Damn, I assumed he said something racist maybe, but this is what the issue was about, I just lost all respect for MIT.
> He and Stanford University professor Ivan Marinovic had argued in a Newsweek op-ed published in August that current diversity efforts — known as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — at universities violated equal treatment.
> Instead, they proposed a framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality where "university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone."
In my opinion, the current system is put in place to try to address inequalities that the applicants outside of the educational institution had faced.
It's not a perfect solution, but I think that not having it in place may result in a student roster that would be increasingly conformed by the children of those who have benefited the most from economic inequality.
If you think that the issue is economic inequality impeding their development, this sort of fix is at best a hack that draws fire in other ways, especially from those with egalitarian values.
An enforced racial criteria is the definition of systemic racism. It's literally a system around judging people on their race and doling out advantages on that race.
No, that's not the idea.
The idea is that things some people characterize as “focussing on merit” actually focus on the outputs of processes influenced substantially by (direct and structural) racism and other non-merit biases as well as merit.
When people are protesting about racial injustice toward some minorities, saying "All Lives Matter" is dismissing their concerns. It's like when someone goes to the police department saying "You need to protect me from a murderer" and an officer goes "Yeah, we need to protect everyone from murderers." Yes, that's true, but that's not a very helpful response to someone asking for help.
Likewise, the whole academic evaluation based on merit dismisses the idea that our current "objective" means of academic evaluation may not be as objective as they should be when considering race. Yes, we should evaluate students based on "merit" but we need to reconsider whether our current methods measure "merit" accurately.
Would you agree that "All Lives Matter" is racist because it's derisive of "Black Lives Matter" the proper noun? The sentiment that all lives are important is not racist, and it's also not mutually exclusive from BLM's message. If anything, they align right?
BLM is saying Black lives matter just as much as any other life. Black people should not be treated as second class citizens. They're not claiming Black lives matter _more_ than others.. that _would_ be racist.
A true merit based evaluation would be.. just that - based on merit and not racial background, sexuality, age, political affiliation, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, or even the schooling you've received. To give any group preferential treatment would be not based on merit.