posting comments including, "This is an incorrect usage based on a failure to understand the theory of evolution," and "It's twisted to use this for politics." One tweet pointed out that "Darwin never said any of this" and demanded the LDP retract the strips, while another said that "connecting (evolution) to the Constitution, which is completely unrelated, is nothing but a distortion." Yet another user quipped, "Maybe it's the LDP that needs to change."

Psychiatrist and Mainichi Shimbun columnist Rika Kayama also voiced her opposition. In the 19th and 20th centuries, evolutionary theory was applied to human societies in what came to be known as "social Darwinism," and natural selection based on "survival of the fittest" was used to justify racism and eugenics. Kayama tweeted, "The Nazis based their massacre of Jews and disabled people on eugenics, and ever since then, everyone has understood that the simplistic application (of evolutionary theory) to politics is dangerous. I wonder if the LDP PR section did this as a premeditated crime, or just out of ignorance."

Meanwhile, the official account of publisher Iwanami Shoten tweeted, "It's a common misconception about the theory of evolution, but 'evolution' does not equal 'improvement.' Evolution is the source of (biological) diversity."

Satoshi Chiba, a professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Life Sciences who has also penned a book on evolution, told the Mainichi Shimbun, "Evolution is change without direction, and that change is neither for good nor bad. Just as the water of a river slowly created a valley by wearing away the land, (evolution) is change in properties occurring on a group level; the simple result of natural selection and other phenomena. Even regression is a kind of evolution."

"I have to say it is quite shoddy of the PR section of the ruling party to do this with something everyone learns in high school biology," he added.

This is not the first time the LDP has tried to rope Darwin's work into promotion of its political program. In 2001, then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi referred to the theory of evolution in connection with structural reform during his general policy speech to the Diet.

Chiba noted that "while Koizumi said, 'Living things that can respond to change are the ones that survive,' the use this time of the phrase 'people who can change' is more pernicious." He continued, "Adaptation is nothing more than a result. It is not change through intention. To bring biological thinking into politics is itself a serious problem, and quite dangerous."

Hokkaido University professor emeritus and constitutional scholar Katsutoshi Takami told the Mainichi Shimbun, "If we're going to talk about adaptation, then the Constitution has responded to and survived 73 years of change, in the form of new laws, judicial precedent and government reinterpretations, since its implementation. For some to say that 'it must be changed' because they desire to change it seems to me a logical sidestep. If they're going to say that it (the Constitution) cannot adapt to present-day society, then they must clearly present their reasons."

(Japanese original by Fusayo Nomura, Integrated Digital News Center)

Read more from the original source:

Japan ruling party manga using evolutionary theory to push constitutional change slammed - The Mainichi

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Heres what you need to know on this Tuesday, June 23.

September 11 Museum Plans Massive Cutbacks The September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York is one of the more frequented tourist destinations in the citywhich also makes it one of the hardest hit by the shutdown. Deprived of ticket sales and other earned revenue, which usually covers more than 95 percent of its annual expenses, the institution is facing a deficit of up to $45 million over the next year. To make up the shortfall, the organization is launching a fundraising campaign and has furloughed or laid off nearly 60 percent of its staff. (New York Times)

An Unemployment Crisis Looms Over UK Art Academia Thousands of lecturers across London are facing unemployment as schools cut back on casual contracts over the summera move that some say disproportionately affects Black and minority ethnic academics, especially women. The senior management team at the art school Goldsmiths, at University of London, will let go 472 casual contracts this summer, 40 percent of the overall staff. We are poised to lose a whole generation of ethnically, but also otherwise diverse, young academicsthe future of academia will just be even more pale, male and stale than it already is, a lecturer at UCL said.(The Art Newspaper)

Art Basel Relaxes Application Restrictions 2021 for Hong Kong Fair The worlds leading Modern and contemporary art fair has relaxed the rules for applicants for its next Hong Kong edition to encourage struggling galleries to participate. For the 2021 event, galleries will only be required to make a down payment of 25 percent for their booth in advance, rather than the full amount. Thanks to an initiative by the Hong Kong Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, dealers will also be offered a one-off 15 percent discount for stands in the main section (and a 30 percent discount for first-time exhibitors). Perhaps most significantly, Art Basel Hong Kong will also temporarily suspend the requirement for applicants to maintain a permanent exhibition space, provided the gallery is staging shows for its program. The criteria for the minimum number of shows a gallery must hold per year has also been relaxed. (The Art Newspaper)

