"When you assume..."

"...you make an 'ASS' out of out 'U' and 'ME'." That was one of the funniest punch lines in an episode of The Odd Couple. In this episode, "My Strife in Court," Felix and Oscar are arrested for trying to scalp a ticket, and they wind up in court. The court scene is one of the funniest in the series, a classic.

This past Thursday, March 15th, my M.B.A. statistics professor was conducting class. Through the usual digressions, the talk got around to Galileo, then to the question of which object (out of two) would hit the grown first when dropped simultaneously.

Not wanting to get into all the details of the discussion, e.g. making sure the release was really simultaneous, I'll skip to the relevant part.

The professor asked a white student whether his water bottle or pen would hit the ground first if dropped at the same time. The student answered that he thought the water bottle would hit first. The professor fatuously said something to the effect that he's the product of the American education system, thus implying that the answer was incorrect. He then called on an East Asian student and asked where he went to school. The student replied that he had gone to school in New York City. So the professor moved on to the South Asian student sitting next to him and asked him the same thing. The reply was the same.

Feigning frustration, perhaps to hide the fact that he had made an "ass" of himself by his assumptions, he asked another student for an answer, a white one, who had revealed his foreign upbringing via his heavy, Russian accent. That student gave the correct answer.