WTKA Roundtable 5/27/2021: They Like Things Quiet
Thing discussed: The university’s report and recommendation that Fielding Yost’s name be removed from Yost Ice Arena, and the history of racism at the University of Michigan.
- Panel: Mostly fine with renaming the building, think it’s a small gesture and the story is much larger, involving most of those in power at the University of Michigan and other institutions around the country before, during, and after Yost’s life.
- Seth: Racism is quiet. It’s not about smoking guns and bad actors—it’s a culture that puts the feelings of racists over equality and a system of keep things “pleasant.”
- The “Moral Map” standard versus the reality that of Michigan’s 103 building names, all but one—the William Trotter Multicultural Center—are named for white people. Trotter’s lesson: You have to agitate.
- Craig: We should be celebrating Black athletes of Michigan's past. They were great, and ignored.
- Seth: 13.5% of my graduating class in 2002 was African-American; the last class was 4.4%.
- Report issues: Didn’t talk to the experts like John Behee whose information was used. Craig: It read less like a history and more like a legal brief, and he was really bothered that it made Gerald Ford out to be a hero. Willis Ward does not support that story.
- Seth: Michigan was different from other schools because they had protesters against sitting their Black player. Yost hired Pinkertons, who found three leaders of the protesters whom President Ruthven dismissed.
- Brian: Doesn’t that disqualify him from having a building named for him? Seth: Sure, but it’s a small part of a much greater system that’s still in force today.
- Sam: Highlight the student response. Highlight history. Discusses historical events of attacks on Black communities, and their resonance in events today.
- Seth: Example of Belford Lawson Jr. (read the article here). Same movements we have today. Same reactions we have today.
- Sam/Seth: History of Ocoee Massacre on Election Day 1920 in response to Black registration to vote, and how these stories are not told, kept quiet, specifically because they resonate with the same issues today.
- Michigan must teach this part of their history—name of a building is such a small part.You have an opportunity here to apply some function by teaching people, and open up the conversation again to real changes. Do more than being symbolic.
- Seth: Story doesn’t end with Yost. Crisler’s Quota system is visible in the team photos.
- How far does it go? Seth: If we just draw the line to people who had major campus protests against them you're fine.
- Example of resonance: Tulsa Massacre was about Black community having money. Today this happens.
- Sam: It's not about individuals--it's about how these events resonate with what happens today.
[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]
You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream.
Segment two is available here. You can also watch the video here:
THE USUAL LINKS
- Helpful iTunes subscribe link
- General podcast feed link
- Direct download link (right-click/save as)
- What's with the theme music?
It wasn’t just about that racist incident; it was about what that incident represented historically.
I'll wait to listen to make sure it gets the seal of approval.
FWIW there have been five front page basketball posts since "that podcast" on May 13th, all authored by Matt or Brian and three new podcasts of which none included the aforementioned.
And Sam's health improved so he was able to rejoin the team for this one.
I'm pretty sure that Sam said that he's lost 14 pounds in 14 days on his diet. That is a lot of pounds to lose in two weeks!
Yeah, that sounded a bit concerning, failing to drink water or not.
I do like the narrative, though, that Sam Webb would purposely duck...Brian, Seth, and Craig on his own radio show because someone Brain and Seth works with was angry about the coverage around a decades-long sexual assault mishandling by the University.
Yes, I like comical conspiracy theories, and that is my favorite recent one.
Of course those 5 posts are either part of a series written by Brian or Matt's normal recruiting posts. And the podcasts aren't ones that Ace is normally on.
I'm sure you just forgot to mention those details though, right?
I didnt realize unitl you pointed it out that those were a series by Matt & Brian - I thought Ace handled virtually all the basketball-related reporting. Thank you.
I listened to as soon as I could before the Thought Police got busy on it.
I assume that this was recorded before the Hunter Dickinson news broke? Much more interested in the blog's/Sam's take on that topic.
This was recorded this morning, the Dickinson news broke last night. Shocking, I know, but it turns out some things matter more than which athletes may or may not go pro
"Shut up and dribble"
oof. rough one.
Sorry to hear and know that since Seth graduated in 2002, African-American graduation has dropped significantly. That should not be and that needs to change.
Agreed, but University officials are way too lazy to change it.
Weren't you one of the posters railing against affirmative action in the last thread?