On Luxury Stores Decorating With Protest Art The reflexive impulse to protect property is a deeply American one, ingrained in this countrys foundation and upheld more consistently than probably anything else, writes Max Lakin in a biting critique of the luxury stores in Manhattan that have seized on the symbolism of the Black Lives Matter movement to adorn their boarded-up storefronts. Meanwhile, he notes, companies have reached out to Black artists for such projects as a form of performative allyship. Lakin notes: Art can soothe, but it can also manipulate, cajoling pacification when rage is more appropriate.(New York Times)

Beijing Gallery Expands to London TheBeijing gallery Tabula Rasa, founded in the 798 art district in 2015, isopening a London location this fall. The aim is to present a program that may be too sensitive for mainland China as well as to promote Chinese artists in the UK. (The Art Newspaper)

Picassos Paint Palette Sells for $71,000 A paint-stained palette that had been in the collection of the artists granddaughter,Marina Picasso, sold for 11 times its original estimate after 39 bids. The relic from Picassos working process was one of 60 works from Marinas personal collection, which sold at Sothebys as part of a broader Picasso online sale that fetched $6.1 million. (Press release)

Is the Future of Auction Sales Online? The brick-and-mortar auction market was thrown into the deep end of the virtual pool this year. Will it sink or swim? The growth in online auction sales has been considerable, but they still provided less than 10 percent of the overall sales revenues of 2019 to date.(Financial Times)

UCL Will Rename Spaces Named After Eugenicists University College London is renaming lecture halls and a building named after the eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Galton was a Victorian scientist who coined the term eugenics and left his collection to the university as well as an endowment for a professorial chair of eugenics; Pearson was the first to hold the position. (Independent)

Opera House Replaces Audience With Plants As a statement about the significance of art and nature to our lives, Barcelonas Gran Teatre del Liceu has opened its concert hall to thousands of house plants. The opera houses first performance by UceLi Quartet, a prelude to its 20202021 season, was played to the rooted audience. After the show, the plants will be donated to health care workers at the citys Hospital Clinic. (Vulture)

Two Baby Trump Balloons Flew Over Tulsa During Disastrous Trump Rally Two of thosegiant Baby Trump balloonsmade their way to Tulsa over the weekend ahead of the presidents evening rally, flying above the historic Vernon AME Church. Admirers of the floating caricatures made donations to restore the building, which is the only standing black-owned structure in the Black Wall Street neighborhood. (The Hill)

Artist Yang Chul Mo Admits to Sexual Harassment The Korean artist Yang Chul Mo, half of the husband-and-wife artist duo mixrice, has retired from art after admitting to sexually harassing female coworkers at the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. Yang was outed in local media for inappropriate comments made during his tenure as as director of the government-funded art project Collective Chungjeongro. (Art Asia Pacific)

Kadir Nelsons New Yorker Cover Say Their Names Honors George Floyd The artist Kadir Nelsons cover art for the June 22 issue of theNew Yorker depicts George Floyd embodying other victims of racist violence in the US, including Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, and Breonna Taylor. Nelson says that they are not offering prints of the image out of respect for the victims and their families. (New Yorker)

See the original post:

Art Industry News: Art Basel Acknowledges New Reality by Allowing Non-Physical Galleries Into Its Fair for the First Time + Other Stories - artnet...

BLOOMINGTON Indiana University plans to review the names of all buildings and structures across its nine-campus system following the schools decision to rename an intramural center that once honored a segregationist after its first Black basketball player.

IU President Michael McRobbie announced the planned review after the schools trustees unanimously approved a resolution last week to name the Bloomington campus intramural center after Bill Garrett, who broke the color barrier in Big Ten basketball when he made his varsity debut in 1948.

Garrett, who went on to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, died in 1974.

The intramural center was once named after Ora Wildermuth, a former IU trustee and Lake County judge who opposed racial integration and made comments about race that McRobbie called deplorable.

He said during a June 12 virtual meeting of the schools trustees that IUs naming committee will review all named buildings and structures on IU campuses to determine if they should remain. McRobbie said there are hundreds of names on structures at IUs campuses and evaluating them will be a slow and deliberate process.

The review comes amid a nationwide movement to get rid of Confederate monuments and other racially offensive symbols. McRobbie said recent events in our country had demonstrated that the nations legacy of racial discrimination can be perpetuated through those we choose to honor, in our public art, our icons, and the names we put on buildings.

