A reader sends this: From EditorFrancis at Slashdot:
14 terabytes of “highly confidential” data about 5,120 financial aid applications over seven years were exposed in a breach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — proving that the school “misled thousands of applicants and donors about the way it distributes fellowship aid and financial assistance to its MBA students,” reports Poets&Quants.
…
Half the school’s students are awarded financial aid, and though Stanford always insisted it was awarded based only on need, the report concluded the school had been “lying to their faces” for more than a decade, also identifying evidece of “systemic biases against international students.” More.
So the people who insist that there are systemic biases, like these, are not wrong. But those people sometimes have the issues all wrong. Requiring students to be proficient in algebra, for example, is not racist and objectivity is not sexist. These are just ways of thinking needed for science and the bias that needs to be addressed is that some students get a way better education out of the public system than others.
Data breaches are bad but sometimes it’s the only way we ever find out what is going wrong.
See also: More news from the decline: Revealing responses to creationist’s wrongful dismissal over soft dinosaur tissue discovery
and
Who controls Whom in science and what it means for new thinking and new discoveries Within any particular field, a certain amount of criticism is allowed from PhD critics in that same field, because otherwise, there could be no progress at all. But the nature of the criticism has narrow de facto limits, such that nothing discrediting is said of the intellect of any of the elders, only modifications based (supposedly) on newly-discovered evidence, enabled by better experimental instruments than the elders had had available to them.