Affirmative action: “A bitter, but necessary pill.” Diverse campuses are more interesting campuses.
We had a rollicking debate over whether race should be a factor in college admissions, tied to the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the issue this year.
I am not sure if the debate was that fruitful, given how few people understand that colleges do not now and will never admit students solely on highest GPAs and test scores. Colleges seek a diverse student body because they believe that a wide range of backgrounds and experiences enriches their campuses and their students. And few students want to be surrounded by classmates who look, sound and act just like them.
Here is an inside view of the issue from Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus and university professor at George Washington University. I thought he made some interesting points that were worth sharing.
This is an excerpt from his piece on Bloomberg: (Before commenting, try to read his full essay.)
Using only high-school grades and standardized tests would give us a freshman class with far more women than men. Therefore, some balancing will be necessary to ensure gender equity (except at Barnard, Smith and Mount Holyoke). Geographical representation (for non-state-supported schools) will be sought. The major field of study will become more significant in choosing applicants than is currently the case: There will be room for chemists, yes, but also linguists. It is hard to predict if this system would be better or worse, more or less equitable than the present system.
Affirmative action has been a bitter, but necessary, pill. Designed to right a wrong, it began to provide opportunities for a portion of the population that has been unjustly denied access to education and opportunity. What began as a remedy for one group — black Americans — was later broadened to include a wide selection of others: women, Latinos, American Indians, people with disabilities and special needs, veterans and several other groups.
The current special set-asides in college admissions serve two very different purposes: to improve access for under- represented groups, as noted; but also to deliberately build a diverse multidimensional class because a diversity of gender, ethnicity, geographical origin and talents is good for its own sake, irrespective of whether a wrong is to be righted.
How does one define merit in admissions? Standardized tests have their own problems and are often criticized for perceived biases against disadvantaged students who have received an inferior k-12 education or who lack experience in taking such exams. Letters of recommendation are subjective and often tell us as much about the writers as about the candidates. High-school grades and, by extension, class standings are increasingly subject to a subtle gaming of the ranking system. School districts want to be known as places where their graduates go on to excellent colleges and universities. Since students with high grades tend to be admitted more easily than those with lower ones, there has been an inflation of grades over recent years. Today’s B plus is yesterday’s B minus, and hardly anyone in college-bound classes ever flunks. High-school students are not always held to rigorous standards, and colleges often have a difficult time equating the grades from one school to another.
Merit measured solely by grades would bring us a class of students who were one-dimensional in some ways and uneven in others. Harvard could fill its class with high-school seniors with near-perfect SATs, all valedictorians. Who wants to go to college to meet fellow freshmen from only Newton, Scarsdale, Bethesda, Shaker Heights or Palo Alto — the tried and true upper-middle-class communities?
Colleges are going to look for ways to continue economic diversity, cultural pluralism, gender equity and geographic distribution because it makes a far more interesting group of students to study with and learn from. The purpose of the admissions officer is not to attract to his or her campus a group of students who are uniformly consistent. It is to take from some large pool of applicants a reduced number with a cross section of characteristics.
In the end, the view of merit in students and the concept of what makes up a high-quality entering class have evolved in the past 25 years. A multicultural community is at the heart of every campus from New York University to the University of Mississippi.
For generations colleges were most inventive in finding ways to keep Jews and blacks out. Now they may have an opportunity to use their wits to find the legal means to admit and enroll multicultural classes without the use of affirmative action. My money is on the universities, which were, after all, open for business before the Constitution was drafted.
–from Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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177 comments Add your comment
Eric
March 2nd, 2012
10:18 am
Anyone complaining about diversity figuring into admissions but NOT saying anything about the always considered criteria of gender and home state are being hypocritical.
I have a parent who got a great education at an Ivy League university — after being accepted in part through geographical diversity because he was from a southern state. Our universities should not promote provincialism.
bu2
March 2nd, 2012
10:45 am
@Observer, in the case of the University of Texas its females and Asians who are the “hogs at the trough” as you put it. Texas is roughly 30% Hispanic, 10% African American and 5% Asian. White males, Hispanics and African Americans are all under-represented.
Observer
March 2nd, 2012
11:18 am
@ bu2. “The hogs at the trough” to which I was referring were the bloggers here who seemed to be white males mostly arguing that race and gender shouldn’t be factors in college admissions decisions. And it was “Digger” who supplied the quote…more accurately, he/she wrote “hogs from the feeding trough.” Wonderful and pithy.
