Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…
Once, I had faith in the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities: growing up in Middle America, they seemed from a distance like wondrous Shangri-Las of learnedness and refinement, floating far above us banal minor leaguers. And then I got into Brown, for what was a frustrating four years, and later worked for over a decade at Columbia using skills from a career in journalism to help market the university. My professional responsibilities quickly came to include delivering extra dollops of that ultra-elite sizzle, the implicit assurance that the short list of famous institutions offered the authoritative latest and greatest from the world’s best and brightest, regardless of how little was really happening intellectually on campus.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t meet lots of smart and even brilliant people over the years — you don’t generally reach somewhere so competitive if you’re a total idiot — just nowhere near as much as advertised. The typical mode of discourse at Brown tended to sit somewhat beneath the AP courses at my Midwestern public high school, and at Columbia below even that. So what happened? How did a small clique of American institutions rise so high only to sink so far?
As timeless and eternal as the Ivy League™ brand may seem today, it’s a relatively recent invention: the term only crept into the lexicon circa the 1930s, at the earliest, and originally just for athletics among some old money schools in the Northeast. Even before the stunning self-immolation of the past few months, there was still some reason to hope that the Ivies’ overblown reputations might not last forever.
For one thing, Ivy brand preeminence has required airbrushing a ton of inconvenient history: Up until the world wars, it was largely German and other continental universities that held the most global academic renown. Not that long-standing American places hadn’t been jockeying for status among their high society peers, but they were still peripheral to the older world. With total victory in World War II, however, the primacy of the U.S. establishment was assured — initially benefiting the very most socially connected places.
But, still, being the best of the U.S. didn’t mean then what it does now, when American life is nationalized. The passage of the G.I. Bill brought unprecedented masses into higher education, and with them, much dilution of the old-line Northeastern networks’ influence. And midcentury regional elites, whether in Texas or Missouri or wherever, still tended to prefer local known quantities to faraway campuses up east. Ivy League colleges weren’t necessarily easy to get into for undergrads, but hadn’t quite moved definitively outside the range of reasonable possibility for high-achieving hopefuls.
And yet gradually, with the shift to national and then increasingly globalized economics and sensibilities, the sort of hypercompetitive exclusivity now associated with the Ivy League began to become a thing by the 1980s, the most famous schools getting ever more famous for being so famous, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. That mounting unattainability has been taken as almost indisputable proof of social status and intellectual cred ever since, with throngs of applicants from all around the world, to the extent that even Hollywood millionaires are willing to commit felonies to try to get their children admitted.
But, inexorably, the scene has long since been hollowing itself out. Legacies and affirmative action are awfully easy targets, and deservedly so, but ultimately it’s the uber-exclusivity itself that’s most ravaging the Ivies: in their extreme inaccessibility, they’ve become less and less culturally relevant beyond the symbolic realm. The situation today is that very few applicants, especially outside of favored demographics, have even the slightest chance of getting in, such that lots of other formerly next-tier “safety schools” have become for all intents and purposes equally desirable and networked gateways to the upper echelons of the professional middle class. Today, university admissions have turned into such a ludicrous crapshoot that the Ivy League distinction now feels more arbitrary than distinguished.
And by relentlessly zeroing in on those children most super-optimized for the perfect college app, and faculty with the most box-checking CVs, the fanciest institutions have spent decades selecting not for real intellectual passion and curiosity but eager apple-polishing, hoop-jumping, and grant-earning conformity. No doubt there are still some top-flight students and faculty working at the very highest levels, but far fewer than is reassuring to contemplate.
Read the rest at the Washington Examiner Magazine.
Next: Crooked Timber
Prestige monopoly is an interesting phenomenon and definitely fits in with what we see in the Ivy League. It makes sense to wonder what the implications of this kind of monopoly is.
But I do wonder what happens when these cartels crack. The most Germane example in living memory might be the HBCU football world. Prior to the 1970’s, HBCU football housed an unreal volume of talent that the predominantly white schools would never touch. There were any number of unwritten rules, such as no more than 3 African American players on a team
Then the dam broke, and no college football team could be relevant without African American players. Maybe the turning point was the USC-Alabama game of 1970
Interestingly, the Ivy League never capitalized on this unimaginable wealth of football talent, and largely they still don’t. Maybe this is why they would be the doormat to any team in the ACC, let alone the SEC.
The story doesn’t end well for hbcu football or college in general. At one point, HBCU had unquestioned monopoly over African American talent. Howard, in particular, had the lions share. After the predominantly white universities started enrolling African American athletes, they enrolled students as well, and now HBCU have not much more than 6-7% of all African American college students.
I wonder when the Ivy League will look at conservative scholars and thinkers and see an existential threat to their cartel if they don’t recruit and retain them.
I say this as a committed, card carrying leftist, but I think if the Ivy League doesn’t find ways to incorporate right wing thought into their universities, then their intellectual life will reflect their football life: unproductive and uncompetitive.
“ ....and Brown like, well, Oberlin”.
Split might laughing. 😂 He