Twitter is a real-time stream of conscious for our society; an immense database of comments, thoughts and expletives that make up our collective social musings. When news breaks, twitter explodes. For example, when a man saw a plane crash land in the Hudson river the first thing he did was not call 911, he tweeted instantly alerting not just one person of the incident but hundreds. It is this instantaneous ability to alert thousands to current events, long before the traditional news media could respond that makes me believe Twitter, or at least its pioneering vision, will be around for a lot longer than many other trendy .com trends.

This instantaneous connectivity has implications far beyond news and offers businesses whole new way to interact instantly with their customers be it through promotions such as daily specials or instant customer service response times. Recognizing this ability to stay in constant contact with customers, companies are flocking to hire social media marketing specialist that have experience with twitter. For example, the famous Hollywood theatre the Roxy was one of the first businesses to see the business opportunity of twitter, @theroxy and launched its first account in May 2007. Since that time, the Roxy has gained a huge following of 35,000+ twitter followers and has been able to leverage this online activity to rejuvenate one of Hollywood’s most famous hangouts. Nic Adler, the manager of the Roxy, recently spoke  about this experience and how it has transformed his business and those around him with Dick Gordon of WUNC’s national talk show The Story. If you have not heard this, it is definitely worth the listen; Nic Adler on The Story (WUNC)

Nic was at the forefront of the business side of twitter, but since that time thousands of small, medium, and large businesses have adopted twitter to help connect themselves with customers in a way that wasnt otherwise possible. Proctor & Gamble for instance can now track and respond to feedback about its latest line of shampoo in real time. Hasbro can anticipate Christmas demand by following the rising level of interest shown about its products in the weeks and months leading up to the holiday shopping season. Twitter’s core appeal to individuals is in its ability to provide real-time feedback for individual users but its strength to business is its ability to provide aggregated feedback on how hundreds of thousands feel about their products or services right now. Like google, Twitter is collecting and analyzing our collective data to provide insight into each and everyone of us.

Its amazing, when writing about the reach and distinct opportunities twitter provides humanity, to remember that Twitter was launched just 4 years ago and did not even come to the attention of those in the Technorati until SxSW three years ago. Just a little over one year ago, Twitter was averaging 100 million tweets every three months. Today that number is 75 million tweets per day. Twitter now has 190 million users who post 15 billion tweets a year, in over a hundred languages and across the globe. Twitter is transforming the way we communicate by making it instant, short, but bittersweet.

Despite its amazing promise, Twitter has several problems that limit its ability to play a larger role in the lives of people. #1 among these is that there is no way to prioritize which tweets from which followers show up in your feed, allowing those most active users to literally take over your feed. We all know the types of people I am speaking about, these are the guys that give twitter a bad name for egotistical maniacs (see video above) and annoy the crap out of me. Like Chatroulette, Twitter has a censorship problem that limits its ability to be a large scale source of news for people because one is not able to prioritize content. #2 is that twitter is glitchy. Twitter’s inability to keep itself running at pace with demand and serve its customers has spurred a new pop culture icon, the fail whale. Name one other business that had such a high rate of failure that it spawn a pop culture phenomenon? No other service in the world would be able to turn failure into publicity, twitter did. However, as twitter matures and its users grow older its users will grow less and less patient with the rising start up and will demand the death of the fail whale. Twitter must kill the Fail Whale if it wishes to move beyond its hobby status and into the real news business as its founder recently announced they would.

If twitter is able to overcome these problems, it may just be able to become the global news platform of the 21st century. A place where reporters spread information and blast the interwebs with enticing content and interviews along side mom’s new recipe for pumpkin bread and the latest high school football scores. CNN, WRAL, and the DTH all have equal footing on twitter and it is up to the next generation of social media marketers to figure out how to stand out in a crowd of 190,000,000 users. Any ideas?

Over the past several months, I have been a part of Chancellor Holden Thorp’s Student Innovation Team and we have worked closely with him to firstly, catalog what programs and initiative were already creating pockets of innovation on campus and secondly, to propose new opportunities and places for innovation that would fill the gaps. In these efforts, a group of thirty of us covered all sections of campus and examined closely Carolina to find these pockets of innovation, we found many.

These pockets include a diverse cross section of campus scuh as the medical school were they are at the forefront of research which incorporates current students to spread the fire for knowledge, a new entrepreneurship minor out of the economics department that hooks students up with local and international internships so they can experience the true life of a start up, and the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise that bridges the gap between University research and current industry. One area we did not see much activity though was towards students that were either not naturally inclined towards innovative thought or towards the strong core of students that were interested in innovation and could then plant seeds across campus to those less naturally inclined.