I don’t know the admission standards of U.Texas (aside from grades and test scores), but I’d think that the Latinos and African-Americans are the racial/ethnic groups who are underrepresented in the University’s student populations…but I’m sure that other factors in addition to race/ethnicity were considered.
@no name used, Mar. 1, Mar. 1, 11:48 pm: “I like the idea of taking gender and race identifiers off college applications. It would definitely be a step in the right direction.”
Again, the question needs to be considered from the viewpoint of college admission committees trying to assure a student population with enough diversity to educate and attract applicants, when there are more applicants than admission spots. As Maureen has noted earlier, California and Texas Universities have already discovered that when you remove race as a factor to be considered, you wind up with schools that are 75-80% white and Asian. And other universities have found that if you remove gender as a factor, then you wind up with a “co-ed” school that is more than 70% female, given the higher HS graduation rates and test scores of females generally. And in both cases, the schools see declines in applicants, who want a more balanced sort of campus. Bad economics for the schools.
And as someone here–”Thomas”?– noted, college is a privilege, not a right; and schools have the right to decide their admission standards.
Observer
March 2nd, 2012
11:22 am
P.S. Always remember that “Asians” include both Pacific Rim Asians and Indian continent Asians. I believe that it is the latter group of Asians who are especially growing in size at the Universities.
no name used
March 2nd, 2012
1:52 pm
Observer, what does it matter what the population looks like when the goal is supposed to be education. If you will note a prior posting of mine, I stated that I would like for them to look at the whole picture-grades, test scores, letters of reference, job history, activities in the community, hobbies etc. What the data you have shown is telling me that those groups that are getting in are the ones that are actively trying to improve their lot in life thru college. Other groups may be looking to other pathways for improvement. It does not matter what the campus population looks like, only what they are able to do with the education they recieve.
Observer
March 2nd, 2012
2:24 pm
@ no name used. Colleges do look at the things you note above…and also race/ethnicity, gender, geographic location, and age. As Maureen notes above: “Colleges seek a diverse student body because they believe that a wide range of backgrounds and experiences enriches their campuses and their students. And few students want to be surrounded by classmates who look, sound and act just like them.”
It matters to the colleges “what the campus population looks like,” because that’s a very important part of why they get applications for admission. And race/ethnicity involves more than “what people look like,” for it also includes the experiences and perspectives that go along with the “skin color.” That’s true of course for the other diversities as well. “Education” means more than materials learned from textbooks in classrooms.
And ultimately…the colleges have the right to set up their admissions standards.
Observer
March 2nd, 2012
2:25 pm
P.S. Plus the factor of the applicant’s socioeconomic class.
bu2
March 2nd, 2012
5:58 pm
@Observer
Employers have the right to set up their employment standards was long used to justify racism. And public universities are not private, but are taxpayer supported. Most private universities get substantial federal $.
From the north
March 2nd, 2012
8:24 pm
thomas wrote:
——
In some (usually small) countries, students must go to the college/university they want to enroll and take an entrance exam on a specified date. Students will also have to select a major and each major has a specific number of openings. Colleges may or may not fill up the spaces depending on students’ exam scores. Students will also have to take an exam to change their majors if they want to change it after they are admitted. That will be an ultimate “standard” based system, won’t it? I don’t think it will ever happen in the US. As long as colleges have to base their decisions on subjective judgements of others (and SAT or ACT is not designed to screen students), college admission system will remain an “art” of predicting students’ potential.
—–
I live in one of those countries. Over here, all universities are tax-funded and non-tuition. Entrance (with the exception to performing arts, etc) is only by GPA. The students apply not to a University, but to a major within that University. All applications are sent to one federal application office, which does all the sorting. If one gender is underrepresented, and two marginal applicants of different genders have exactly the same GPA (to within 3rd decimal point) the underrepresented gender can be preferred, but that is the entire extent of AA in this country. No consideration whatsoever to race, money, what have you. Also, we have no legacy or athletic admissions. None whatsoever. The university that the applicant is applying to has no say whatsoever in whether a given applicant is admitted or not. Applicants can list as many applications as they want (for free) and if they do not med the GPA standards in the popular major in a popular university, they will automatically be considered for the subsequent applications, until they are admitted somewhere, or sun out of application preferences.
