A visual defect in which the unequal curvature of one or more refractive surfaces of the eye, usually the cornea, prevents light rays from focusing clearly at one point on the retina, resulting in blurred vision.
There’s a lot of blurred vision about stigma these days.
I recently quoted some overheated comments about the recent news that that a significant number of students had been admitted to Berkeley and UCLA with SAT scores — and, it turns out in some case, grades — dramatically lower than the average for their classes. [Last link via Joanne Jacobs] One of the quotes was from a Berkeley undergraduate, who said “It’s unfair to stigmatize these students,” and another, worse one was from Berkeley Chancellor, Robert Berdahl, who said the report revealing the above information amounted to “derision” and an “attack” on the underscoring students.
In this regard, a debate bubbling at the Harvard Law School over the need, or not, for gender-based affirmative action on the Harvard Law Review is interesting and relevant. Follow the links in Sasha Volokh’s post.
I would like to highlight one point made in a letter by several former editors of HLS that bears on the issue of stigma:
In debating whether to implement some type of an affirmative action program, a large number of female (and a smaller number of male) alumni were consulted. The overwhelming majority opposed adopting gender affirmative action, many of them believing that it would cause employers and others to devalue their participation in the law review. Whether this effect is empirically true is a different matter, and we acknowledge that this is an imperfect sample (those women who get on to the Law Review are not necessarily a representative sample of the law school population as a whole), but many found it significant that this concerned a large number of the constituency most affected by the decision.
At least at Harvard Law School, it appears that the “overwhelming majority” of women who were interviewed believed that a policy of “taking gender into account,” even for the few discretionary positions on the law review, would stigmatize them. To the chancellor and at least some students at Berkeley, by contrast, stigma derives not from lowering standards for a group of students but from the release of information that the standards have been lowered.
UCSD stands by comprehensive review
First Berkeley, then UCLA – and now it’s UC-San Diego’s turn: Nearly 800 students, about 58 percent of whom were underrepresented minorities, were admitted to UC San Diego last year with below-average SAT scores, while an equal number of students…
It is not hard to understand what is going on at Berkeley. When you are pulling a scam, you don’t want the pigeon to know what is going on.
This Berkeley story, of Berdahl eating his own (the Chair of the Regents was appointed by Davis), because the guy had the intellectual honesty and integrity to follow the law of California, is amazing. As far back as 89, an internal report at Berkeley (see my website at http://chetly.home.comcast.net/features/aff-action.html),
internal critics recognized that “affirmative action” at the levels it was set at then brought the academic integrity of the school into question and doomed too many minorities to failure/drop-out (worse than mere stigmatization, although dropping out certainly stigmatizes both the drop-out and other members of the class by association), but they also recognized the need to keep “it quiet.” This stigmatization was admitted by Patricia Gurin’s (the “diversity” expert) husband when he analyzed in 1994 the same data she testified glowing of in 1999. Once again, the results were never circulated widely, perhaps to prevent the very stigmatization that they measured. (see wesbite at http://chetly.home.comcast.net/wsj.html)
The irritating thing is that Berdahl and company actually get away with this chilling tactic in quelling the debate. Increased discourse is actually bad, according to this strange theory, because it somehow “attacks” democracy. I find it almost axiomatic however that increased discourse, even if the person engaging it is very wrong, IS democracy.