As the oldest public university in the nation, I found it surprising that a school focused on innovation was not doing more to connect its primary driver, students, to become more innovative either in the forms of resources or programming. I believe that a university’s primary role is in educating the next generation so that they are prepared to carry on the forward march of humanity, but the more I learn about University policies the more I realized that students now play second fiddle to government funded research and large scale dollar initiatives.  At Carolina for example, we bring in over $800 million dollars in research funding annually to push the edge of human knowledge and develop new technologies. This work creates countless opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to learn with their professors the complex systems needed for research today, but it also requires a lot of time and attention on behalf of faculty, administration, and staff to ensure that this lifeline of credit is continually flowing. This research focused idea of innovation  leads to a hidden culture of innovation on campus, one that is centered not in the open but in the back room labs and technology centers spread across campus. For like any other large scale institution, Carolina has priorities and from my analysis these were directed at promoting innovation to a select few on campus and not at reaching or changing the nature of thought on campus.

Annoyed by the status quo, partly because we were part of the 85% of students that were not involved in campus research and therefore lacked insight into these new methods of thinking or constant environments of excitement and change, I and a group of students got together and began devising a set of programming proposals to take innovation across campus. What we came up with the was the Innovation Collaboratory.

A dynamic interdisciplinary think-tank, made up of students of differing majors, interests, and years the Colloratory was a cost-effective way to signal the importance of innovation on campus and inspire a more widespread dialog on innovation and its importance in an education setting. Basically, the Collaboratory is an innovation dorm that brings together all the pieces needed to foster a successful idea; business, science, creativity, driven individuals, and resources. Designed to reflect the dreams it will foster, the Collaboratory in our eyes was sort of a Silicon Valley hallway for individuals to come together and create, propose new ideas, and begin to live this culture of innovation we wanted to see so badly on campus. It was our hope then that the design language of the hall, combined with this driven group of students could open the doors to a new campus atmosphere that was constantly seeking to solve the world’s greatest problems. We thought a dorm could help this goal by signaling to innovative types that Carolina is the place for you.

As a recent high-school graduate, I can tell you that you can never underestimate the important role that pictures and dorm room quality play into a high-school students college selection process. By making this a dynamic and fun space we wanted to make sure that if Carolina was going to pursue this direction that it had what it needed visually and structurally to attract those types of students to Carolina. It was from this vision that we drafted a proposal, accessible here, that got the ball rolling on the student end.

Flash forward a couple months and our little idea is part of a larger conversation on campus about how to take innovation out into the open. A Student Innovation Team is created and formed for the purpose of examining what Carolina needs to do to become more innovative. We examine the campus, put our ideas together and they are all combined with the Chancellor’s personal vision into a Roadmap for a more innovative Carolina. A written document on how to guide Carolina out of the dark ages and into the light. It is from this document that the idea of an innovation hub first arises, to work either in connection with or in replace of our initial dormitory proposal.

To be located in the lower section of the UNC Student Union, the Innovation Commons is sold as a communal place for interdisciplinary thought socialization. At an expected cost of  16 million dollars to complete, the Hub is not cheap and would cost $17 a student to see completed. While designs are still at the preliminary stage, the current proposal calls for a large section of flexible meeting space, a coffee bar, and a multi-use theater that would play host to various theatrical performances on campus be they art, dance, or theater.

The idea is that by creating a flexible and friendly space, students will by virtue of being surrounded by innovative ideas be more inclined to participate and become part of a broader discussion and cohort of innovators on campus. While I agree that more needs to be done on campus to foster a lasting sense of innovation, and that a large architecturally distinctive space is a great first step, I think it can only be done in concert with programming and facilities designed to enlarge this core group of innovators that provide the innovative spark to the hub. One way I see this being done is through the creation of a living learning community designed to foster innovation in the residential setting, such as the Collaboratory.