I think that it is a fantastic system, and I loved my time as an undergrad and later PhD. student at a STEM-only university.
When I read stuff like this, I thank my lucky star that I was not born in the USA and had to contend with the stuff descibed in the article.
On whether diversity is a good in itself: there was very little (by US. standards) in the way of ethnic diversity, which is quite natural in a country that is 95%+ white. I did not yearn for more of that stuff.
Observer
March 2nd, 2012
8:48 pm
@ bu2. Using race/ethnicity as a college admissions factor is precisely what the Supreme Court will be deciding. Stay tuned.
@ From the north. Two responses. One, your last paragraph at once rules out any relevance of the University system in your country for ours. We are indeed a huge, messy, rowdy country with a lot of human variations. A 95%+ white country in which one is also white, highly intelligent, and naturally talented in one of the STEM-fields (and thus presumably easily employable) is going to feel like a warm aquarium does to a fish.
Two, if you’ve never experienced cultural/ethnic diversity, how could you “yearn for that stuff” in any case?
From the north
March 2nd, 2012
9:01 pm
Observer wrote:
——
@ From the north. Two responses. One, your last paragraph at once rules out any relevance of the University system in your country for ours. We are indeed a huge, messy, rowdy country with a lot of human variations. A 95%+ white country in which one is also white, highly intelligent, and naturally talented in one of the STEM-fields (and thus presumably easily employable) is going to feel like a warm aquarium does to a fish.
Two, if you’ve never experienced cultural/ethnic diversity, how could you “yearn for that stuff” in any case?
——–
On point#1:
Which I why, were I to recommend anything to a college-bound young person of my ethnic group, would be to apply to a University in a place where that ethnic group is a prevalent as possible, so as to limit the scope of all this. That is unless the young person is of the caliber to get a Harvard full academic scholarship.
On point#2
Lots of immigrants to the USA have come from completely unfree countries, and still have been perfectly able to yearn for the various freedoms in the USA. Also, most teenage boys have no problem figurng out that they want female companionship, even before they have had it.
Observer
March 2nd, 2012
9:36 pm
Point#1. All I can say is that you have a different value and legal system from ours. You value cultural/ethnic homogeneity. Here that homogeneity has legal restrictions relating to those left out. Your recommendation might work for those whose race is white, but not for the many other racial/ethnic groups we have here.
Point #2. False analogies. Your examples of diversity (political freedoms and innate sexual differences) aren’t the same as cultural/ethnic diversity. My point was that if you’ve never known people who aren’t like yourself, how can you know whether you would enjoy the experience or not? If you’ve only known gray, how can you know that you wouldn’t like colors?
But it makes no difference…for you are there, and quite happily. I am glad that I am not. I fear I would be bored.
From the north
March 3rd, 2012
2:28 am
Then everything is fine, observer. Glad to hear that you like your place. Two more (and final) questions though:
Imagine that the university admission system that I outlined would be imposed on GA, or on the USA as a whole. Imagine further that no legal or political challenges to change it back would achieve anything. (Preposterous, I know – but please play along, and think what if) Then what? What would the big changes in GA or USA be?
A slightly less outlandish scenario: Imagine that lots of the people that would like the University admission system that I outlined would decide gather together, and in one great migration congregate on a few designated states where they would become the norm, and able to institute the admission system on a state level. All the people in GA who hade affirmative action would trade places with the people in Minnesota who like AA, and similar trades going on between other pairs of states. Then what? What would happen in the states (GA, etc) which would by then have no people who dislike AA. What would happen in the other states?
Observer
March 3rd, 2012
11:58 am
@ From the north. I’m glad to know that even STEM graduates have such vivid imaginations. You might like “ethnic diversity stuff” more than you think.
Scenario #1. One key factor you have left out in your scenarios is money–the cost of such a University system and who would pay for it? You may have 95+% white taxpayers, but we sure don’t. And even among those who are white, many would oppose paying taxes for what would seem, over here, such an unjust and imbalanced educational system….and also such an expensive one. Very expensive.
Another key factor, perhaps even more important, is that such an educational system, removing any personal choice, runs quite counter to the cultural identity of this country. So the big change to the USA, and thus GA, would be that it would no longer be the same country. It would be a socialist state, not a democratic one.
