Originally Posted by
Articulate_Ape
Failed the exam to be a heart surgeon? No prob, we'll just lower the bar.
Remember the Bakke decision? Patrick Chavis was one of the five students admitted under the affirmative action program who had weaker qualifications than Allan Bakke. The end result (thanks to http://www.coloringthenews.com/html/preface.html):
On June 19, 1997, the California Medical Board suspended his license to practice medicine, citing his “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.” Finding him guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the cases of three patients—one of whom had died—California Administrative Law Judge Samuel Reyes said that letting him “continue in the practice of organized medicine will endanger the public health, safety and welfare.” Soon after, the Los Angeles District Attorney announced that Chavis was the object of a criminal investigation.
According to medical board investigators, Chavis had engaged in egregious malpractice while performing liposuction procedures on patients in a body-sculpting practice he had started as a side business after taking a cosmetic surgery seminar in Beverly Hills. For doctors looking for easy cash, liposuction had become a lucrative and largely unregulated business, and Chavis’s New Attitude Body Sculpting had flourished, even in hardbitten Compton. But the four day short course Chavis had attended left him inadequately prepared to handle complications. Patients who lived told harrowing tales of Chavis’s post operative neglect when the procedures he had performed went bad.
After one botched procedure, Chavis stashed a patient in his home instead of admitting her to the hospital. Abandoning her for nearly forty hours, the doctor refused to return the frantic phone calls of the patient, who lost nearly 70% of her blood and was admitted to a hospital with a severe abdominal infection. A second patient told an almost identical story: a botched liposuction, massive internal bleeding, and Chavis’s almost inhuman indifference to her suffering. A third patient was not as lucky. After another botched procedure, Chavis left her in his office for four and half hours, her blood pressure plummeting from severe abdominal hemorrhage, which left his clinic floor puddled with blood. By nightfall she was in cardiac arrest and died while her husband rushed her to the hospital.
Medical board investigators also heard from a doctor who had worked with Chavis. Citing “poor impulse control and sensitivity to patients’ pain,” the doctor gave investigators a tape recording of patients screaming horrifically, with Chavis responding, “Don’t talk to the doctor while he is working,” and, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” In addition, Chavis refused to take responsibility for anything that had happened to his patients. According to investigators, at one point Chavis said that it was the husband of the dead patient who should be brought up on charges, claiming that he had picked her up and put her into a wheelchair after surgery in violation of procedure. At another point he said he was the victim of a racist medical system that didn’t like to see a black doctor do well.
Despite the fact that the black doctor in question was only admitted to college because the system bent over backwards for him, he still played the race card when he was caught. The victims of this kind of idiocy are, of course, the patients of unqualified doctors, but the other victims are the qualified minority professionals who didn't benefit from lowered expectations and quotas, and who have to overcome the stigma created by those who superficially resemble them, but who are otherwise inept or unqualified for their positions of trust.
Originally Posted by
Calypso Jones
This has been going on all over for a long time. It's done for women too.
I submit that since children make up roughly one third of the population, the police, fire departments and teaching professions should immediately hire as many children as possible in order to make up this disparity.
Originally Posted by
Novaheart
Is a somewhat representative force a legitimate goal?
Around here, police officer is one of the better paycheck type jobs, especially for someone with less than a college degree.
Yes and no. A police force must have members of the communities that it policies, if for no other reason than undercover work. It is also critical that officers know and understand the neighborhoods that they protect. The former requires superficial resemblances, while the latter requires immersion and genuine interest in the community, which is not defined by race, but can appear to be. However, these goods are severely undercut when a force compromises professional values and qualifications in order to fill quotas.
Originally Posted by
lacarnut
Yep, we need more affirmative action for surgeons, police officers and gasp even school teachers.
:eek: Test score qualifications should be raised to at least 70. Every civil service job promotion I applied for required a score in the middle to high 80's just to get an interview.
Several years ago, I was preparing to deploy and we received an officer, MI branch, who had gotten in trouble with her security clearance. She had racked up some debts during a period of unemployment and because of that, her TS clearance was going to be revoked. I was tasked to assist her in drafting her rebuttal. I had her write up the first draft and told her that I would then edit it for format. The document that she gave me was riddled with grammatical and spelling errors and had the worst sentence structure that I had ever seen not written with a spray can on concrete. It was shocking that a captain could get that far without being able to parse a sentence or run spell check. I completely rewrote her appeal and submitted it for her, saving her career. In theater, her NCOIC did most of her work in the office, and I did the daily intel briefings (she mangled English words, much less Arabic, the final straw came when she pronounced "Syria" as "Sur-R-I-uh", with a long I). I had to write her NCOIC's tour award, and I ensured that he got a Bronze Star
