Free College For All. Now.

Real quick up top: you can now sign up for my summer course on plastics! This course is worth actual college credit and will teach you everything you need to know about how plastics are made, what makes them unrecyclable, and what we can do about it. You don’t even need to be a current Five College student to take it! Learn more about how to enroll here and check out the course syllabus on my website. Thanks!

Affirmative action is dead. What now?

Pride Month 2023 ended pretty brutally with Supreme Court rulings on everything from businesses being allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and Indigenous communities remaining deprived of water. It’s not all bad news; the Indigenous Child Welfare Act was upheld and the court sided with Black voters in Alabama by rejecting a redistricting that would have suppressed their votes even more. Still, it’s hard to not see how the 6-3 conservative majority in the Court, with 3 of those members being appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, is very, very bad, to the point where many are (rightfully) questioning the system by which 9 unelected people can decide the fate of millions.

Most presciently for my own profession in STEM education are (1) the cancellation of Biden’s student loan debt relief plan and (2) the the end of affirmative action. You surely don’t need me to tell you that these will hurt the American public, but let’s break down exactly why this matters and how it connects to everything else conservatives have been doing in this country.

Affirmative Action was the mechanism by which historically-excluded and marginalized groups have gained access to higher education, especially for women and people of color. Higher education has always been predominantly white and male—it was designed that way from the ground up—so the rule was meant to put its finger on the scales to provide a small counterweight against centuries of systemic injustice.

The field of science, particularly biology, is guilty for some of this injustice. In the earliest days of modern science, racists practiced phrenology to “determine” that women’s brains and Black people’s brains were smaller, and thus these groups are more suited to domestic labor or field labor (respectively, or both for Black women). Standardized tests such as the SAT and IQ score are merely the latest iteration of this method of bias, having been invented by eugenicists as a means to rank certain classes of people as having lower intelligence. To this day, the SAT is used to assess student learning and determine who gets into college. This is to say nothing of the economic privileges that are distributed across racial lines on the level of individuals (the ability to hire private tutors, the ability to do extracurricular activities because you don’t have to work, or having parents that went to the college you apply for) and the systemic (your school district being well-funded enough to have AP or Early College Experience classes). Make no mistake: the gutting of affirmative action will have a negative effect on the American public that will last generations and will take generations to fix.