Little Asia on the Hill

When I hear Berkeley, I think of crazy white hippies yelling "Down with the Man!" and Manish Vij ;) Shows how East Coast and ridiculously un-current I am. (If the school don't have ivy, it's not really in the league, right?) That aside, The New York Times ran a feature on several of the public California colleges, featuring UC Berkeley and its overwhelmingly Asian makeup. Again, I've always lived east or close to it, so the idea of a 46% Asian (29% white) campus is absolutely fascinating to me.

[We won't even talk about my people. It appears we're going the way of the Native American...]

I lean toward the "College should be a microcosm of real life" camp, which I know is highly unlikely but a girl's gotta dream... Anyways, any discussion about the racial makeup of a student body is bound to initiate conversations about affirmative action which is not a conversation I wish to have. No amount of current programs or "reserved seating" can genuinely revive decimated cultures. I agree with this guy, mostly because I always root for the underdogs:

Eric Liu, author of “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker” and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.

“I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy,” says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book “Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose.” Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”

Ah, yes. But life isn't fair. It never has been and I believe the international moratorium on unfairness failed to pass again this year.

At any rate, Native Americans have their own colleges and HBCU's have been around since right after slavery ended, which coincidentally, was around the same time the Chinese started building the railroads. I say, it's about time they got their own universities. ;) They can invite whoever they want.