Comment by poplarsol
15 hours ago
A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
15 hours ago
A WASP ethical framework cannot survive either the extirpation of WASPs from the student body or the transformation of the education system into a high stakes mandarin style death struggle.
This class form of racism always gets a chuckle out of me. Want to trade skull calipers?
He's wrong, but it's not because he's being racist
A "WASP ethical framework" is barely a thing, if at all. The Princeton founders were motivated by moral obligations derived from a particular subset of Protestant Christianity. They were dissenters from the Anglican establishment, so it feels weird to try to bunch them in under the "WASP" umbrella. I have no idea if people who wrote the honor code were Calvinists too, but that was the seed ideology. It's not something that generic "WASP culture" gets to claim absent from the foundational theology. I'd wager that most WASPs at Princeton today do not share genuine belief in those foundations, if they don't cheat it's only because of social pressure, which tends not to hold up as well under pressure.
WASPs in this day and age are no more immune to "high stakes mandarin style death struggles".
The word "or" grammatically indicates such a combination of conditions.
The style of writing and the inclusion of the word "mandarin" made me assume that you were implying WASPs were not participating in the "high stakes struggles". You still have not explicitly stated your view one way or the other. As you can see from the other comments, almost everyone read an undercurrent of xenophobia in your post. I sense you're a skilled interlocutor- I concede I fell into your trap.
You are aware that Stewart Alsop was writing about the death of WASP elites in 1970 or so. Does that mean you think Princeton exploded in cheating in 1971?
Sorry, can you state your hypothesis clearly here? You are saying Princeton would not need to make this change if it admitted only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
What?