Dr. Loury with Stephon Alexander on expectations in academe

[Belle]

This excellent conversation is revealing. The much younger Dr. Alexander - a Particle Physicist at Brown - talks about assessing students in Physics and the distribution of talent across the races and classes. But the older Dr. Loury reveals his wider experience in some of his exchanges with his younger colleague. The essence of the discussion; don't stereotype, don't underestimate and always encourage students to perform higher and higher, better and better.

Also, there may be cultural reasons (I'm sure there are) why some black students aren't driven to perform at those higher levels. Dr. Loury has something to say about THAT; 'culture' and achievement are interconnected!! He referred to a book about Asian students called "F is an A Minus" - about the fact that the parents of Asian students are extremely pushy with their children and will foster an environment where the very best things can be achieved, but who cannot accept anything less than perfection. Of course, that approach has created its own 'failures' and resentments when kids simply cannot live up to unrealistic expectations (I've taught kids like this). This 'hot-housing' has led to some spectacular successes, but we ought not conflate that with comprehensive LIFE 'success' as we cannot know their lived experiences. Another paradigm, not considered, is that people mature intellectually at different stages of their lives; not everybody will be found to be a genius at 18. Many will discover this aspect in themselves somewhat later. I've always regarded IQ as not fixed, contrary to earlier beliefs that this quotient isn't variable, but I'm unsure where the research currently stands on the matter.

Dr. Alexander said that he knew what it was like to be 'excluded' by some groups in academe and that he still is in many ways. He reveals his lack of worldliness here and Glenn picks him up on it. Within and amongst all groups people will be and have been shunned, often on the basis of their very achievement - which has almost nothing to do with race. Dr. Loury understands as I do; that many people are insecure and the better your achieve, the bigger your house, your status, your achievement the more likely you are to be shunned by some groups at some time. That life is actually a lesson will come to Dr. Alexander and this will enable him to see 'prejudice' as a more broad social construct which is largely overcome through self-belief and confidence and not by patronization, condescension and implied helplessness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2yKNgeP6tU

Just thinking a bit more about this overnight; when I said I always believed IQ was not immutable this needs to be qualified. I didn't mean to suggest people could jump their IQ band from, say, between 100 and 125 to a much higher band. I meant that they could jump from 100 TO 125, or higher - but there's no evidence that somebody who starts out as 'average' can end up on the 'genius' band, or anywhere near that.

Also, Dr. Loury says he believes that somebody in the 90 percentile of performance is probably going to be less suited to Physics than somebody at 98 or 99. (He was doing this as a shot across the bow of affirmative action.) Dr. Alexander was more ambiguous, stating that he'd given written tests to students at that level and some had performed better than others, while some students in the same cohort were better 'at the blackboard' solving problems spontaneously (rather than in written tests). He used this to debunk Dr. Loury's percentile argument but I think he's got this wrong. I would expect that within even the 98 or 99 percentile there would still be variability in skills; some written, some spontaneous. If you transposed this to a high-level concert pianist you would still see variability; all are world-rated performers and interpreters but I'll bet the majority of them couldn't improvise, though some could. In short, Dr. Alexander was up too close to be able to see that even within tiny margins there can still be skill variability. But you have to be right up there in that cohort to begin with.