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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Stanford drops basic admissions tests for applicants

The coming dark age: Stanford University has chosen to eliminate the requirement that applicants take basic admissions tests as part of their application process.

This includes the MCAT test for medical students and the GRE for physics students. The administration made the decision because of the restrictions being imposed on society due to COVID-19.

What this means of course is that the education standards required of doctors and engineers at this school will now decline. They will simply know less about their fields, because Stanford will not require them to learn it.

However, I am sure Stanford will make sure these future doctors and physicists will be able to explain white privilege and the all-compassing existence of racial and gender bigotry in every procedure they do. Without question. What’s more important, learning how to be a good doctor or condemning the imagined past evils of America?

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • Cotour

    Low standards is no standards.

    But as long as everyone is “Equal” then that makes it all OK and it will probably not make much of a difference. Not much.

    Its insane, but its all OK.

    (And once again the Zman transmits just how racist and how his elite white privilege upbringing shades his judgement)

  • Diane Wilson

    Noting that this is admission standards only. No one graduates based on MCAT or GRE.

    It would be nice to imagine that these schools still have flunk-out courses to weed out the students who shouldn’t be there. But with grade inflation, how does anyone flunk anything any more?

  • MDN

    Sad. It’s not the institution I attended in the 80s. I suppose the only thing they really care about nowadays is that they get full tuition whether they hold live in-person classes or not.

    My solution to the admissions racism hysteria would be different. I would set and adhere to legitimate quality of admission standards, but EVERYONE who met those standards would be put into a random lottery to get in.

    This way is fair, and over time the racial demographic of the student body would reflect that of the applicant pool at large, and ALL qualified applicants would have an equal shot at admission. But ALL applicants would be qualified as well, period.

  • LocalFluff

    In the early 1990s Sweden suffered a deep depression (our government’s “friend” the Soviets had just ceased to exist…) The government then multiplied the number of universities, to lower the official unemployment figures. Since then standards of higher education and research have dropped very markedly. The world can do without Sweden, but not without the USA that has had leading universities in most subjects for about 100 years now. It’s like burning the library of Alexandria.

  • Spectrum Shift

    At some point the operative phrase will become “Stupid enough to get in”

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