Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Cornell¹s Black Student Disunion

A few have always risen against the odds and the few African African immigrant students who excel are not the rule. They come from populations with mass failures in examinations. About 80% of Nigerian students have been failing high school exams in Nigeria for decades. The theory of Chua and Rubenfeld missed this by overgeneralizing their convenient samples, one of their examples is Justice Sotomayor who was failing in high school until she asked a successful classmate to teach her how to study effectively. The missing link is lack of training in study skills. Our students are being given fish by teachers but they are not taught how to fish. Once students master study skills, they will excel even against the odds. African American students at Cornell cannot be labelled failures simple because they complain about institutional racism which is a reality that African African students should speak out against too. Any student at Cornell must be good enough to get there in the first place. The problem lies in the high school where every course is taught but not study skills. We have a proposal to experiment by working with failing high schools to teach study skills and then compare the learning results with control group of schools. We hypothesize that knowledge of smart study skills will achieve better results than the gospel of hard work. We have shared our action research design with many state governors internationally but no takers yet.

Biko

On Thursday, 19 October 2017, 05:32:40 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Cornell's Black Student Disunion

https://www.wsj.com/article_email/cornells-black-student-disunion-1508364848-lMyQjAxMTA3NTE4ODcxMjg4Wj/

A radical group calls on the university to disfavor immigrants.

Photo: istock/Getty Images

By

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Oct. 18, 2017 6:14 p.m. ET

159 COMMENTS

A century ago, colleges cared if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Now some are demanding that when universities admit black students, they give preference to descendants of those who arrived on slave ships. Black Students United at Cornell last month insisted the university "come up with a plan to actively increase the presence of underrepresented Black students." The group noted, "We define underrepresented Black students as Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country."

After widespread criticism—including a student op-ed with the headline "Combating White Supremacy Should Not Entail Throwing Other Black Students Under the Bus"—the group backtracked, sort of. It apologized for "any conflicting feelings this demand may have garnered from the communities we represent." But if the purpose of racial preferences is to promote "diversity," as the Supreme Court has held, why don't immigrants count?

The BSU argued that "the Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America."

There's a contradiction here. For years liberal writers have blamed black poverty and undereducation on racism—the experience of being more likely to be pulled over by police, to be looked at suspiciously in department stores, to be discriminated against in schools and the workplace.

But it doesn't seem to be the case, at least not to the same degree, among immigrants. "The more strongly black immigrant students identify with their specific ethnic origins, the better they perform [academically]," Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld observed in their 2014 book, "The Triple Package."

Anecdotal examples are easy to find. The website Face2FaceAfrica noted in April that Ifeoma White-Thorpe, a New Jersey teen born in Nigeria, had joined "a remarkable roll call of high-flying African-American students who were accepted into all 8 Ivy League Universities." Among them: Ghanaian-American Kwasi Enin, Somali-American Munira Khalif and Nigerian-Americans Harold Ekeh and Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna.

Why does racism not seem to keep black immigrants down? The answer is obvious: Black immigrant culture tends to value academic achievement and believe it is possible no matter what happened to your ancestors. As one business school graduate born to Nigerian parents tells Ms. Chua and Mr. Rubenfeld: "If you start thinking about or becoming absorbed in the mentality that the whole system is against us then you cannot succeed."

Groups like the Cornell BSU insist that the system is out to get them and they cannot succeed. This makes the presence of high-achieving immigrant black students inconvenient. Between diversity and victimhood as the highest good in today's academia, it's hard to know where to place your money.

Ms. Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.

Appeared in the October 19, 2017, print edition.     

Toyin Falola

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