Cracking the Prestige Cartel
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.
After 11 long years at Columbia, I’d had quite enough of sugarcoating elite academia. In early 2023 I launched The Ivy Exile, a journal published on Substack recording the ugly truths of what it takes to project the reputational false pretense that makes up so much of supposed Ivy excellence, aimed at puncturing the prestige bubble. I would love to believe my whistleblowing is a helpful part of the story, whose first act we’re still players in, of how society can come to acknowledge and embrace the imperial disrobing of such leading institutions. But, gladly for my project and sadly for my ego, it was and is not to be. All on their own, by their own volition, the Ivies are exposing their deep-seated fraudulence.
In just a few hours of testimony before Congress, and with a handful of compelling sound bites, a few petulant university presidents, including those of Penn and Harvard, discredited themselves far more than I’d accomplished over many months of work, as they jarringly deferred to lawyerly pedantry when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the policies of their universities. The answers may well have amounted to some strained version of technically correct, and the questions were no doubt framed uncharitably. But no amount of parsing and “steelmanning” can edit out the underlying truth the hearings revealed, which was that the very universities that had for so many years strained to manipulate language and policy to find means to punish students for unprogressive things ordinary people believe are now at pains to manipulate language to find ways not to punish students for things ordinary people think are downright evil — and that progressive dogma as expressed in the institutional and social forces at play on shaping Ivy League undergrads now incorporate a certain degree of mandatory antisemitism. It was unintended community service on their part, inadvertently highlighting the rot at the top I’d been striving to reveal.
Extensive backlash rapidly ensued, most consequentially leading to the ouster of Penn President Liz Magill so far, as well as the still-unfolding exposure of plagiarism in the academic work of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Whatever else can help encourage more thoughtful skepticism is likely a good thing, in my view: it’s probably best the general public should come to think of Harvard like Halliburton, Princeton like Philip Morris, Columbia like Chevron, and Brown like, well, Oberlin. With one Ivy League president down, and perhaps more dominoes to fall, the signs have been somewhat encouraging.
And yet the question lingers: should you or your child apply, and should you or they show up after managing to get in? It’s a classic question of individual versus collective interest; attending an Ivy is still likely enough of a gold star network to be worth all the distastefulness, especially assessed in sheer expected lifetime earnings terms, even as boycotting those bastards would probably be much better for society. At the very least, one can start only by seeing and talking about reality as it is, not as it is branded.
Read at the Washington Examiner Magazine.
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Really appreciated this essay. I was briefly a graduate student Yale. I found that they disproportionately selected for students and professors who were hyper-competitive and hyper-elitist, not just people who are brilliant and hard working scholars with creative ideas. This of course does not describe everyone, there were some really talented people at Yale with very impressive projects who were using the prestige of the institution to get them funded. But overall I found the culture to be cut-throat one, which disincentivized collaboration, real mentorship, ethics, and intellectual risk taking. I did my bachelors and masters degree at two different universities which are seen as undergrad "safety schools" where the professors and students were much friendlier. I was much more successful in those programs because of their collaborative environments.
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.