I think a secondary facility is as equally important to the hub in creating a lasting sense of innovation on campus because unlike the hub it directly benefits students via their living arrangements and hits them in the location they spend the most time, at a much cheaper price than the hub as well.  For no matter how fantastic we make the hub, students are only going to spend a couple hours a week there if we are lucky but for the 40-50 students that live in the Collaboratory this is a large part of their lives and will inevitably change the way they view daily life. By living in a place that is packed with free thinkers of all disciplines, designed to foster communication, and produce results these students are bound to become living examples to their fellow students and act as ambassadors for the cause. This ambassadorial role is critical because it’s necessary to the hub’s success. If Carolina is going to spread innovation across campus it has to be more than just a place, it has to have a body of students that live it, that breathe it, and that experience it and spread it along to their fellow students. What better way is there to do this than through a residential hallway designed to foster these types of students and recruit them to the university? Cultures start from the ground up, they can not be imposed upon a people from the top.

It is for these reasons and more that I am calling upon the university to recognize the critical relationship of these two spaces and why it is so critically important that they move ahead in parallel. The Hub gives the Collaboratory purpose and the Collaboratory gives the Hub life. If you agree with me and want to get involved with the project, have funding ideas, or may like to have such a project named after you please let us know because we would hate to let this moment pass and see Carolina befallen with another half-ass attempt. Help us make this happen for Carolina. This is our moment, the nation is looking at us to lead and the Chancellor has called upon us to succeed. If we are to meet this challenge we are going to have to engage with students in a meaningful and lasting way in unconventional ways.

Higher education, no matter whom you speak with, is one of America’s greatest competitive advantages and is reflected in rankings which place 75% of the global top 150 universities inside the United States. Since the early seventeenth century, when what is now Harvard College was opened, America has been fostering a strong independent system of higher education that has allowed the United States to garner a highly talented workforce, the best educated professors, and world-class research partnerships between educational institutions, government and corporations. College is a part of American life, a culture that has played a large part in America’s past economic success but our current set of institutions have proven themselves incapable of either preparing students for the workforce or successfully converting laboratory research into commercially viable products. To improve our effectiveness in both areas some innovative thinking and structural changes are needed.

One pair of scholars sounding the alarm, just so happen to be two of Carolina’s finest academic minds, Chancellor Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein. Together these two have written a book entitled Engines of Innovation: the entrepreneurial university in the twenty first century and make the case for large scale change in the higher education mindset to embrace the needs of a changing and dynamic world wrought with problems. They see America’s top tier research universities as large reservoirs of knowledge and human capital which society have invested heavily in but which have, at least as of yet, failed to deliver back fully on that invest. With a combined endowment of more than $250 billion, America’s top Universities are one of the few collective centers that combine the three necessary pieces for commercial growth; capital, knowledge, and novel solutions. Thorp and Goldstein argue that by tapping into this network of knowledge, America can mobilize itself, like it did for the Apollo missions,  once again to solve the world’s greatest problems of hunger, violence, climate change, disease, and water.

No matter your presuppositions about America’s public and private higher education system, this book will make you see past them and imagine a higher education institution that truly fulfills its role as an engine of innovation. Check the book out on amazon or www.revupinnovation.com for more information.

Recently, the World Economic Forum released their annual Global Competitiveness Report and the United States continued to fall in the rankings. In this years report, Switzerland ranks #1 with the United States coming in at #4 (‘#2-’10, #1-”09) behind Singapore and Sweden. While the United States continued to be the world’s most innovative economy, the US fell behind in most other measures including infrastructure, higher education, health care, and technological development. The reasons for these declines vary, but the Forum notes falling public faith in government institutions, high concerns about public spending and deficits, and concerns about governance in private markets.

The Forum also raises deep concern over the long-term economic stability of the United States (#87), due to apparent disregard for trade imbalances, fiscal deficits, and the lack of a clear exit strategy from these policies. In particular, the 787 billion dollar stimulus package  was renounced because of the long term impact it would have on macroeconomic growth policies and the deficit. Close examination of the ranking shows that the United States lags significantly behind its western peers in nearly all aspects except for market size, innovation, and university funded research potential. Should the United States lose its edge in one of these sectors, the effects on our global competitiveness would be profound.

Now, it is clear that the financial crisis has had a deep impact on America’s ability to compete globally, but I believe that much of this is due to a declining faith in the American model of business rather than infrastructure or declining labor productivity. That said, it is clear the massive shift in governmental economic policy, e.g. stimulus, health care, and financial regulations, has had a negative impact on America’s long term growth prospects and discouraged investment and research in those aspects of the economy. While the true impact of these policy changes will take years to calculate, the slow recovery of the US economy in comparison to other top ranked nations suggests that these changes are having a noticeable impact on labor and growth standards domestically.

