“First Vulcan to graduate at the head of her class”

There were Vulcan, Tellarite and Andorian admirals in DSC.

And, IIRC, the Federation council scene in ST IV had Tellarite and Andorian admirals as well.

 

While human admirals the most common for RW production reasons if nothing else, they're not quite that bad. Even if we discount Commodore Oh, then there's still:

Rear Admiral Sitak, who may be famous enough in-universe to have had a starship naming after her during her lifetime.
JAG Admiral T'Lara, the presiding officer in Rules of Engagement.
A Vulcan Vice Admiral and a Bolian in Rapture
The Academy Commandant in Homefront/Paradise Lost.

The original movies also add to unnamed Andorians (an admiral and a commodore) and a Caitian admiral, and of course DSC adds several non-Humans.

While the numbers are small, IMO it's worth bearing in mind that we only see a fraction of the fleet in any given era, and the distrubtion of non-Human personnel in terms of ranks, roles and responsibilities allows for the assumption that all roles are open to non-Humans and the preponderance of Humans is mostly as a result of far higher levels of participation in Starfleet by humans (if 75-90% of candidates are Human, then most the acceptants will be Human).

YMMV.

 

Yes, which is why I said "almost." Words mean things.

 

That's true.

And if it wasn't for instinence that this was because Starfleet is "pretty damn racist", I wouldn't have quoted you at all.

Given that we've seen proportionally more senior and flag officers of non-Human descent (somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2) than we have for Human (< 1/10), then I would suggest that any "institutional racism" or bias in general comes from the non-Humans planetary societies, not Starfleet as an organisation.

YMMV.

 

If there are multiple races/species represented in an organization but the overwhelming majority of people in the top positions are of just one of them, that is a clear institutional bias, even if it's "just" 80 or 90% rather than 100%.

And let's not take this too seriously, since we're talking about fiction. Obviously most of the characters are human because it's a show made for and by humans with a limited makeup budget, so it's not like this is a real moral debate or anything, just an observation about an imperfection in a made-up story. But the fact that such a human bias clearly exists means it shouldn't be surprising that it exists in the Academy as well.

What are you talking about? Here's Memory Alpha's list of Starfleet flag officers:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_flag_officers

I count 104 named flag officers of various ranks, only 6 of whom are nonhuman (four Vulcans, one Vulcan-Romulan hybrid, one Andorian). There are a handful of aliens among the unnamed flag officers, but most are human.

 

Yes. Prose fiction, by contrast, has an infinite makeup budget and zero makeup cost, and so ADF can give us books like Nor Crystal Tears, where the Thranx outnumber the Humans.

 

You know... TOS did have a lot of "monster"-type aliens. And admirals and commodores usually appeared on the viewscreen behind a desk. So it would've been possible to make a creature/puppet-type character to represent a non-humanoid flag officer calling in from Headquarters, maybe as the regular contact, so they could amortize the cost of the effect by recycling the footage with new dialogue dubbed in.

 

Paricularly if you had a line about "at this distance, audio only' so the visual of the admiral was a still.

 

Okay, yeah I could have phrased that better.

What I meant was that given that for instance:

We've seen only two Caitians IIRC, one was a flag officer [unnamed, so doesn't appear on your list].
We've seen only a handful of Andorians, most were flag officers [unnamed, so doesn't appear on your list].
We've seen more Vulcans, but over half of those were either senior or flag officers.
We've seen only a handful of Bolians, at least two of which were senior or flag officers.

On the other hand, we've seen thousands, if not tens of thousands of humans, only a tiny fraction of which had any notable role at all.

The available sample suggests that attainment is perfectly possible by non-Humans, and the lobsided ratios are due entirely to much lower numbers entering (in universe) or budgets (out of universe), or I suppose if you must suggest some sort of bias, then it's something like suggested by Soval. Humans leverage Starfleet better because they are more flexible and varied in approach than most races, but that's exclusive to Humans so the "leg up" can be overcome with effort.

Could they have done better... probably. Certainly DSC is making some progress here, despite it's issues in other regards and hopefully SNW will continue the trend.

 

I'd call that a selection bias shaped by story considerations. When we see Starfleet characters outside the hero ship's crew, it's usually for a reason important to the story, and so there's a disproportionate likelihood that they'll be authority figures of some sort. Also, different Trek productions have always been inconsistent about which aliens they use, generally just making up new species rather than reusing existing ones. The reason we see few Andorians is that few productions between TOS and ENT bothered to use them. But I think there were at least three of them in the TMP rec-deck scene, balancing out the flag officers that appeared in TVH.

Which is still a bias in favor of humans, which still makes it plausible that few non-humans have become valedictorians, which is the point. I'm not concerned with the reason for such a bias, merely with how a numerical dominance of humans in Starfleet could justify the claim about Valeris. As discussed earlier, becoming valedictorian is a matter of politics as much as academic achievement. The powers-that-be have to choose you as the best candidate for the role, which means it's not just an automatic matter of giving it to whoever gets the highest test scores. And if those powers-that-be are overwhelmingly human, their choices will be consciously or unconsciously biased by human standards and expectations -- just as the human standards of the faculty might lead them to underestimate the academic performance of non-human students. In much the same way that tests and academic standards written for and by white people have historically underrated the intelligence and ability of non-white people, or that standards created with neurotypical people in mind are inadequate for assessing the performance and needs of neurodivergent people.

 

Would the TOS production crew even think of non human flag rank officers?

 

There are plenty of human looking Federation member species we could be mistaking for human. The idea that there's a racist bias in Starfleet really seems to spit in the face of the whole point of Star trek.

