RSS
Facebook
Twitter
E-PrinceReader Comments
Graduate School seeks to attract minority students
Published: Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
Like other Ivy League institutions and academia at large, Princeton has a long and mixed record on racial diversity. Founded as a home of scholarship for affluent white men, the University has attempted a gradual transformation into a home for ...
(back to the article)
The opinions expressed here are those of the individual commenters and do not necessarily represent the views of The Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, Inc. We do not take responsibility for the opinions, facts, or claims presented by individual commenters, and reserve the right to moderate or delete inappropriate comments.
Interesting article. I appreciate Patricia Fernandez-Kelly's distinction between minority faculty and foreign-born (and foreign-raised) faculty who simply 'look the part'. Her quote made me realize, however, that the special concerns of foreign graduate students don't figure much into the articles that are part of the "Graduate School Special Report". Perhaps the Prince should at some point write about the myriad difficulties that foreign graduate students face; we have to function in a different language, adapt to a different culture, cope with visa hassles, etc., and we are just as unfamiliar as many minority students are with aspects of US academic life (cf. the 'cocktail-party talk' and 'relationships with editors'). It would be nice if the Prince could bring itself to write an article about us that went beyond the by now very tedious undergraduate complaint about our supposedly inferior English language skills.
Apparently class diversity isn't even on the radar. In the quote from Robinson below, for instance, all the issues he attribute to minority status are actually class matters -- poor white students have as little access to these things as poort racial minorities, and rich racial minority with professor parents have more access then working class whites. Class is certainly coded racially, but let's try to keep some precision in how we use this analysis and, perhaps, keep an eye on class in the meantime, too.
"Robinson said that socialization lessons that students must learn as they rise through academia can be easier for students from families with academic backgrounds, while many underrepresented minorities do not have this kind of support. He noted that graduate students who begin their postgraduate degrees already having “a familiarity with academic-social milieus, … cocktail-party talk and … relationships with editors [of academic journals]”have an advantage, adding that non-minority students are much more likely to enjoy these benefits."