The question of opportunity in the macroeconomic sphere is an interesting one because it is so closely tied to political notions of equality and government planning policies. The rise of the global economy has transformed our notion of economic opportunity and raised into question the factors at play. Is geographic location still critical to economic opportunity? In a world with telepresence video conferencing centers, global on site delivery, and relative financial mobility does where you start your company really help or hurt business substantially? Do large libraries and research institutes still matter? When someone anywhere can simply wikipedia or google scholar knowledge or gain the collective knowledge of thousands through crowd sourcing? Is access tocapital still highly restrictive? When you can reach out to banks across the globe or appeal to millions of investors via the internet? These are the kinds of questions that are constantly being examined but they all focus upon this revelation that no longer are entrepreneurs and organizations tied permanently to a geographic location but are free and willing to relocate to areas that value their work. Gone are the days when it was unfathomable for Coca-Cola to relocated key corporate functions outside of the protected sphere of the United States.

Nations long used to holding the upper hand over corporate and business interest due to their geographic monopoly are having to cope with the realization that its a buyers market for the first time. Nations no longer can expect corporations or organizations to put up with excessive intervention or lagging bureaucracies. Nations now have to sell their state to business interests or risk losing those sources of revenue and prestige. While the situation on the ground is not nearly this clear cut the basic effects of this movement are visible. Across the developed world, pressure is on governments to limit their private sector interference and improve their service operations so that local corporations can compete with competitors from less restrictive nations. This trend is causing governments to race to the bottom and in the process disband all previous notions of public-private sector interactions.

America is losing this race because rather than limiting these restraints on businesses we are handicapping American businesses ability to compete against global competitors. America can not compete on price, so we have to compete on opportunity for growth and value which is why higher education and innovation are so critical to our continued success. These are the engines that give America the technological edge necessary to charge premium prices. The moment we lose these advantages, we lose because it is only through increased productivity and prospects for future development that we can charge American wages.

President Obama’s policies have America heading in the wrong direction. If economic growth and higher wages are the key policy goals of this nation, we need to be limiting our restraints on businesses and focusing on reducing the burden that debt is having on our national economy. Our current policies though do nothing to promote these ideas but rather increase our national debt and thus the burden upon businesses and the population in the future while increasing government involvement in private industry. These policies build speedbumps on America’s economic highway at a time when China, India, Germany, and Switzerland are smoothing our their economic drivers. If this course is not corrected, businesses are going to start taking a different route.

It will be interesting to see how America’s economic competitiveness will change in the coming years as these changes in policy begin to spur economic decisions and businesses have time to change strategies. If the status quo continues, I fully expect to see America fall further in relation to our global neighbors and for our ability to maintain and demand high paying jobs to decrease.

Stay tuned for Part 3

Innovation: The successful implementation of a new idea, process, or product that improves the human condition.

Founded in 1919, as the Department of Commerce, Kenan-Flagler is a world class Business School located in Chapel Hill, NC and Bangkok, Thailand (Kenan Institute Asia), offering internationally ranked undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, MAC, and Ph.D. programs. The school was named after Mary Lily Kenan-Flagler and her husband, railroad baron, Henry Morrison Flagler who during their lives endowed numerous professorships for the growing University of North Carolina, in 1991. The change came after a very large gift by Frank Kenan, who wished to honor his family’s legacy and see the Business School located alongside the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise in Chapel Hill.

Since that time the school has expanded greatly, opening an Asian campus in 1996, and relocating to a world-class facility in 1997 named after alumnus Hugh McColl. Today the school is home to around 1700 students (630 BSBA) (680 MBA) (320 EMBA) (55 Ph.D.), 153 Faculty, and numerous career, marketing, and IT support staff.

The Programs:

Undergraduate (B.S.B.A.): The undergraduate program at Kenan-Flagler is a two year B.S. degree in Business Administration and is made up of 16 courses (11 core, 5 electives) that give students a basic foundation of business operations, finance, marketing, and communication. Student in this program are allowed to focus their elective studies into one/two area(s) of emphasis (consulting, entrepreneurship, finance, international business, marketing consulting, marketing management, real estate, sales) that give insight into possible career fields. Students wishing to major in Business are required to take a series of pre-requisite courses and apply for admission to the business school their sophomore year. Admission is competitive with only around 50% of UNC-CH students accepted each year. Accepted students then enter the business school their junior year and are given specialized advising and career services housed in McColl building. The program is highly ranked nationally by both US News & World Report (6th) Businessweek (11th) with special notice being given to the marketing and management centers.

