Category Archives: The Culture

The University of Texas’ latest engagement in racial and ethnic preferences isn’t a court case defending Affirmative Action but a chemistry course. It’s not dumbed-down but taught in a smaller class of four dozen where individuals are more likely to get special help.

“The TIP program points to the contradiction at the heart of the diversity rationale. In order ‘to obtain the educational benefits of student body diversity,’ UT created programs to vary its standards based on both race and geography. [Chemistry professor David] Laude seems to have found a way to help less-prepared students succeed, and one hopes his approach will prove replicable. But his method entails putting those students in separate courses. That’s difficult to reconcile with the notion that diversity itself is educationally beneficial.”

What’s inarguable is that smaller classes are always better than ones of hundreds of students taught by graduate assistants instead of professors. But with so much of modern academe’s tuition and fees going to pay administrative salaries, they’re unlikely to be available to all.