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Tuesday february 7, 2017 vol. cxxxix no. 3
{ Feature }
{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } RESEARCH
Eisgruber drafts U. researchers investigate and signs letter gendered stereotypes critiquing executive order By Ruby Shao staff writer
By Catherine Benedict staff writer
On Feb. 2, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and 47 other American college and university presidents sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to “rectify or rescind” his Jan. 27 executive order. The letter criticizing the order, which forbids entry into the U.S. by travelers from Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen for 90 days and from Syria indefinitely, was initially outlined by Eisgruber and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann. The executive order has been criticized by Democrats, such as California Senator Kamala Harris, as a “Muslim ban,” and was announced by Trump at a speech at the Pentagon, in which he said his ulterior goal was to keep “radical Islamic terrorists” out of the country, and only admit those “who will support our country and love deeply our people.” His executive order also caps the entry of refugees into the country in 2017 at 50,000, much lower than the 110,000 refugees the Obama administration wanted to take in 2017. The letter to Trump argues that “the order threatens both American higher education and the defining principles of our country,” as it “specifically prevents talented, law-abiding students and scholars from the affected regions from reaching our campuses.” The signatories assert that the ban is
unjustly aimed at Muslim immigrants, and that their campuses embrace “outstanding Muslim students and scholars from the United States and abroad, including the many who come from the seven affected countries.” Moreover, the group of 48 argues that the executive order attacks the American dream of religious diversity and “[dims] the lamp of liberty and [stains] the country’s reputation.” The letter ends with an urge to “rectify the damage done by this order.” The letter was signed by the presidents of all eight Ivy League schools and of every U.S. News and World Report “Top Ten” university, excluding the presidents of the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Signatories included alumni such as Tufts University President Anthony Monaco ’81, Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings GS ’70, University of Oregon President Michael Schill ’80, and University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel ’79. A few federal trial judges have blocked portions of the executive order, with U.S. District Judge James L. Robart issuing the widestreaching temporary halt to the ban. At press time, the case is now in the hands of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, and the case seems likely to reach the Supreme Court.
LECTURE
Arens discusses personal comfort systems By Hamna Khurram staff writer
The core philosophy of personal comfort systems is to “address the person directly and not the whole space,” said Dr. Edward Arens. Arens is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Center for Environmental Research. His work with personal comfort systems is closely tied to the Center for the Built Environment at Berkeley. An initial personal comfort system that Arens introduced to the audience was designed for office spaces. It consisted of a motion-sensitive fan, a foot warmer that uses reflective red and orange light bulbs to warm the individual’s feet, and a heating and cooling chair. When dealing with temperature and humidity changes that make an individual more or less comfortable in their work areas, it is “100 times more efficient to condition the person directly,” said Arens. Field tests have also demonstrated that personal comfort systems can reduce energy costs by as much as 60 percent, while rendering 90 percent of people comfortable using just the specialized chair and desk fan. While developing personal comfort systems, Arens also
emphasized the importance of being able to target the right body parts. He cited a study in which high pressure air was applied to different parts of people’s bodies while observing the thermal character of their reactions. “What’s interesting about these results is that under cool conditions, it’s one set of body parts that dominates, and in warm conditions it’s another set that dominates,” said Arens. In cold conditions, the extremities — including feet, hands, and the head — experience discomfort first, while in warm conditions, the face is more receptive to discomfort. By targeting these areas appropriately according to varying conditions, increasingly useful personal comfort systems can be created. The heating and cooling chair, for example, uses heated resistance wire to raise an individual’s body temperature and targeted convection currents to bring down a person’s body temperature. “There really shouldn’t be any other kinds of chairs,” said Arens. “We really want to see the world get moving.” The event was sponsored by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. The lecture took place in Maeder Hall at 4:00 p.m.
