Detecting a pattern
John, the actual guy who runs Discriminations, pointed to an article about Auburn University's very successful program for recruiting women and minorities into the Computer Science field.
AUBURN - Auburn University is the unlikely home of the nation's highest concentration of black computer science faculty and graduate students in the country.
Additionally, it has a greater concentration of women in its graduate computer science program than just about anywhere else.
That's not just trivia, according to Juan Gilbert, one of those black faculty members and the director of the Human-Centered Computing Lab. The ability to recruit women and minorities into the field of computer science and engineering may turn out to be key to keeping the nation's technological edge, he said.
The National Science Foundation has taken notice. The foundation has approved a four-year, $1 million grant to study Auburn's success at bringing women and minorities into the field and design a way to duplicate it at other universities.
John's snide comments make it apparent he doesn't like the idea of this program.
First let's look at the reasoning behind the creation of the program.
Why is it important? In the late 1990s and through 2004, foreign-born students - predominantly from India and China - made up more than half the graduate students studying computer science and computer engineering in the United States. Those students and the professors they work with are primary generators of new inventions and technological breakthroughs.
But many of those potential students are now staying home.
Increased scrutiny of student visas after the Sept. 11 attacks has made it harder to get here. The universities in India and China are better established now, making it possible to get a computer science education without coming to America.
And American computer companies are shipping programming work overseas, meaning foreign engineers don't have to come to the United States to get good jobs. At Auburn, applications from foreign students have fallen by about half.
"It's become more lucrative for them to stay at home," Gilbert said.
The response from most universities has been to intensify recruiting in foreign countries, but Gilbert said he believes tapping the resources of this country is a better strategy.
This is serious. Our technological advantage is at stake," Gilbert said. "If international enrollments continue to drop, who will be our engineers? White males can't fill the gaps. Women and minorities are the solution."
Come on, doesn't that make sense? Recruit here, in the USofA? Recruit sucessfully, in fact.
According to the National Science Foundation, between 1991 and 2000, the nation's universities produced about 9,000 computer science graduates and only about 100 of them were black. Now, only about 150 blacks are enrolled in computer science doctoral programs nationwide.
Less than 1 percent of the nation's computer science faculty is black, about 32 professors. "And I think I know all of them," Gilbert said.
Auburn now has eight black computer science doctoral students. "We have 5 percent of the country's Ph.D. students in one place," Gilbert said. Nationwide over the past five years, 57 blacks got doctorates in computer science. Five of them, almost 9 percent of the national total, graduated from Auburn.
Women are similarly underrepresented. Though they account for more than 50 percent of the population, women make up less than 20 percent of computer science graduates and 14 percent of faculty. At Auburn, 43 percent of the computer science Ph.D. candidates are women.
There is no way this program is anything but good news.
Now, let's see John's take on it:
The most intriguing question about Auburn's computer science "diversity," I think, is, what difference does it make? According to Juan Gilbert, one of Auburn's black computer science professors, it makes a big difference.
Gilbert said he believes creating a more diverse pool of computer science research won't just keep enrollment up or advance some societal goal. It ultimately will yield better technology.
"If all of our technology is created by the same people, then our solutions will be limited and they will only serve those people. Diversity is the key," Gilbert said. "Diverse backgrounds yield diverse minds, which yield diverse solutions."
This is a provocative assertion, and it would be good to have some evidence of the results of this "difference." In what sense, or in what sense related to computer science, are all non-blacks "the same people"? "Same" how? How are black minds different from white or Asian or Hispanic minds? Have there been any black "solutions" that could only have been produced by someone with a black background?
Discriminating minds want to know....
There is no conception of "all non-blacks" being "the same people," anywhere in the article.
At least it was a rather genteel expression of the hallucination.
You know, I generate a lot of text because I like to give enough context to get a real idea of the article's point of view. Fact is, one can give the central idea of a story or editorial in three, four sentences, tops.
IF you choose the right sentences.
Then again, depending on what you see as being right, one can can totally misrepresent the situation. In three, four sentences, tops.
