Raised Eyebrow(s)

I'm a fan of how unexpected good things can happen out of their unexpected nowhere.

I've got today and Friday and I will be done with 2nd block. I've got a nice break until the 27th and I have decided to hibernate (yeah...it's summer...) until school starts again. I have been feeling kind of burned out which has made me increasingly angry at the fact that I feel burned out--I don't have time to be burned out!

I always thought I would have most of everything figured out by the time I was this involved with education focused towards a potential career but alas, that thought has been a filthy lie conjured up by my subconscious to wreak havoc in my life.

It's unfair. I need a new subconscious.

As much as psychology is one of those unemployable majors, I've been narrowing what I want to do with my life in terms of how much more school I want to do... Maybe this isn't the exact way to do it but hey, it's valid because of the aforementioned burned out feeling.

It breaks down into a master's and anything past a master's. I figure that if I don't actually refer to "anything past a master's" in terms of actual nouns that the whole situation will become a little less daunting.

I was a little disturbed by a conversation that I deliberately eavesdropped on yesterday afternoon. There was this ethnic Hawaiian guidance counselor talking to two new ethnic Hawaiian students. My ears burned because of my sordid love affair with cultures, racism, biculturalism, cross generational conflicts, discrimination, prejudice--you know, things of skin pigment importance.

Well, this lady was ranting about the "current state" of BYU-Hawaii. Her angry comments were directed towards the supposedly new difficulty of getting into BYU-Hawaii. She broke down the demographics and seemed to be very agitated at the low numbers of native Hawaiians. She claims the new president of the school needs to be mutinied because he is changing what BYU-Hawaii is "all about". Besides, she explains, her grandfather helped build the school and is rolling over in his tropical grave at such exclusion.

I have already been exposed to Hawaiian discrimination as I have a friend who attended the Kamehameha Schools which gives explicit preference for those of Hawaiian ancestry.

So, I was a little agitated when I heard this lady go off about how BYU-Hawaii does not stand for what it used to because there aren't enough Hawaiians attending (she also tried to rope the two students she was talking to join the Hawaiian dance team which as she stated, was different from BYU's Living Legends which combines cultures, the Hawaiian dance team is exclusively for Hawaiians).

Truthfully, I don't know where to begin to want to send a roundhouse kick. I agree that cultural identity and preservation is important but this lady was in a position of guidance and she was off her rocker. Her idea of heritage as THE determining factor seemed awfully ... I'm gonna go ahead and say it ... Nazi-like. She spoke of her people as superior, that they had inalienable rights to go to BYU-Hawaii because it's "our school". Frankly, I am dismayed and shocked. This is the problem of having outlying states: they come up with their own crazy ideas about how to do things and therefore need to be annexed or STAMPED out by Pro-American Patriots. She felt like she was owed something. Additionally (this is the kicker), she felt like BYU-Hawaii should let Hawaiians in regardless of their academic performance.

This is where I became a judgmental rock/stone thrower.

This college guidance counselor was advocating that an educational institution should be more lenient with admissions based solely on heritage. Her example was that the temple president's kids can't get into BYU-Hawaii because their ACT scores are too low. First of all, BYU-Hawaii is a university. It's not open enrollment. It's academically biased as ALL RESPECTABLE SCHOOLS IN THE WORLD ARE!!! Just because you're Hawaiian doesn't mean you should be allowed into BYU-Hawaii because you put the Hawaii in BYU-Hawaii.

Face it, BYU-Hawaii is making a big change in becoming a reputable institution and is going to require screening based on academics. BYU-Hawaii is not Hawaii's school nor does it belong to the Hawaiians. It's an LDS Church sponsored institution. Funding for the school as well as any other BYU incarnation is paid by tithes and donations of Church members--not just Hawaiian Church members.

I'm seriously so annoyed I don't even know if my thoughts are coherent.

I just want to say that the fact that this lady is this frantic (she mentioned organizing opposition to remove the University's president) undermines any legitimacy that BYU-Hawaii is trying to achieve as a respectable academic institution of higher learning. I don't have any problems with Hawaiians (besides the whole Pele rock thing) but if you want to get a good education at a respected university, y'all are the ones who need to change your standards NOT the University.

Aloha that.