karabel in A Sentence

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    An obvious indication of Karabel's obtuseness is that he describes and condemns the anti-meritocratic policies of the past without apparently noticing that they have actually become far worse today.

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    2

    Karabel notes that MIT has always had a far more meritocratic admissions system than nearby Harvard, tending to draw those students who were academic stars even if socially undistinguished.

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    3

    Since Karabel's own historical analysis focuses so very heavily on Jewish admissions, his book also serves as a compendium of useful quantitative data drawn from these and similar sources.

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    4

    As Karabel repeatedly demonstrates, the major changes in admissions policy which later followed were usually determined by factors of raw political power and the balance of contending forces rather than any idealistic considerations.

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    5

    Karabel's massive documentation- over 700 pages and 3000 endnotes- establishes the remarkable fact that America's uniquely complex and subjective system of academic admissions actually arose as a means of covert ethnic tribal warfare.

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    6

    For example, throughout his very detailed book, Karabel always seems to automatically identify increasing Jewish enrollments with academic meritocracy, and Jewish declines with bias or discrimination, retaining this assumption even when his discussion moves into the 1990s and 2000s.

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    7

    Indeed, Karabel notes that the most sudden and extreme increase in minority enrollment took place at Yale in the years 1968- 69, and was largely due to fears of race riots in heavily black New Haven, which surrounded the campus.

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    8

    Karabel's own ideological leanings are hardly invisible, as he hails efforts by state legislatures to force Ivy League schools to lift their de facto Jewish quotas, but seems to regard later legislative attacks on“affirmative action” as unreasonable assaults on academic freedom.

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    9

    It is interesting to note that this exactly replicates the historical pattern observed by Karabel, in which Jewish enrollment rose very rapidly, leading to imposition of an informal quota system, after which the number of Jews fell substantially, and thereafter remained roughly constant for decades.

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    10

    After all, Karabel devoted hundreds of pages of his text to documenting exactly this pattern of Ivy League admissions behavior during the 1920s and 1930s, so why should we be surprised if it continues today, at least at an unconscious level, but simply with the polarities reversed?

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    11

    For example, soon after Karabel's book appeared, a prominent Massachusetts law school dean with a major interest in ethnic discrimination issues devoted two hours of his televised public affairs program to a detailed discussion of the topic with the author, but at the end let slip that he believed California's population was 50 percent Asian, an utter absurdity.

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