A profile of Senator Lieberman in today's New York Times magazine reports that Mr. Lieberman is "dedicated to achieving fairness through growth rather than redistribution." The next sentence says, "Lieberman would have happily voted for a $900 billion tax cut tilted toward the middle class rather than the rich." Hello? A tax cut "tilted toward the middle class rather than the rich" IS redistribution. The way the tax code is currently configured, the rich already pay a higher income tax rate than the middle class. Giving the middle class a larger tax break without cutting taxes on the rich would increase the progressivity of the tax code, redistributing money from the rich taxpayers to the middle class. One can be for such redistribution or against it, but there's no getting around the fact that it's redistribution.
Asian Admissions: The "Sunday Q and A" column in the national section of today's New York Times has the question: "Does being Asian-American help or hurt your chances of getting into a selective college?" The Times answer, in a nutshell, is "Elite colleges also place a premium on diversity. And because Asian-American applicants represent a clear minority at nearly all of the nation's most selective colleges, a student who can check the box next to Asian-American on an application is likely to get a boost as a result." The answer then devotes three paragraphs to the situation at Bates College, which, the Times says, accepted 49 percent of the 113 Asian-American students who applied for the freshman class. That compares with an acceptance rate of 38 percent for the 3,021 white Americans who applied, the Times reports.
A straight comparison like that is useless without knowing the grades and standardized test scores of the white and Asian-American applicants. If all the Asian-American applicants to Bates got straight A's and perfect SAT scores, and all the whites got C's and mediocre SAT scores, then the statistics the Times cites demonstrate not a "boost" for Asian-American applicants, but a penalty. In 1990 the Harvard Crimson obtained detailed admissions data for Harvard College after a Freedom Information Act request filed with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, which had been investigating Harvard's admissions practices. The Crimson analysis found that while Harvard claimed to applicants that there was a "tip" or preference given to Asian-American applicants, in fact, the tip was nonexistent. The Times claim that being a minority at a college results in a boost is similarly absurd; the minorities that the colleges are particularly eager to admit are the ones that are underrepresented at colleges compared to their presence in the general population. And while Bates may have fewer than its share of Asian-Americans, selective colleges such as MIT, Cal Tech, Harvard, Stanford and Yale now have so many Asian-Americans that the "boost" the Times claims exists is all but nonexistent. If anything, Asian-Americans need higher grades and test scores to get into those institutions and overcome the preferences granted to athletes, legacies and "underrepresented" minorities.
Speaking of Harvard: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times claims that "During the McCarthy era, for instance, campuses like Harvard and City College dismissed professors who would not answer questions from government investigators about whether they or their colleagues were Communists." That's an unsupported smear of Harvard. In one famous case, as the Harvard Crimson reported on December 1, 2000, "When Associate Professor of Physics Wendell H. Furry took the Fifth before a Congressional committee in a nationally publicized case, Harvard reprimanded him but said that his refusal to speak was not cause for dismissal." In another famous case, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Helen Deane Markham, was suspended for a month and a half when the university decided it could "no longer reasonably believe that she is free from Communist domination," the Crimson reports. And the left-wing activist ex-wife, Ann Ginger, of a deceased assistant professor at Harvard Business School, Raymond Ginger, claims that Harvard forced her husband to resign when he refused to answer questions from Harvard about whether he and his wife were Communists. But in no known case has it been shown that a Harvard professor was dismissed for refusing to answer questions from the government about Communist infiltration. There were enough genuine sins during the McCarthy era that it isn't necessary for the New York Times to manufacture any more of them.
The same metro section article refers to "a 26-day protest at Harvard during which students occupied the administration building." There are several administration buildings at Harvard; "an" would have been a better choice of articles in that sentence.
Can't Spell: What is it about Rashid Khalidi that the New York Times can't seem to spell his name correctly? An article in the Week in Review section of today's Times gets the name right on first reference, then spells it "Khaladi." The Times also spelled his name wrong on December 29, 2000, as Smartertimes.com pointed out at the time.