Phase 1, Post 8: Affirmative Action

In the Harvard case, lacking context makes it hard to determine who is right.  However, as you go deeper into the case, it becomes increasingly clear there is no hard evidence in the plaintiff's favor.  What this case seems like is an instance of faulty causality, where the lower population of Asian students at Harvard is framed as a lower population of students because they are Asian.  While it is easy to complain that there were qualified Asian students with high GPAs and test scores, there is an admissions process for a reason - you won't get into the school just because you meet a benchmark.  Furthermore, looking at the case from this perspective, it can feel as though the accusation is naive to factors outside of intelligence that impact school performance.  Coming back to an old source (Questioning the 3D Printing Revolution) from last blog post, "marginalized people have always created goods, products, arts, platforms and businesses, it’s just that those creations aren’t recognized or valued by dominant oppressive systems."  There are other students who - for reasons entirely independent of intellect - cannot maintain a perfect GPA or ace standardized tests.  These numbers are not perfectly indicative of how smart or talented these students are, or how much they contribute to a community.

While, broad strokes, the SFFA is well-intentioned, I believe the judge was right in ruling in favor of Harvard.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phase 2, Post 13: Ansh Patel & Jordi Frank

I think particularly during this time it was really good to hear from recent graduates, and how they transitioned from college life to career life. It is easy to get caught up in here and now, and how important school is right now. But it is always reassuring and affirming to hear about life post-NYU. Ansh Patel does work with Alzheimer's epilepsy patients, and while that is not necessarily a field that I would be going into, it was nice to hear about since I recently lost my grandmother, who had Alzheimer's. Ansh also brought up game design and how he wanted it to be his passion, not his career. I thought this was really interesting because there are a lot of hobbies or passions that I used to have in high school that people would always ask me why I didn't decide to pursue them, and I think that is because of this reason, that there are things that I keep as passions and things that I keep as career. But that doesn't mean that I'm less passionate about my career. ...
Read more

Phase 1, Post 6: Desktop Manufacturing

Print the Legend  and Questioning the 3D Printing Revolution  contain different - though not entirely opposing - perspectives on the social significance of manufacturing made accessible. One consistency between the media is the contrast within a factory floor.  Ansh Patel talks about the distinct segmentation in a printer factory.  On the design side, the space is described as having a "sanitized aesthetic," while the manufacturing side was considerably less clean.  This divide was embellished with not only a glass wall, but a clear demographic difference as well: the design side was populated with young white men while the manufacturing side was nearly entirely people of color and women.  While this is not a major talking point in the documentary, the context the article provides makes the visual more evident. Conversely, a major topic in the movie that does not come up in the article is the gun controversy.  Cody Wilson, a strong proponent o...
Read more

Final Project

For my final, I chose the story making project. The premise of my story is that the pandemic has already essentially set in to society. I remained vague about the specifics of the disease as I thought it would be more important to deeply explore a single idea rather than spread myself across too many details. This also helped me reveal the idea of the disease slowly and deliberately, rather than cramming in a news segment for exposition. In its most basic form the disease takes away your ability to perceive depth, which we can assume to be a spinning sensation or panoramic vision. The one clearly defined rule about the disease is that you can see regularly through a mirror, since it is a flat reflection. There was a lot I wanted to communicate through visuals and through characters so I chose to write a screenplay. It is a short screenplay, so, in an attempt to be metaphorical and subtle there may be some ideas that are underdeveloped, at least in how they are conveyed to the audie...
Read more