Word: klitgaard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...before the rally, Bok sent a letter to The Crimson urging "the Harvard community not to place any weight on" published quotations from the report--prepared by Robert E. Klitgaard '68, special assistant...
...that is what Bok asked Klitgaard to study, it is not what the special assistant included in his draft of the report--which has not been adopted as University policy or endorsed by Harvard officials, but has been distributed to admissions officers for comment. The report largely deals with test scores. It makes the unproven and often-assailed assumption that standardized test scores are valid predicters of students' performance in college, and it goes on to evaluate how accurately the tests predict performance for different groups...
...says he did not ask Klitgaard "to investigate the abilities or performance of particular groups of students--either by sex, race, or religion." But in effect that is what the bulk of Klitgaard's report does, making statements about different groups' relative performance and success on tests and in college and basing these statements only on group identity--Jewish, Black or female, for example--and ignoring any number of other relevant factors that together make each applicant an individual. These conclusions understandably insult students whom the report reduces to faceless members of arbitrarily isolated applicant groups...
...policy does not, and ought not, choose students according to a single standard of success. Diversity ought to be the goal for admissions officers selecting each freshman class--diversity and the affirmative action goal of opening Harvard to members of groups that have been excluded in the past. Yet Klitgaard complains in his report that he could find no statistical proof of the value of diversity. That is because some issues transcend statistics. No study should question the University's moral commitment to affirmative action...
...Klitgaard report remains a draft, and if Bok is "truly sorry" about the damage the report has done to people at Harvard, as his letter states, he will disavow the report and urge Klitgaard to do the same. And for Klitgaard's next task Bok can come up with a far more urgently needed study project--how to make Harvard's affirmative action program more effective at all levels...