Two ways to get into public college

At the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, there are two ways to get admitted. You can be a qualified student or, if you have the right connections, you can get in even though you are not well qualified. The linked article raises a good point. Private colleges can admit or deny admission to anyone, subject to civil rights laws. But what is a public university doing with a shadow admission list? And in how many other public colleges is this sort of thing going on?

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Who I Am Is No One Else’s Business

As this just happened, I thought I'd come right home and write about it. I just had one of those customer service incidents that sends me over the moon. I walked into a store to find something. I was in a frame of mind to buy. I found the something and asked the sales person "How much is that?" Back at her desk, she sat down, I sat down, and I expected her to punch up the price on her computer and tell me. Instead: "What's you name?" "Private individual," I replied, a bit nonplussed. "I need a name for the quote," she said. "You have to have it?" "Yes." "Have a nice day." And I walked out. Now, this was perhaps petty of me. What, after all, is the big deal? She needed to punch a name into her computer to open the dialogue box to ask for the price. Here's the big deal: IT'S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS WHO I AM UNTIL I DECIDE TO BUY FROM YOU! This is a persistent and infuriating condition in our present society that causes me no end of irritation because so few people think it is a problem that I end up looking like a weirdo because I choose not to hand out private information for free. It has crept up on us. Decades ago, when chain stores began compiling mailing lists by which they could send updates and sale notices to their client base. Then they discovered they could sell those lists to other concerns for marketing. Now we have a plague of telemarketers, junk mail, spam, and cold calls and a new social category with which to look askance at people who would prefer not to play. Like me. In itself, it is an innocent enough thing. But it is offensive, and what offends me the most is my fellow citizens failing to see how it is offensive and how it on a deep level adds to our current crisis. Look: if telemarketing didn't work, no one would do it. A certain percentage of those unwanted calls actually hook somebody into buying something. Direct mail campaigns have an expected positive return rate of two percent. That is considered normal response and constitutes grounds to continue the practice. Economies of scale work that way. So if only two to five percent of the public respond favorably to the intrusions of these uninvited pests, they have reason to persist. I think it might be fair to say that people with money and education don't respond as readily as poorer, less educated folks who are always on the lookout for bargains---and often find bargains they don't understand and probably end up costing them too much, like sub prime mortgages. We are too free with our personal information. Maybe you or you or you find nothing wrong with always giving out your phone number or your zip code or even your name and address when asked, in Pavlovian response to the ringing bell behind the counter, but what has happened is that we have made available a vast pool of data that makes it easy to be imposed upon and that has aided and abetted a consumer culture that has gotten out of hand. And made those of us who choose not to participate in this look like some form of misanthropic libertarian goofballs. How hard is this? If I choose to buy from someone, then I have agreed to have a relationship, however tenuous, with them. Unless I pay cash, they are entitled to know with whom they are dealing. But if I'm not buying, they have no right to know who I am. And I can't know if I'm going to buy if I don't know how much the object in question is. Trying to establish the buying relationship in advance of MY decision to buy is...rude. I have walked out of many stores when confronted with a request for personal information. I've had a few shouting matches with managers over it. In some instances, the unfortunate salesperson is as much a victim, because some software programs these days have as a necessary prerequisite for accessing the system the entry of all this data. The corporation won't even let the employee make the call whether it's worth irritating someone over collecting all this information. Concerns and worries over Big Brother have a certain validity, but it is largely unremarked that the foundation of such a system will not be imposed on us---rather we will hand the powers that be what they ask for because we can't muster up enough sense of ourselves to say, consistently, "None of your damn business!" There. I feel better. I needed to get that out. This rant has been brought to you by Consumer Culture LTD.

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Why you shouldn’t read important speeches

Liz Coleman, the President of Bennington College, has some terrific ideas about reforming liberal arts education. She presented them at TED in February 2009. Many people will never appreciate Coleman's ideas, however, because she presented them in a long paper filled with redundant and sesquipedalian (!*) terms. To top it off, she chose to read her speech in monotone rather than speaking from her heart. Coleman's decision to read her speech rather than presenting it with spontaneous enthusiasm undercuts the very message of her paper. She violated a basic rule of speech-making: Don't bore your audience with good content deficiently presented. Why can't the highly educated C0leman see this conspicuous problem with her own delivery? Why can't she understand that many people (even the smart sorts of people who attend TED lectures, have lots of trouble paying attention to liberal arts college presidents who read pedantic speeches? For starters, she needs to keep in mind that the Internet audience is not a captive audience motivated by the pursuit of grades. Yes, ordinary Americans need to become more disciplined at being attentive audiences. They need to learn to persevere when difficult ideas are presented, even when those ideas aren't sugar-coated. On the other hand, academics (Coleman is one example of many) really need to get out of their ivory towers and learn to talk to real people without sounding condescending. One suggestion: Coleman should study Barack Obama, who often knows his material well enough to talk off-the-cuff. He has also learned to present pre-written presentations in a fresh, spontaneous-sounding way. I'm not suggesting that everyone can deliver ideas like Obama, but all us can take the time study the various techniques he often uses. Before getting to work studying her new technique, Coleman should carefully watch her TED presentation and ask herself whether her delivery would even keep her own interest. She should ask what so many academics should ask: was her speech designed primarily to move her audience or was it (perhaps subconsciously) designed to show off her own vocabulary and intellectual superiority, amply laced with uppity intonation? If there is even an unintentional hint of these, she's lost her audience. --

*sesquipedalian 1. given to using long words. 2. (of a word) containing many syllables.

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Frank Schaeffer lays, and takes, the blame for murder –

I found this an interesting response to George Tiller's murder. Frank Schaeffer, a reformed evangelical, argues that the hate speech continually spewed by the religious right regarding abortion set the stage for George Tiller's murder, and other abortionists before him. He still expresses disgust at late-term abortion, and while I am more likely to agree with that, I do believe there are situations in which that choice is the only one that makes sense. Painful, horribly so, but sometimes the only choice is.

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Now you can pay for the convenience of water!

This is now the second time in a few months that I've gotten the following piece of junk mail: This letter is advertising a promotion in which, for thirty-two dollars a month and up, I can pay to have bottled water delivered to my door. What a brilliant idea! How could you beat that for convenience? Oh, that's right . . . Instead of paying for Poland Spring water at the rate of about $1.64 per gallon, I could get clean, fresh, drinkable water of any temperature I please straight from the tap in my kitchen. I don't know exactly how much this costs me, but I can say with complete confidence that it's a lot less than a dollar per gallon. Clearly, Poland Spring doesn't want you to think too hard about the economics of this. However, for the environmentally conscious consumer, this mailing also has a page touting their green credentials: Bottled Water Junk Mail Recycling 900,000 bottles and keeping 1.8 million pounds of plastic out of landfills is certainly very impressive. But, the skeptic in me has to ask, wouldn't it be much better for people to just use their perfectly good existing public infrastructure for drinking water, and not have to manufacture all that plastic in the first place? The bottled-water industry is one of the great triumphs of modern marketing: creating demand for a product for which there's absolutely no genuine need, selling at exorbitant cost a substance which any person in the Western world can obtain virtually for free. Even more absurd, despite its imagery of glaciers and mountain springs, most bottled water comes from municipal sources - i.e., the same water you get from your tap anyway. What bottled water really represents is almost pure profit for the beverage conglomerates that sell it, and unnecessary environmental harm caused by the expenditure of fossil fuels needed to manufacture, pack and ship it (not to mention sending out all this junk mail touting it). It's no healthier than the water that comes from the tap in your house. It doesn't even taste better. What on earth could convince a person to pay money for a scheme as ridiculous as this?

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