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Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

fortune.com

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Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#51

Post by maplethorpe »

pyuser583 wrote: post #40
floatrock wrote: post #34

Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends? Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this. Foot, meet gun.

That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie. Or from … history. The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program. The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.

I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#52

Post by wanderlust123 »

pyuser583 wrote: post #41
Esophagus4 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Harvard itself is an incredibly inequitable place. Student organizations — and undergraduate social life more broadly — have been criticized for being stacked heavily against those without connections. And perhaps most insidious is Harvard’s unwavering preference for so-called ALDCs – athletes, legacies, dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. Without dismantling our own elitism, how can Harvard be…

I don’t feel the same. My own alma mater is a niche school. It officially gives admissions pref to legacies, but unofficially depends on parents sending their kids as the school is not well known. Harvard on the other hand - people go to Harvard to become elite. That only works because they get to hobnob with princes and the like. Thats the point. The Ivy’s do a good job of admitting non-elite students. I’m glad that…

This is bordering on delusional lol.

You think folks who are kids of billionaires will be fraternising with some working class kid who got in via merit? That almost never happens.

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#54

Post by Esophagus4 »

pyuser583 wrote: post #47
watwut wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wild thing is that America pretends itself that it is a meritocracy while ... literally defending deeply nepotistic class based system like this. If the Harward did not took that many legacies, they would spread out to different schools. And mixed with others there. You dont need to collect kids of powerful in one place to achieve that.

I’m reassured by the fact that grads of non-Ivy Leagues do extremely well. The focus on Harvard is really overblown.

True, even non-legacies do well from a place like Harvard.

But given a full 75% of American colleges give preferential treatment to legacy students, Harvard is the most visible representation of an unacknowledged caste system.

Something about, “I deserve this more than someone else because of who my parents are” really fires me up.

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#55

Post by spwa4 »

olelele wrote: post #48
floatrock wrote: post #34

Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends? Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this. Foot, meet gun.

The nazi regime destroyed a lot of what today would be classified as "woke research" by the reactionary right. Sexuality studies, social studies and so on. The book burnings were not only about rooting out fiction, they destroyed research.

History isn't quite so simple. Half the academic establishment, especially the human sciences, chose to side with the Nazis before they actually came to power. A lot of institutions in Europe, inside and outside of Germany, removed Jewish scientists before anyone asked them to. Ironically that mostly turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to both the Jewish scientists themselves and a number of people that chose to leave with them (there are entire cities in Europe that were founded by Jewish scientists forced to leave and the people who left with them). For example, after the UN (technically then "League of nations") fired Einstein for not being sufficiently Swiss (it's more complicated than just racism though) in 1932, he was shown why not to return to Germany and was offered a job in the US, at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to Germany anyway and was shown why accepting the Princeton offer was a good idea, after experiencing "the degree of their brutality and cowardice". Note: he was talking about German academics and institutions, not the Nazis directly. This was before the first time the Nazis forbade Jews from teaching, which was in April 1933.

Of course, the Nazis turned out to be anti-intellectuals to an extreme degree too and whether it was by concentration camp mistreatment or using them as cannon fodder (or just sending them to the Russian front and leaving them to freeze to death), the Nazis eventually killed most of those scientists, including outside of Germany, who chose to remove Jewish scientists before being asked.

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#57

Post by alephnerd »

ricksunny wrote: post #22
alephnerd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then UMich - a notably Dem leaning govt program - wouldn't be included. Personally, I remember taking Fairbanks Center associated classes and noticing how we have the children of Chinese VVIPs sitting next to active duty members. It sparked interesting conversations, but seeing someone who was a test pilot at Hanford sitting next to a scion of a Red Family was interesting to say the least. The program also absolutely…

You casually drop a lot of acronyms and references to obscure programs (here and especially in parallel comment) on the apparent assumption that everyone reading does or should be clued in to the same acronyms. I feel you do so in good faith, but I wonder where the implicit assumption comes from that the 'rest of society' ('rest' w.r..t. whatever sub-group does in fact know about these programs intimately) ought to k…

Good question! Gimme the acronyms, terms, and context you don't know and I can give some context and meaning behind them. It's easy to fall into the trap of jargon with Gov stuff.

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#58

Post by xhkkffbf »

floatrock wrote: post #34

Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends? Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this. Foot, meet gun.

It's more complicated. At many of these top universities, woke means don't hire whites. And Jews are often lumped in with whites. The Jewish percentage at top schools has dropped dramatically as wokeism appeared. At Princeton, one top professor campaigns to "eliminate whiteness" and he's very open about it.

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#59

Post by foogazi »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
conception wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascism always trends to incompetency because loyalty is more important than skill and knowledge.

So it’s just a matter of time before the US crashes?

They didn’t say that

Re: Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

#60

Post by fc417fc802 »

wanderlust123 wrote: post #52
pyuser583 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t feel the same. My own alma mater is a niche school. It officially gives admissions pref to legacies, but unofficially depends on parents sending their kids as the school is not well known. Harvard on the other hand - people go to Harvard to become elite. That only works because they get to hobnob with princes and the like. Thats the point. The Ivy’s do a good job of admitting non-elite students. I’m glad that…

This is bordering on delusional lol. You think folks who are kids of billionaires will be fraternising with some working class kid who got in via merit? That almost never happens.

If what you say is true (personally I think it's an overgeneralization) then there would be zero point to eliminating legacy admissions to begin with (since they won't be willing to socialize with those beneath them regardless of where they are). So either you're wrong, or you're right and the entire issue is a pointless one.
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