Stereotypes associating brilliance with men more than women emerge in girls by age six, according to a paper coauthored by a University professor published in the journal Science on Jan. 27. Six-year-old girls proved less likely than six-year-old boys to consider people of their own gender “really, really smart.” The outcome unfolded as children picked among photos of males and females to identify the “really, really smart” protagonist of a story they had just heard, the “really, really smart” member of a pair, or the person corresponding to various characteristics and objects. Though at age five, boys selected their own gender 71 percent of the time and girls 69 percent, by age six, the gap widened to 65 versus 48 percent. Relative to their male counterparts, six-year-old girls also showed less interest in games described as for the “really, really smart.” A girl picked at random would have a 64 percent lower chance of wanting to play than a boy picked at random. Parallel results surfaced for stereotypes linking women to kindness and diligence. At six, boys alone grew less likely to associate niceness with their own gender, and girls remained as eager as them to attempt games for those who “try really, really hard.” University philosophy professor Sarah-Jane Leslie co-authored the study with University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign doctoral student in psychology Lin Bian and New York University psychology professor Andrei Cimpian. The article adds to a series investigating why women are
underrepresented in some academic disciplines more so than in others, Leslie said. She and Cimpian led the initial study, published in Science on Jan. 16, 2015. It argued that fewer females work in academic disciplines whose practitioners consider innate talent the key to success, because stereotypes cast women as lacking such genius. Females might exit brilliance-oriented fields because they internalize the stereotypes, dread the effort necessary to demonstrate that the stereotypes do not apply to them, or go overlooked by colleagues and superiors, Cimpian explained. No convincing evidence in the scientific literature suggests that women actually fare worse intellectually in maledominated fields, the authors noted. “It’s interesting in itself to know about these stereotypes in young children and it’s interesting in itself to know about these stereotypes predicting women’s representation in certain fields,” Leslie said. “But when you put them together, then you really see that these stereotypes are impacting girls from a very young age, and probably impacting their educational choices for maybe 12 years before they even get to a college classroom.” Since the 2015 study pioneered research into stereotypes about which gender is likelier to be brilliant than the other, the 2017 study offered the first insight into childhood acquisition of the brilliance stereotype, Leslie said. “No one had ever thought about a whole field having a mindset, a whole field believing that it takes fixed innate ability to succeed, versus believing dedication, hard work,
growth of ability over time is the major factor,” said Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, whose work Leslie cited as a source of inspiration for the 2015 study. “The very nature of their hypothesis led them to look in places people hadn’t.” Furthermore, the 2017 study was the first to examine children’s gender stereotypes concerning intelligence in general, Bian said. She explained that much literature shows that adults attribute high brainpower to males, and some literature indicates that children associate math aptitude with boys. Because math gender stereotypes begin in five- to sevenyear-olds according to a 2011 study, the researchers chose that period for their experiment on cognitive ability stereotypes, Cimpian said. The starkness of the discrepancy at age six shocked him. Age rather than grade matters, Leslie said. Though the team must conduct more experiments to explain why six, she suspected that the brilliance stereotype arises then as the product of extensive learning about the social world from different sources, including parents, teachers, peers, siblings, media, and popular culture. Cimpian expressed surprise that no relation existed between whom girls perceived as earning the best marks, namely girls, and whom they considered brilliant. Cimpian speculated that perhaps girls neglect to extrapolate from judgments about their peers to judgments about women. Alternatively, he hypothesized that they already hold the attitude common among adults that good grades reveal not brilliance, but rather diligence — a striking developSee STEREOTYPES page 3
TOWN :: JAN 24, 2017
U . A F FA I R S
SPEAR Panel Argues Town’s resolution U. Should Divest from argues Private Prisons against charter school expansion
By Audrey Spensley staff writer
The University should divest from private prisons, argued three speakers at a panel hosted by Students for Prison Education and Reform and Princeton Private Prison Divest. The panelists discussed the history of prison privatization, the results of privatization in terms of efficiency and human rights, and the ethical implications of incentivizing incarceration. “There are two stories we tell ourselves when we talk about privatization,” said Christopher Petrella, a lecturer and writing specialist at Bates College, who began the discussion. “There’s the brief technocratic history, that for-profit prison companies were minted in the early eighties. Then there’s another story.” He went on to argue that incentives for incarceration have existed for far longer than the past four decades and are intertwined with racial discrimination.
“When private prisons were being developed, one of the constants has been the way that the contracts make it explicit that this is about trafficking human bodies,” Carl Takei, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, added. “Generally, for example, private prison contracts specify that the federal government will deliver a guaranteed amount for, let’s say, 1,500 units to the prison, with additional compensation for each additional unit delivered.” “[The prison industry] is based on the idea of turning a profit on something that is not actually a real market and is a trafficking of human beings,” he added. The panelists also agreed that the economic benefits of privatizing prisons have not been proven. Takei explained that the free market model does not apply to prisons because of high barriers to entry. Corporations must not only have sufficient
By Marcia Brown Head News Editor
In a packed town hall meeting for the municipality of Princeton, a resolution urging that the acting New Jersey Commissioner of Education deny Princeton Charter School’s application to expand passed with only one vote against. Princeton Charter School educates local children from kindergarten to 8th grade. The council members are Jo Butler, Heather Howard, Lance Liverman, Bernard Miller, Timothy Quinn, and council president Jenny Crumiller, who presides
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In Opinion
Today on Campus
Guest Contributor Trevor Klee writes about law school admissions and Guest Contributor Lou Chen writes a breakup letter to the New York Times in honor of Valentine’s Day. PAGE 6
4:30 p.m.: In the PIIRS lecture Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, lecturerers discuss the relationships between science, technology, labor, nature and social organization in societies. A 71 Lewis A. Simpson Internationl Building.
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WEATHER
U . A F FA I R S
HIGH
51˚
LOW
34˚
Cloudy with showers. chance of rain:
40 percent