Graduate: (Full-Time M.B.A.): The full-time MBA program at Kenan-Flagler is a 21 month, highly intensive, nationally ranked program that prepares students for the challenges of business life. Centered around three core areas, the program consists of 63 credit hours designed to build critical teamwork, inquiry, and management skills through case-studies and team activities. Students entering the full-time program are able to focus their degree to one of 8 concentrations designed to incorporate more detailed and content oriented aspects to the curriculum. Classes are small, with the largest never being more than 70 people and most averaging 20-30 students. While admission is highly selective, those chosen gain access to the Kenan-Flagler alumni network and faculty that are consistently ranked in the top 10 nationally for academic quality and personal experience. In recent years, the program has spent significant resources building the international offerings for MBA students and now offers numerous international programs, partnerships, and visits for those students wishing to gain a broader perspective. The program is currently ranked in the top 20 nationally by all major publications (WSJ 6, FT 20, BW 17, Forbes 15, USNews 20) and in the top 50 programs globally. Additionally, Kenan-Flagler is ranked 14th globally for its triple bottom line initiatives on sustainability and social impact.

Located in Chapel Hill, NC the program is ideally situated next to the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise, Research Triangle Park, and the state capital of Raleigh, NC. In several courses, students are often taken off-site to visit cutting edge R&D corporations in RTP and meet closely with executives. In addition, cost of living in the Triangle area is very reasonable and an attractive attribute for applicants considering top-MBA programs because of the improved housing and family options available vs. big cities.

Graduate: (Executive M.B.A.): Kenan-Flagler offers three of Executive MBA programs for people wishing to study while maintaining their careers. These programs include Evening, Weekend, and the Global OneMBA. Students in these programs graduate with the same MBA as full-time students but meet in far more flexible manners. Applicants for the EMBA programs usually have between 7-12 years of work experience and are already well established in a career industry. Evening and Weekend programs are offered in Chapel Hill, NC at Kenan-Flagler’s main campus while the OneMBA program is based out of Washington, DC with one weekend in Chapel Hill at the Rizzo Conference Center.

Founded as one of the first truly global MBA programs the OneMBA program brings together five of the world’s premier business schools on 4 continents behind a common curriculum. Students in the OneMBA program learn from a core set of global courses that are taught at each of the participating schools and then are enrolled in a series of regional courses designed to improve their knowledge of local conditions. In addition to having a global curriculum developed by 5 schools, the OneMBA program brings together students from each school together through 4 week-long global residency programs where students come together to experience global business. Through these interactions student gain a true sense of global business, generate global connections, and build an international network of leaders. During the course of the program, students will work in global teams to tackle common issues and build teamwork skills. People interested in this program should check out the OneMBA website at www.onemba.org .

Graduate: (MAC): The Masters of Accounting at Kenan-Flagler is a top 10 program designed to give students a much deeper understanding of corporate accounting and methodology. The program lasts 1 year and is composed of 4 modules (similar to quarters) and a summer session. One highlight of the program is the Global Immersion Elective that allows students the unique opportunity to learn first hand, with professors, how accounting works in other nations. Through a highly flexible program, Kenan-Flagler is able to cater to a students personal accounting interests.

Graduate: (Ph.D.): Kenan-Flagler’s Ph.D program, like many top business schools, is very small (12-15 students per year) and is offered in one of 6 concentrations (accounting, finance, marketing, operations, organization behavior, strategy/entrepreneurship). Students in the Ph.D. program are required to complete a faculty evaluated research paper, a comprehensive course examination, various teaching endeavors, and a dissertation. Students seeking entrance to the Ph.D. program should have some advance course work and high marks in these areas. The program usually takes 4/5 years to complete, with course work taking the first 2.

Through these programs, world-class faculty, facilities, and staff, and a rich history of successful alumni Kenan-Flagler has established itself as one of the worlds premier Business Schools and will continue to lead in areas of entrepreneurship, sustainability, and finance.

Earlier this year, I went to a talk by acclaimed Cuban historian Louis A. Perez Jr. on “Cuba after Castro” in which two very different views of Cuba under Castro were presented. During the talk, Perez talked about the need for a new policy towards Cuba, on that stresses communication and cooperation vs. isolation and embargo. At the time of the talk, I found the conversation nothing more than interesting because there was an silent assumption, even by Perez, that Cuba would rebuff any US action to restore relations, so it was unlikely that progress would occur. This was assumed for a wide variety of reasons, the most obvious being that further US involvement in Cuba threatens to undermined the Castro regime. However there are other, more implicit reasons such as the wide and long standing history of US oppressive policy in Cuba which has created an American distaste in Cuba.