Ah. Great question.
I’m in favor of Affirmative ACTION.
What I’m against is a group of lazy useless bureaucrats concocting a system without effort or thought that produces a desired result with the least amount of work required from them as possible.
Our university went to the Supreme Court to defend their own right to be lazy as fuck with such a system.
A real ACTION system would involve identifying potential students. Having Schlissel and others paying house vists, school visits and doing the same amount of recruiting efforts as the football coach puts into recruiting a kicker.
If you find there aren’t enough students to fill your desired enrollment goals you put in the work and create them. You open your own school systems in affected cities (open to all) and create qualified students.
There isn’t a person alive who would oppose such a system, but the bureaucrats are way too lazy to implement one.
Yeah reads like a really weird attempt at slam poetry.
I take it your answer to the question of "aren't you being a hypocrite?" is, in fact, yes.
I take it your answer to the question of "can you read" is, in fact, no.
No, I read it. What I read was mostly a rant claiming "lazy" administrators weren't taking ACTION in recruiting under-represented groups, even though Michigan in fact has organizations, programs, and offices set up specifically to recruit these groups all the way down to kindergarten, as well as scholarships like HAIL designed to mitigate potential costs. You act like Michigan is somehow not trying to attract academic talent across the country. Across the country African American college enrollment is up but graduation rate remains stubbornly lower than other groups, I believe still around 58% after 6 years. At Michigan the rate is closer to 86%. And while I'm of a similar act cohort as Seth and absolutely believe there were more African-Americans graduating in the early 2000s than now as part of the overall class, my 2003 graduating class was about 8% AA (not 13%) and that was pretty much the average during that time. Maybe my numbers are a bit off or the accounting is different. But a college can't fix an academic culture in this country wherein states drastically underfund some areas for very political reasons and perpetuate racist zoning and discriminatory policies by opening a couple of magnet HSes.
And personally, I have also volunteered my time as a recruiter for the school and been part of these outreach efforts, though at the HS level. It's not remotely easy, and the fact virtually every school in this country has seen declining AA attendance despite billions spent on addressing the issue should point to it being more than the school's president reticence about emulating the recruiting practices of Jim Harbaugh.
So anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying "yes, I read your post and found it to be vapid and factually dubious."
What is the normal response when "organizations, programs, and offices set up specifically to recruit these groups all the way down to kindergarten" fail?
You tear them down and start over with things that can and do work. That of course, requires effort and dedication.
We always complain about "SEC or OSU bag men" here in other contexts. If you have to, find the very best students and have Schlissel hand them $100,000 K in a Fed Ex envelope. I don't care if we do that. The efforts that are being made are failing, and I don't see efforts to fix it from the top.
Hiring some Dean or VP of whatever isn't a solution. You make it the job of every faculty member and administrator here to address this as an employment issue. From researchers and the President all the way down. If you don't like it, seek employment elsewhere.
Or just admit it's too hard and whine that you can't just rig the admissions system.
So the part where UM graduates African-Americans at a rate nearly 30% higher than the national average is, in fact, evidence that at least some of what UM is doing is working.
Your "solution", as far as I can tell based on what seems to be just successive paragraphs of "do something!!!!", is to...try to identify high-achieving African American students in cities and give them money to attend UM. It doesn't, in fact, address any of the underlying issues that have led to the slow decline in under-represented groups in admissions, but instead simply tries to hoarde the small number at the top year-by-year. It's remarkably inefficient, demeaning, and fundamentally fails to address any of the issues you kept point out above in whatever initially set you off.
Anyway, by all means please keep assuming that the reason why under-represented groups don't attend elite universities is because the administrators are hapless idiots who don't want to go outside and leave actual educational reform efforts to people who know what they're talking about.
It's been a while since my Industrial Engineering classes, but shouldn't the goal of any system design be to produce the desired results with the least amount of work possible?
Yes, but in this case the main desired result was no work at all, so that's literally what they did.
If their actual goal was to improve the student body, they would have implemented a plan more along the lines of what I outlined.
Not to be as that would require work they aren't willing to do.
One problem with your plan is, you don't identify the solution to the fundamental problem. The issue is not that the University doesn't have candidates. There are always many more applicants than there are openings. The issue is, how do you select from the applicants in a way that prioritizes increasing diversity, without pissing off the white people who think they should have been selected?
