Coyote Blog: sage wisdom from the Southwest

If you're not reading Coyote Blog...you're missing posts like:

Please Stop:

Jennifer Britz, the Dean of Admissions at Kenyon College reports that she is sad to say that she is admitting boys who are less qualified than female applicants in order to maintain gender parity.

"Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men."

One. Yeah! Lets take a moment to celebrate a victory for women. Its great to see us talking about "too many" qualified women flooding colleges, just a few years after feminists were still writing books about schools failing girls.

Two. I finally get to say something that I have wished for decades to hear from members of various minority groups that have been the benficiary of affirmative action: Stop giving us men a special break. Boys in high school are falling behind girls in their achievement, and are not going to get the message as long as you keep taking less qualified boys instead of more qualified girls. The colleges I attended 20+ years ago survived fine with 2/3 men, they can do the same with 2/3 women...

Bush: The Worst Communicator:

ABCNews is running a series on some interesting documents found among released Hussein-era Iraqi government docs. I am not going to react to them in terms of how they affect the decision to go to war, in part because we have no idea how representative 6 or 7 damning documents are out of thousands that we have not yet been shown (a similar problem the Enron jury will soon face). Also, for reasons below in the footnote**.

My main reaction to these revelations was "wow, how badly does the Bush administration suck at communication?" After taking three years of criticism over exactly some of the issues addressed in these documents, and presumably others we have not yet seen, the administration just sat on this stuff and refused to release it? Clinton's folks would have had one of these presented each morning of every day for a year to the press with a little bow around it. I am flabbergasted that there are so many conspiracy theorists who think this administration has some special Karl-Rovian-mad-science to orchestrating events. To me, their PR successes look more like Peter Sellers accidentally avoiding numerous assassins in The Pink Panther Strikes Again...