Scenario #2. Affirmative Action law is federal law, and in this country federal law trumps state laws. So what you propose wouldn’t be possible. That’s why our U.S. Supreme Court is deciding the issue of whether race/ethnicity, covered under Affirmative Action laws, should be allowed in college/University admission decisions. (And I should explain that here “ethnicity” has a specific denotation, referring to Hispanics. According to the definition of our U.S Census, Hispanics belong to an ethnic, not a racial group; and Hispanics can also belong to any of the races: white, black, Asian, or Native.)
Is your small northern country by any chance Finland? There has been some controversy over here about the viability of our following your K-12 educational system…that is why I ask.
Observer
March 3rd, 2012
1:03 pm
@ From the north. P.S. I should have added in answer to your scenario #1 that your proposed University system would be so expensive because it have to replace our system of a myriad of private colleges and universities in addition to the public ones, so that an entirely new system of universities would have to be built to accommodate the many additional millions of students. Again, we are a huge country.
From the North
March 3rd, 2012
2:50 pm
Dear observer,
You are quite close, but just a tad too far to the east. However, in the place that I grew up in, Finnish was the only minority that had over 1% of the student body. I doubt that the other minorities had 2% combined in the primary school where I grew up at that time. That was not a socially advantaged place by any means – mostly working class, with maybe 30% lower middle class, and a small smidgen of central middle class thrown in. Imagine a mix of equal parts West Virginia, rural Minnesota, and Upper peninsula Michigan. The teachers came from the same social circles, for the most part. You can judge their work on my English, and on the stuff that I write of in these comments. So, how, do they appear to you?
That said, I think that you overestimate the cost of a hypothetical transfer of the University admission system to the USA. The admission system used here is not part of the universities themselves, it is a central national organization. In order to implement our system onto the USA, one would simply fire the admission board personell at each university, and then use some of them to staff a single organisation which puts applicant preference lists, GPA for each applicant, #places at each major for every university into a computer and get out the result by the computer. Since the computer algorithm is completely transparent, and not dependent on any qualitative factors, the whole thing could be done in a big Excel spreadsheet. Again: no fudge factors whatsoever. Running a computer program like that is not costly. Then, once students have accepted their placements (or declined them, if they have had a change of mind) the list of freshmen for each major in each university gets sent to the university. From there, everything would proceed as now, but without legacies and student-athletes.
I assert that the system is quite cheap. It would be politically impossible in the USA, but that is another kettle of fish. There is no need for any new university hardware, just a centralized computer-driven admissions office.
On the contrary, our admissions system does allow for choice from the individual applicant. The applicant is free to list any majors in any university in the whole country in his application preference document, and he is also free to list them in any order he wishes. Whether he is admitted to his first preference is another matter – if one has so-so GPA, then it can be good idea to choose a major in a university that is not that popular/out in the sticks.
On scenario#2: Even if there still were a set of AA laws, would they have any relevance in a state where close to 100% of the population would dislike them? Remember that the scenario envisions people who like them moving from (say) Minnesota to GA – en masse. If there are no members of the protected groups in a state, on what can an AA law operate on?
Regarding race, ethnicity, and hispanics: You do not have to lecture me on that issue, that was covered in primary school civics. What do you take my teachers for? Complete incompetents? I am flabbergasted.
When people over here look at the US. university admission system, it looks most of all like a figure skating competition. Points are given for a lot of reasons, but not in a transparent way. Over here, the closest analogue would be T&F, you run faster, jump longer, or throw further than the other guy, and win that way. No ifs, buts, maybes. Come to think of it, our sports broadcasting has a lot of airtime for such measurement sports, and very little for sports based on beauty contests. Of the winter sports, there is more airtime given to skiing (all forms, except moguls which are qualitatively judged), biathlon, ice hockey, curling, and a few more measurement sports than figure skating. Figure skating is almost only shown during olympics, and every time it is shown there are letters to the editor in the paper demanding that all qualitative sports should not get any airtime whatsoever.
Observer
March 3rd, 2012
4:04 pm
@ From the north. I can tell that you are a STEM graduate, for all of your proposal has a logical, mathematical precision about it… assuming that our population, culture, and legal system are similar to yours. But you must try to imagine very different parameters for your educational scenarios. We are a pluralistic, heterogeneous society as yours, I gather, is not.
