By wpengine
About one hundred students packed into the Community Lounge of the Latino Living Center (LLC) to discuss the issue of affirmative action on Friday night. Audience members shared their thoughts on various aspects of affirmative action and debated the University of Michigan undergraduate and law school case that is currently before the Supreme Court. The discussion was sponsored by the Latino Living Center and Ujamaa. The question before the court is the legality of the University of Michigan’s admissions system, in which applicants are assigned various point values based on certain academic and nonacademic factors, including race. Minority applicants receive 20 points because of their status as a member of an underrepresented minority group. The total amount of points applicants can receive is 150. According to the presentation, the Michigan case is crucial in determining the future of affirmative action because it could resolve inconsistencies among rulings on affirmative action practices and give schools more specific guidance as to how to legally implement affirmative action practices. Currently, the only Supreme Court decision relating to affirmative action is the Bakke case. This decision said that while race can be taken into account in admissions decisions, schools cannot set “quotas” to determine the racial makeup of a class. There is considerable debate as to what sorts of practices legally constitute quotas, and many hope that the Court’s decision in the Michigan case will provide a clearer interpretation on the matter. While the legal aspects of affirmative action in general and the Michigan case in particular constituted a significant portion of the evening, the bulk of the discussion was devoted to the philosophical and historical underpinnings of affirmative action. Ray Dalton, senior lecturer and the executive director of the Office of Minority Educational Affairs (OMEA) at Cornell, spoke at length on the subject. “The use of words like racial preferences and quotas racializes access to higher education … Affirmative action has never meant [admitting] the unqualified,” Dalton said. “Before affirmative action, there was a mindset that if you weren’t white you wouldn’t be considered.” According to Dalton, affirmative action was instituted to break down the barriers to access that minorities faced in such areas as college admissions and employment and to remedy what he calls “the under-utilization of people of color in this country.” Dalton said he believes strongly that the factors that necessitated affirmative action are still present today, pointing to the underrepresentation of minorities in several professions and corporate positions. A large portion of the attendees were members of minority communities. Based on audience questions and responses posed by the leaders of the discussion, those present appeared to be largely supportive of affirmative action, though there were people who had a few reservations regarding the way it is implemented. Among those who expressed such doubts was Elliott Reed ’05, vice chair of the Cornell Republicans. “I think that this is a pretty important issue that affects not only minorities … Affirmative action is not inherently wrong but it is flawed in execution,” Reed said. “I think that socio-economic based affirmative action is much less of an evil than stereotyping and discriminating against people based on attributes which are beyond their control. [Poor] Ithacites and people from the streets of Harlem are more similar than they are dissimilar. And the question is who is more qualified,” said Reed.Archived article by Daniel Palmadesso
By wpengine
The Cornell community, along with the rest of America, continues to mourn the loss of the seven astronauts who died when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere last Saturday morning. Mission commander Rick D. Husband, Dr. Laurel Salton Clark, pilot Cmdr. William McCool, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, Dr. David Brown, Lt. Col. Michael Anderson and Col. Ilan Ramon died as a result of the break-up. Many members of the Cornell community are affiliated with NASA through the astronomy, physics and engineering departments, including the New York Space Grant Consortium. While all expressed grief over the events, they echoed President Bush’s message that the space program, including the International Space Station efforts, will continue in the future. “I think it’s a major disaster of human loss and loss of an extremely vital part of the space program,” said Robert Richardson, vice provost for research and the Floyd R. Newman professor of physics. Richardson was named to NASA’s International Space Station Management and Cost Evaluation Task Force in 2001. During an already-tense period for many Americans, this disaster created feelings of sorrow for the families and loved ones of the one Israeli and six American astronauts who died, as well as many questions for NASA researchers. As the country watched, the shuttle appeared as a shining light in the sky which then spilt into three separate pieces forty miles above the Earth. At the same time, debris from the break-up began to fall over parts of Texas, according to The New York Times. Some of the astronauts’ remains have been discovered by investigators as of yesterday. Planning to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the space shuttle lost contact with NASA officials at Mission Control in Houston. Five hours later President Bush announced to the country at a White House press conference that “the Columbia [was] lost. There are no survivors,” as reported by the Times. Reminiscent of the Challenger explosion 17 years earlier, the Columbia was a manned space mission that received much attention for the diverse group of astronauts on board. Col. Ilan Ramon was the first astronaut from Israel, and also on his first mission. Ramon’s presence led to increased security at the time of the shuttle’s takeoff on Jan. 16, according to the Times. The other six were Americans, each with diverse backgrounds in the space sciences. The Columbia shuttle, which was on its 28th flight, carried a mission whose goal was to “carry out experiments in the areas of astronaut health and safety, advanced technology development, and Earth and space sciences,” as defined by the original NASA overview for the mission. NASA officials have not yet determined a cause for the break-up; however, a number of theories have emerged as possible explanations. Most recently, NASA announced that temperatures on the shuttle’s left side increased dramatically as the shuttle began its reentry into the atmosphere. Officials suspect that the shuttle began rolling to the right to compensate for the temperature change as it made its final descent into the atmosphere, according to the Reuters News Service. “In the coming weeks we will know what produced this [crash],” Richardson said. He also noted that NASA will examine the cause of the break-up in order to ensure it never happens in the future. “NASA is very careful of its analysis of things that go wrong with its manned space program. If [the cause] were something rubbing against the spacecraft, NASA would change their procedures to make sure it’s corrected,” Richardson added.Archived article by Carlos Perkins