I am Familiar with the Taste of Foot

So I, perhaps foolishly, thought to myself that I might have something useful to contribute to The Exchange, a program on NHPR that Laura Knoy has hosted for years.

I pretty badly misspoke myself. In the rush of being broadcast live across the state I got awfully nervous, and listening to it again later on in the day, I have to say I'm a bit embarrassed.

They were talking about ethnic diversity and affirmative action in the collegiate setting. I've noticed in my personal experience, and this has been confirmed by studies, that even though a college campus might be ethnically diverse, often times highly technical fields of study (specifically, the hard sciences, mathematics, and engineering) are virtually ignored by ethnic minorities and women. Leastways, very few of them graduate.

This is a bad thing, because these fields yield the most lucrative starting salaries after college (we had a T-shirt to that effect when I was in school). If we want real egalitarianism and socioeconomic diversity, we ought to be figuring out a way to graduate more women and minority students with these degrees.

That, in a nutshell, is what I meant to say.

I actually said something quite a bit more grating. I came off rather crassly, and it sounded a lot like I called Women's Studies and African American Studies worthless compared with being a rich computer nerd like me (ha ha ha, and what I do is harder anyway, you peasants).

Eww.

This sort of arrogant-sounding bluster is exactly what's wrong with a lot of the discussion in the software industry, and yet as much as I detest it, I'm pretty sure I managed to inject some of it into a completely unrelated discussion.

Since that foolishness is now a matter of public record, I wanted to add the preceding clarification, and the following apology, to the public discourse as well:

Sorry about that. I should've spoken more carefully and more clearly.