We cannot, in any way, be part of perpetuating this legacy, he added.

Trustee Patrick Shoulders, who in 2018 had cast the lone dissenting vote against removing Wildermuths name from the intramural building, voiced support for the schools system-wide names review. But he said that throughout the country, leaders who believed and did things now considered abhorrent are still honored, citing the ownership of slaves by Americas founding fathers as an example.

I see these as complicated issues, Shoulders said. And I want us to be consistent.

In announcing the names review, McRobbie singled out David Starr Jordan, who was IUs president from 1884 to 1891 and has a building on Bloomington campus, Jordan Hall, named after him, which houses IUs biology department and its greenhouse.

Jordan was a proponent of eugenics, the practice of controlled selective breeding of humans often carried out through forced sterilization. He wrote in The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit, of his belief that humanity would thrive only if the fittest were promoted and blamed the downfall of past civilizations on the corruption of that process.

Jordan, who later became the first president of Stanford University and died in 1931, has numerous other locations on the Bloomington campus named after him, including a major thoroughfare and a creek that runs through the campus.

Garrett was Indianas Mr. Basketball in 1947, when he led Shelbyville to a state championship.

He led the Hoosiers in scoring and rebounding each year from 1949 to 1951 (freshmen did not play on the varsity squad in those days). He led the Hoosiers to a 19-3 record and a No. 2 ranking in 1950-51, when he also was chosen as IUs most valuable player.

He was drafted by the Boston Celtics, making him the third African American ever drafted by an NBA team. But Garrett was called to serve in the U.S. Army, and two years later he signed a contract with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing with them for three years.

Within a year of Garretts graduation from IU, six other African Americans were on Big Ten basketball rosters.

He coached Indianapolis Crispus Attucks to a state championship in 1959.

He was inducted into the IU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984 and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1974.

See original here:

Indiana University to review names of buildings, structures at all campuses - South Bend Tribune

The government's plan to restructure university fees will have disastrous consequences for all students, not just those studying the humanities.

The Australian governments proposed fee restructuring for universities will have disastrous consequences for the humanities. But its bad news for STEM education, too.

How do I know? Because Im an Australian teaching the history of science to STEM students in a major public university in the United States, and I see first-hand how desperately science undergraduates need training in culture, politics, and society.

They come to my classroom as future geneticists without having ever heard of eugenics. Future doctors without any understanding that medicine can cause pain and injustice just as adeptly as it can give relief. Future engineers who have never had a forum to voice their concerns about how technology can erode our rights as citizens.

As it stands, Australian STEM students are even less exposed to these discussions because, unlike the US system, Australian universities usually do not require students to cross-enroll in humanities credits. This was the case when I was a science undergraduate at the University of Queensland, and I was funneled into science-only courses.

I was never taught that biomedical sciences are social systems that therapeutic innovation can be racist, sexist and classist. Not once in my science degree did I learn how evolutionary theory was born on the assumptions of white supremacy, and how this racism still reverberates in 21st century institutions. Never was I made to appreciate that our abusive relationship with the environment is at once a scientific, economic, historical and philosophical problem, and that intelligent policy is only created through consultation with experts from all these fields.

I only learned about these things when I stumbled into a humanities elective. Taking this first humanities subject was transformative, and it made me a better scientist. Engaging in discussions about race, class, and gender truly reoriented my engagement with the sciences. Not only did I become better and more creative in my biology classes who knew that a history class could help me better understand and challenge theories of heredity? but I had an eye to how science was situated in society.

I saw science for what it is: plonked in a complex social milieu, bigger and more complicated than just facts and data.

Like me, many science students in Australia stumble into humanities classes and make these same realisations. Some of them do what I did: declare a dual degree in Science/Arts, and continue thinking deeply and compassionately about how STEM works in our world.

Under the new government plan, this fortuitous act of stumbling into a humanities class will occur less often, and less easily. As the door to Arts subjects is closed to science students, so too is an opportunity for enrichment.

Australias plan to restructure funding at universities is touted as an investment in the sciences, but it is actually a heavy blow. The next generation will be less equipped to operate in a competitive international marketplace, and less able to adapt their science-making to the increasingly complicated world that demands their attention and expertise.

It takes more than just a science degree to educate future scientists. They need the humanities, too, to train them in a type of critical thinking that cannot be found in a laboratory.

Patrick Walsh is an Australian PhD student in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a masters degree from the University of Wisconsin, and bachelors degrees with honours from the University of Queensland.

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