 

IMO, episodes like Coming of Age, make it clear that Starfleet has many, very specific, requirements that might be more common in humans on average which could be described as "bias", but that's no different than say...

USCG Aviation Survival Technicians ("rescue swimmer") candidates having to be good with heights and strong swimmers...

Rather than say... their Air Force equivalents still having a requirement (rather than a majority expectation) that candidates that are male (presumably an as-yet-reformed artefact of "no women in combat") or a historical bar on capable black seamen becoming US Navy master divers which are based on prejudice, which is anathema to Starfleet (but is apparently kosher for the Vulcan Expeditionary Group).

 

In theory, of course. But we can't deny the onscreen reality. Keep in mind that the Federation wasn't thought up until the latter half of season 1. The Enterprise was originally conceived and portrayed as a vessel within an Earth-based, human military service. So the human-centric nature of Starfleet was built into the foundations. Later productions have tried to a greater or lesser extent to ameliorate that and acknowledge greater diversity, but it's often been a token effort when it's been made at all.

Again, this is not an actual moral argument. No sense getting defensive about the ethics of an organization that doesn't actually exist. It's just a discussion about the execution of a fictional premise. The human-centric nature of Starfleet, particularly in the 23rd century, is a reality that the text itself has acknowledged, e.g. in TUC. Even in TNG and VGR, humanity is treated as the default and non-human characters are treated as standing out for their differences. Which is understandable in a work of fiction created for a human audience. But it doesn't reconcile smoothly with the later choice of the franchise to redefine Starfleet as an egalitarian multispecies organization. But that's not an issue of ethics, it's a glitch in worldbuilding.

Calling something a bias does not assert anything about the intentions and reasons behind the bias. It merely acknowledges that there is some factor that predisposes the odds in one direction, a statistical bias. The word basically means a slant, something that tilts the playing field, regardless of the reason. Biases can be due to benign, malicious, or neutral factors, but they are all still biases.

Again, the question here is not about the morality of a fictional organization. The question is simply whether we can postulate a plausible explanation for why Valeris would be the first Vulcan to graduate at the top of her class. We do not have to enjoy the explanation; what matters in deductive reasoning is not whether we like things (which is itself a bias), but whether they make objective sense. An institutional bias in favor of humans is a plausible explanation for a lack of Vulcan valedictorians, and there is abundant evidence in Star Trek to make it plausible that such an institutional bias exists. I assert that as an objective analysis, not a moral argument.

 

I'm not the one that asserted that Starfleet is mostly human because it's racist (speciest) against non-Humans, that was you.

That is a moral statement, implying deliberate or sub-conscious malicious bias. For instance, what little that we know of the Vulcan Expeditionary Group tells us that this is the case there.

On the contrary, my responses have been intended to explain my thoughts on why there might be objective, non-prejudicial reasons for this benign, neutral bias, which is likely to have arisen initially from Humans role as "arbitor" between the very different cultures of Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarities, because they have character traits that are inclusive of all three, whereas setting the "benchmark" against the Vulcan norm would exclude Andorians, Tellarities etc; setting it against Andorians would exclude Vulcans etc.

Which -- given that even in canon, and considerably more so in licensed media (even during the TOS era) that it is possible for non-Humans to be accepted and excel in Starfleet -- seems more plausible to me.

Circling back to Coming of Age, if the lack of non-Humans in Starfleet was due to racist/speciest prejudice, then we would expect either Wes or Mirren to have got the Academy slot, not Mordock who is implied to not even be a Federation citizen, never mind human.

 

Again: Starfleet doesn't exist. Vulcans don't exist. There is no moral question when no actual people are being harmed or deprived of rights. There is merely the analysis of the worldbuilding of a work of make-believe. And there is plenty of precedent in that work of make-believe for a pro-human bias which could explain the lack of Vulcan valedictorians. It's a bias that would be racist if any of this actually existed, but it doesn't, so don't take it so damn seriously.

The reason for the pro-human bias doesn't matter to me in the slightest -- only whether or not it exists and can explain the line about Valeris. You're reading far too much into a passing word choice that I used for effect.

Again: bias and prejudice are not strictly synonymous. Prejudice is one possible cause of bias. The benign factors you profess are a different cause of bias. The word "bias" refers merely to a slant in the selection process; explaining the causative factors behind that slant is a separate matter.

 

Except that clearly does, because you refuse to accept the premise that the reasons could be anything other exclusionary and intended to ensure "human supremacy", whereas other possibilities clearly exist.

I agree that they aren't. However, your previous posts do imply that they are and that any "failure" by previous Vulcan cadets can only be because the establishment wanted to sabotage them, rather than being the incidental result of the fact that Vulcans are very different than most sapients, so there is a degree of "mismatch" there. After all, Spock didn't say that she was the first non-Human (which would raise deliberate malice implications), he said that she was the first Vulcan.

 

Just because I put forth one possibility does not mean I "refuse" to consider other possibilities. Again, why are you taking a work of make-believe so bizarrely seriously as if there were actual stakes to it? Lighten up. There is nothing to justify this kind of hostility when we're talking about an imaginary thing we watch for fun. I'm walking away from this pointless argument now.

 

You underestimate me, sir.

 

The rationale I came up with for my Star Trek Timeline* is that Valeris was the first Vulcan to graduate at the top of her class at Starfleet Academy's command school, which fits well with her drive and ambition, IMO. I figure that most Vulcans wouldn't be too interested in command (as we saw with Spock on TOS).

*Valeris' mention is in the "2289-2299" section, towards the end of the timeline.