Scenario #1. You assume that all of our Universities are interchangeable, except for academic ranking. So arranging everything by computer means that “the whole thing could be done in a big Excel spreadsheet.” But here, our schools are not interchangeable; and it is exactly because of our diversity that there is also a diversity of school identities. And that is valued here. In addition to the state Universities and the Ivies, there are schools with religious origins and affiliations; schools that are all-male or all-female; schools that are proudly identified with one minority racial group such as our Historically Black Colleges and Universities, also termed “HBCUs.” The “choice” you mention is only that of majors.
Scenario #2. You say: “Even if there still were a set of AA laws, would they have any relevance in a state where close to 100% of the population would dislike them?” Yes! All states are governed by federal laws, as I noted above, and that is stated in our Constitution. You may remember that this country went through a rather prolonged conflict in our Civil War of the 1800s over the issue (among many other things) of whether state rights or federal rights should prevail. That has been settled, in favor of the latter.
Sorry if I seemed to lecture you on “race, ethnicity, and hispanics.” That is something that a great many Americans don’t seem to understand. There is often considerable discrimination against Hispanics as not being “white,” whereas many of them are since they belong to an ethnic group not a race.
And since you ask, I will say that your primary school English teachers did a very good job.
Observer
March 3rd, 2012
4:35 pm
@ From the north. If you are from a small northern country with a 95+% white population that is just to the east of Finland, you must be emailing from Iceland. Velkomin!
And I would say that you have more interest in “diversity” than you may think if you are conversing here. This entire blog topic shows the messy, rowdy, lively side of diversity as the bloggers argue this issue from many different cultural and racial viewpoints.
From the North
March 3rd, 2012
4:48 pm
Dear Observer,
I must be expressing myself badly. The university admission system that I have been describing is not a proposal – it is a fact/policy over here, a pipe dream over there, but (by me) a proposal nowhere.
While I understand that federal law would still apply in a state where all the inhabitants dislike AA laws, please thrink it through. The scenario posits that people disliking AA would move into that state, and people liking AA laws would move out and take their places in the states that the former are vacating. Do you not see that under such a scenario, the ethnic composition in the state with people disliking AA would be something like that of New Hampshire/Maine/West Virginia? Even if AA laws were followed to the letter in that state, how would the admissions board in that state U fill its diversity slots? What would they have to work with?
Since you bring it up, yes we learnt a bit about people from other countries than our own in STEM fields. Off the top of my head:
Newton: Englishman
Laplace: French
Euler: Swiss
Timoshenko: East Slavonic
Mendeleyev: Russian
Lie: Norwegian
Avogadro: Italian
Aristarchos: Greek
Kelvin: Irish
And so on. But I doubt that that would count as diversity among those who are instrumental in AA laws.
Observer
March 3rd, 2012
5:54 pm
@ From the north. No, I quite understood that you were describing your country’s present university admission policy. But I think that you’re making a few assumptions about our admissions policies, which perhaps you concluded from these blog discussions. I should preface this by saying that I’m a college professor, so I have some inside knowledge about the subject.
It’s assumed by many who are outside the university system that our university admissions must follow AA policy in admitting a certain number of applicants from racial/ethnic minorities. That is not now true. They do not have “diversity slots”! AA policy covers workers and the workplace, but it does not cover students in higher education. It does cover the workers there–the faculty and staff. If you will read another blog-thread here on “Get Schooled” about the role of gender in college admissions, you’ll note that the University of Georgia (UGA) states that it does not consider race or gender in its admissions.
But Universities do often consider the race/ethnicity of its applicants as one of many factors, VOLUNTARILY. They also may consider factors of gender, geographic region (urban or rural, in-state or out-of-state), socioeconomic class, and sometimes age (older as well as younger). They believe that it will make their campuses more attractive to prospective students to be able to offer a diverse student body. It is for them, really, an economic matter ultimately.
And in fact, student applicants self-identify their race/ethnicity. There’s no way of checking, and a white student could easily claim to be a black, Asian, or Hispanic student.
The Supreme Court is now deciding the question of whether a university should be allowed to consider race/ethnicity at all. But that is a different issue than whether Affirmative Action laws should be continued, as many of the bloggers here seem to believe.
I myself think that universities should be allowed to consider race/ethnicity if they wish to, for a diverse campus produces a better education for its students in this pluralistic society. Applicants who are in the majority race–white–and of the traditionally dominant gender–male– are not at all happy about that….and hence this blog topic.