I was therefore highly surprised by Cuba’s reaction to recent action taken by the US to increase relations with Cuba, in which Raoul Castro stated that he was willing to talk with the United States on increasing relations. While, I do not know enough about Cuba to speculate further I find this development very interesting and promise a more in-depth article in the coming weeks.

 In the meantime, since you have only been waiting a year for a new post, keep an eye on the US/CUBA relationship as it relates to the BP Deep Horizon oil leak. It will be interesting to see how these two counrties interact as the oil from this massive disaster reaches closer to their shores.

The Front Page of the Daily Tar Heel

In a world where 960 million people go hungry every day, how ridiculous is it that our nation mandates the use of food to fuel our over-sized SUV’s?

Imagine how painful life  is for a man who works all day simply to feed his family when he sees a 30% rise in prices because of decreased supply.

I can hear the confusion in their voices as I try and explain our desire to reduce green house emissions by using corn based fuels in our gasoline. “You are doing what? You burn food while people starve, so that when you drive your SUV to McDonald’s and buy a BigMac. By doing this you reduce your CO2 emissions by 5% and my family goes hungry. And for what? to make yourself feel better?”

This is not an imaginary effect created to scare people from using Ethanol. It’s real and its causing havoc on global populations, in Mexico, in the Philippines, in Bangladesh, in China, and in India people every day face rising food.

While ethanol production from corn and soy beans is not the only cause of rising food prices it is a major cause.

In 2007 the US used 2.3 billion bushels of grain to create a total of 6.5 billion gallons of Ethanol. While this may, on the surface seem like a significant amount of ethanol consider that the US uses 232.5 billion barrels of oil per year. Ethanol is just a drop in the bucket, but that 2.3 billion bushels could be feeding 115 million people a year. It is hard to argue that removing enough food to feed 115 million people does not have an effect on global food prices and, unlike you and me, to millions of people that extra penny is the difference between life and death.

So as America considers its transition away from oil, it is important that we consider not only the environmental or economic costs of our actions but also the human costs. People matter.

I apologize for the long delay between posts, but hopefully this will generate some discussion. Most posts to come, I promise.

 The article asserts that various populations, such as African-Americans and Southerners speak “a different language” which makes achieving success in schools that operate using proper english difficult. While I do believe that language can be a critical barrier to student performance, for many of my fellow students at Enloe High School in Raleigh came from families where english was not their first language but it was rather Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, or Spanish. I can only imagine that learning english was quite a challenge, but all of my friends attest that they  mastered english by 3rd grade and beyond that point it posed no barrier to their education. Given this testimony, I find it silly that  colleges would place any significant handicap for students in which english is not their first language,whom have gone through the american educational system. However the real issue here is not if language is a barrier for success, that is well known and documented, but rather do regional dialects and improper language uses count as a different language?

 It is this point that I have the most contention with, certainly American-American English is not “proper english” and Southerners have a distinct dialect but do they classify as a separate language? According to the OED, a dialect is ; One of the subordinate forms or varieties of a language arising from local peculiarities of vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiom. This definition, clearly identifies a dialect as a subordinate form of a language and therefore not worthy of the same distinctions and accommodations garnered to a different language. Every group, family, or geographic location has its own distinct language uses that differ from conventional english, but certainly these do not qualify as a different language worthy of affirmative action protections. If this was the case ever citizen in the country would qualify for protection under this definition, making the protection in essence pointless. For example, the majority of my family is from Pittsburgh and over the course of a day it is not uncommon to hear words such as “yinz” “melk” and “pataydas”. On top of this, I personally have developed my own language style using words such a “Nuculear”, “Ambalance”, and “Howdy”, these quirks define my speech but I do not consider them a separate language or proper english. I doubt anyone in a college admissions office would classify this manner of speaking as a distinct language, granting anyone from Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, or Person County, where pen and pin are homonyms, a leg up in the admissions process. Rather these dialects are a part of a persons language history, something each of us are born into, for no region, city, or area speaks perfect english. By the time a person graduates high-school language should not pose a critical barrier to success, absent a confounding variable, and to utilize that language heritage as an excuse to gain an unfair advantage in the college admission system degrades the respect of the system and insults our ability to overcome barriers placed before us. 

Many of you will certainly disagree with my analysis of the situation, and it is lacking in many areas, so please feel free to comment and discuss your viewpoints in the comment section.

~The Poster