There are a lot of poorly thought out initiatives that have recently made their way through Congress, but not many herald the United States’ gradual transformation into a third world country quite so much as the idea of instituting a gender quota in the sciences, as reported in The New York Times.

It isn’t so much the quota itself that is detrimental as the idea that strict numeric equalization is more important than building a scientific structure that functions well. However, the quota itself will also do a great deal of damage: Women are shunning science and mathematics because, for one reason or another, most of them lack interest in those subjects. Instituting a quota will jam women into a structure to which they feel no affinity, which can only end poorly. Furthermore, because the fact that they are female now counts as a qualification, less qualified female candidates will now have free passes into a system which has historically held a very high standard of admission, potentially undermining the system by flooding the scientific establishment with yet more mediocre scientists.

Finally, I have a somewhat unique angle on this myself, being in the process of starting a university: every additional requirement placed upon selection of students will interfere further and further with the primary purpose of my organization: education. The more legislative barriers I need to surmount, the less I can focus on the goals that actually matter.

While I seek to start my institution in the United States, I am amenable to locating it elsewhere should the USA continue to recklessly hurl itself into the third world. By even considering this measure, this country demonstrates that its policymakers consider political correctness above reason in the one area in which reason counts most. Barred from the support of reason, science will wither, and, due to the pace at which science moves, the balance of world power will shift within the span of a decade.

If this is what the government wants, they will achieve it. More power to them if they finally succeed at mirroring the depravity of their inner visions on the external world. But I don’t have to stay to watch it.

One question that kept brewing in my mind was the center point about which society’s operations rotated – the central theme, if you will, of this seemingly arbitrary (hi)story that we weave.

To be clear, I know that profit is the prime motive in much of society, and that the motive for profit is how the motive for status and security gets translated into social action, but the goal of raw, undirected profit doesn’t get people very far. It has to somehow channel through an activity for a profit motive to make a social impact – and what drives that impact – the reason why I can drive to a city and see a particular arrangement of buildings and advertisements – is what I’m still seeking. It’s the very story of how we define our reality and shape our world.

But that’s most of society…

I’ve drilled down a bit into academia as I proceed to plumb its depths, and I think I’ve realized why scholars seem to go out of the way to create such an air of mystique about the whole practice of writing papers for publication. (Of course, now it’s tradition, and reinforced by the peer review system to boot, but I mean why the eternally stupid practice of making things deliberately inaccessible was started in the first place):

It’s designed to draw grad. students in. An undergraduate interested in science and looking at scientific literature would probably think “Wow, look at all of this neat stuff being done couched in barely comprehensible language! I want to do that!” Society then offers a seemingly easy and assured way of doing that: “Go to grad. school”. The bargain here is “Follow our steps and serve us well and you will eventually be successful – you too will be able to do such work.” This sounds familiar – the carrot is being dangled again, and all you need to do to get it is work really hard! Forget the fact that you’re running on a wheel…

It really takes about one month to learn how to do such things. By 6 months in, not only should most research be failing to impress, but it should be routine. Of course, you’re stuck there for as many years as the school decides to keep you for. Even the timeline of a dissertation is not usually self-determined.

I’m reviewing the IRS guidelines for 501(c)(3) educational institutions, in preparation for registering my own organization for educational non-profit status. I think I’ve figured out why affirmative action is alive and well:

The IRS mandates something akin to this notice to be sent to a school’s community periodically:

“The M School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.” (IRS Publication 557)

This sounds great! Exactly the sorts of policies I hope to implement, except the IRS forgot to include gender in there (perhaps because athletics are already segregated by gender).

Then they say this:

“The IRS recognizes that the failure by a school drawing its students from local communities to enroll racial minority group students may not necessarily indicate the absence of a racially nondiscriminatory policy when there are relatively few or no such students in these communities. Actual enrollment is, however, a meaningful indication of a racially nondiscriminatory policy in a community in which a public school or schools became subject to a desegregation order of a federal court or are otherwise expressly obligated to implement a desegregation plan under the terms of any written contract or other commitment to which any federal agency was a party.”

And, even worse:

“A policy of a school that favors racial minority groups with respect to admissions, facilities and programs, and financial assistance is not discrimination on the basis of race when the purpose and effect of this policy is to promote establishing and maintaining the school’s nondiscriminatory policy.”

Now the “diversity committees” and differing admissions standards I’ve observed in existing universities start to make more sense. If minorities do not enroll in the school in approximately the same proportion that they exist in the community, the IRS immediately assumes something is wrong (rather than the more likely explanation that the university just doesn’t interest said students for some reason or another). Schools are then pushed into the position of being more lenient to minority students, because they basically have to fill a quota to avoid angering the IRS.

Now, this would be ok if not for some incorrect statistical assumptions. If the sampling of students from the general population were random (and taken exclusively from the local community), the proportions would be about the same as the local community and we’d be more or less fine.

Unfortunately, the sampling is not random. Certain majors will have certain racial compositions; others will have different ones. The majors that the school offers will thus affect the bias of the admissions process of the institution as a whole.

So there you go. Couched in the language of a “nondiscriminatory policy” lies a policy that very much discriminates. While it’s unjust, it’s unfortunately the law, so follow it I will.

I just found out that not only are there different standards for the admission and funding of minority students, but there are whole committees devoted to recruiting them, at least at my school, which prides itself in being “the most diverse in the nation”.

This isn’t right; it marginalizes the majority and rests a significant organizational bias on something other than skill (and according to a consequence of the Panidealist principle of universality, recruiting on the basis of anything other than skill reduces the idea-generating power of an organization). That this is not only countenanced but encouraged in a society that ostensibly condemns racism is also rather hypocritical.

There is only one way to be fair: remove all racial information from the admissions process. Blind it and recruit based on merit.

You see, racism isn’t truly gone until the very notion of race is transparent – when light or dark skin is no more a symbol of division than light or dark hair. Discrimination in either direction just serves to delay the time when this transparency will be realized.