You make some assumptions that I think are not backed up by facts.
If you had an overabundance of qualified candidates, mathematically, you don't have to do anything but randomly select among that pool and diversity is guaranteed.
So someone decided that random selection after clearing the initial admissions bar wasn't cutting it.
That's my point. You talk about identifying students and recruiting them, or developing them. My point is, it's not about having recruits, it's about selecting from them in a way that is effective and also stands up to legal and public scrutiny. Your plan doesn't address that.
My plan specifically addresses that.
If you find a "5 star" kid you really want, go have Schlissel have a sleep over at his house and do whatever you have to do to get him to choose M over Stanford or Yale or whatever.
Before someone says, "well, no one is going to choose M over Stanford" - we still recruit football players when Alabama and OSU want them, don't we? Do you advocate we quit doing that?
I ask about selection, and you go back to talking about recruiting. This conversation is starting to seem unproductive.
Indeed. jbrandimore this is the second main page thread on this you've been over-actively pushing your beliefs and not reacting in good faith to those who've been more than patient with you. Knock it off or you're done.
Fair enough.
Reading that part about doing as little work as possible really makes me hope you're not a bridge designer, noob!
But I'm no engineer... just a commuter!
Heheh... Nope, computer systems. Your commute is safe from me.
Michigan does work to recruit students of color. It’s clearly not effective but it’s not down to lAZy BurEaUCraTs
Oh? Can you name any in house visits by M big shots?
gadzooks.
this is such a surreal and obviously un-implementable approach. i can't tell if you believe this, or if this whole string is some sort of weird performance art.
Right. Because working hard is surreal and unimplementable.
Thanks for concretely proving my point.
Well done.
well, YOU'RE definitely working hard, and you're definitely proving something, just not what you think you're proving.
if mark schlissel put as much effort into recruiting african-american students as you are, to do...whatever the hell it is you're trying to do, all would be solved.
but he won't, and do you want to know why? because it would be fucking crazy for the president of a university to make fucking home visits to find fucking "5-star students."
but hey, trolling, amiright? great job.
Yes but I won't tell you about them
Indeed he was - just wait, there’s another round of mental gymnastics, slippery slope nonsense and pearl clutching coming up in this one too
You seem to be the one doing the pearl clutching.
Your inability to understand the meaning of common phrases like ‘drama queen’ and ‘pearl clutching’ is pretty funny, if not particularly surprising.
Ah were you the person that decided to use weaponized misogyny in a debate on race and failed to see the hypocrisy inherent in that?
The fact that the guy who, in yesterday’s post, defended the ‘discounted bagels’ for black students ‘joke’ or ‘gag’ or whatever you want to call it, is now claiming to be a champion of equal rights and accusing others of hypocrisy is truly mind blowing stuff. Wow, just wow.
I didn't defend it.
What I did do was ask the question as to what a legitimate protest against a racially based system might have looked like.
As no one answered, I will give you another opportunity.
This time try not to weaponize sexism in your answer.
And we’re back - full circle - to your failure to understand the English language. Go ahead and show me a reputable source that deems ‘drama queen’ misogynistic.
Cool use of the word ‘weaponized’ though - it makes the rest of your nonsense seem so scary, and profound
Nice evasion. Try answering the question posed to you multiple times.
Try not claiming, repeatedly, that a word is misogynistic when it isn’t. If you want to have a legitimate debate, then stop engaging in disingenuous arguments and making false statements over and over again. If you’re so offended to be called a drama queen (by myself and others fwiw), then stop acting like one.
While I find this entire argument stupid & unproductive, it sort of makes me proud knowing it's part of the Michigan Difference!
The ohio st or msu are not having such debates on their sports blogs!
But, while clearly stating I do not think much of any of jbrand's proposals have merit or any degree of functionality, I do have to agree using smears or putdowns feminizing opposing viewpoints or arguments is textbook misogyny.
And what else would "clutching pearls" or being any sort of queen be?
As for your question on whether you are sexist, Huffington Post seems to say "yes."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-you-should-never-call-a-woman-a-drama-queen_b_5591346
That's weird. I seem to remember Mooseman specifically answering your question but I am sure it is easier to pretend no one did and then play your same game again. And that's why, as Bacon1431 pointed out, your entire participation here is in bad faith.
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