From the North
March 3rd, 2012
6:25 pm
Dear Observer:
It is a pleasure to write to you, but one that I must put on hold for at least 18 hours. Once I am back from my trip, I will describe my country in greater detail by only using similarities to US. states, since you erred to far in the other direction with your second guess.
Yours,
FTN
I don't like it, but I agree
March 4th, 2012
10:12 am
It isn’t simply whether or not we believe colleges are primarily institutes of learning or mechanisms by which our society brings together the brightest minds: we have to assume that test scores and data cannot possibly reflect the whole of a person’s character and intelligence. Yes, I believe character is important in college; how will our society be shaped if the only means of making decisions is the brightest minds making 100 percent objective determinations regarding moral and ethical issues? I like to think that our society represent more than job-skills training grounds; as such, I want college students to think and learn to work with all members of society from all cultures and races. As much as we want to look beyond the current mess we find our world in, the simple solution is the hardest to admit: our best and brightest must learn to work together to find the answers to what ails us. College is the appropriate place for this discussion and I support whatever methods are available for ensuring that this happens.
From the North
March 4th, 2012
5:48 pm
Dear Observer:
Back from a trip with good results.
My country is neither Finland nor Iceland, it is a country the size and shape of California. Its climate ranges from that of Wasilla in the north, to that of San Francisco in the south. It has a murder rate in between that of Utah and Idaho. Our Infant mortality rate is about half that of Vermont. We have about 100 homicides per year, nationally. The country has no deadly natural disasters – no hurricanes, not much in the way of storms, no earthquakes, no killer epidemics since 1917, no volcanoes, and people die of deadly wild life only once every few years.
Since demographics are part and parcel of AA laws, let me describe our demographic composition. Here, Google is my friend. Our Hispanic population is comparable to that of Kentucky, of which 42k are Chileans and 700 are Mexicans. Our Jewish population is quite similar to that of Indiana. Our population of people of African heritage is comparable to that of Nebraska. The muslim population is comparable to that of 15 Dearborns. To those minorities, add the non-minority population of 3 Minnesotas.
Prof
March 4th, 2012
9:16 pm
@ From the north. The only country just to the west of Finland, with the size and shape of California, seems to be Sweden.
But Google was not my friend in trying to find the demographics of that country, for I find that Sweden uses the term “ethnic groups,” not races. Neither does Finland or Iceland. In fact, they don’t seem to have the concept of race that the US does. And I remember my European history now and Europe’s constant conflicts between its various ethnic groups, or what I would call national peoples. I see now why you sputtered in your Mar. 3, 2:50 pm post: “Regarding race, ethnicity, and hispanics: You do not have to lecture me on that issue, that was covered in primary school civics. What do you take my teachers for? Complete incompetents? I am flabbergasted.”
You need to know that the U.S. mainly groups people according to race (those with genetically transmitted physical characteristics), not ethnicity (those belonging to a cultural or national group). Our definitions are by our Census Bureau, and in 2000 they defined the races according to their areas of origin: whites, from Europe; blacks, from Africa; Asians, from the Pacific Rim or Indian subcontinent; and Natives, the original peoples of an area. Hispanics were defined as a culture that could be of any race. This classification came out of the world history of European colonization and the African slave-trade/diaspora…going back to the origins of the various peoples.
So we would simply term all of those you list in your Mar. 3, 4:48 pm post as “white.” Jews and Muslims aren’t considered by us as races or ethnic groups, but religions. Chileans are white or Native, and may also be Hispanic. Mexicans may be white or Native (and a few are black), and may also be Hispanic.
This may change your understanding of what we mean by “diversity.” The history of the Americas is very different from that of Europe; and we can make assumptions without even knowing it.
Prof
March 4th, 2012
9:41 pm
P.S. Thus our Census defines North and South Americans as whites (except for those whose origins are Native), as well as those in the Middle East and North Africa (except for those whose origins are black). I should have defined blacks, above, as those originating in Sub-Saharan Africa. For Europe colonized all those areas.
Prof
March 4th, 2012
10:06 pm
@ From the north. Oops. I should have used my other moniker, “Observer.” Oh well. I’ll use only “Prof” from now on.
Prof
March 4th, 2012
10:10 pm
@ I don’t like it, but I agree.
YES!!