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.
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.
The intellectual life of the Ivy League is already as mediocre as their football teams! The increasing emergence of heterodox alt-academia began as mostly ornery iconoclasts but has recently enjoyed an influx of converts and funding from troubled centrists as the backlash to "woke" has mounted. The most strategic move fancy institutions could make to appear fair would be to panderingly give some spotlight to the "just asking questions" folks and a handful of establishmentarian conservatives, but even minimal concessions have become so culturally unthinkable that even minimal course correction might have slipped beyond the range of possibility. It seems that conservativism may be permanently banished from the fancy places, where for the foreseeable future the realm of permitted discussion will range between left and the left end of center-left.
I think that mediocre intellectual life depends on the discipline. Mediocre ideas probably are dominant in, say, social science and psychology. But mediocrities probably can’t survive in academic STEM fields. And even here, The Ivy and adjacent schools have a commanding hegemony on science and mathematics and very nearly so in engineering.
To beat the football analogy to death, change came from employers (the nfl) before it was adopted by the colleges. Still, sports has one undeniable imperative: to win. Under those circumstances, whichever school “defects” first (by recruiting African American players) would have a decisive advantage over those schools that wanted to preserve a racial caste system. Of course, this advantage couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t, as all the schools had to rethink their approach to race. Because they all wanted to win.
This is also true in science and math- you have to be correct for real, not politically correct. Even under those ruthless conditions, the sciences and math flourish mostly at liberal, elite institutions. You just don’t expect Nobel prizes, or even NIH grants, from liberty university.
Maybe most of these mathematicians swallow their real feelings in order to be part of a liberal community of scholars, but I’m not so sure. Instead, I think most of them are liberal, and then they convince themselves that only liberals can do high level math.
But this does raise the question: are most mathematicians liberal, and if so, why?
I was being a little flippant to broadly characterize the Ivies' intellectual life as mediocre -- of course there are many brilliant students and faculty in almost every area of study, even if at a smaller proportion than the schools' reputations suggest. And it is indeed much harder to fake one's way through a STEM field than something squishier.
But STEM is hardly immune to the rot of the larger academy -- I did a piece about my many years at Columbia Engineering watching the field get more and more corrupted by politics: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/social-justice-by-algorithm . To extend the football metaphor, it all depends on what constitutes "winning the game": that can be more about landing grants and news coverage and interdisciplinary kudos than especially impressive/valuable research in and of itself.
As for the question of why mathematicians/other STEM folk are leaning ever more reflexively leftwards, they tend to be hyper-specialized in particular technical problems, and to conceive of the world in scientifically optimizable terms without enough reference to the "crooked timber" of humanity as revealed by the softer fields and humanities at their best. Every career incentive points to endorsing managerial technocracy, and all the social cues are to outspokenly go along to get along, and those are the people likeliest to be get hired. Also, conservative intellectuals don't get the pop cultural exposure that left intellectuals do, so without doing a fair amount of digging on their own a lot of pretty smart people assume the entire right is Sean Hannity as opposed to, say, Thomas Sowell.
Frankly, I do think the proportion has diminished somewhat in this society of distractions and perverse incentives, but that's difficult to quantify. With admissions so arbitrary the shortlist of "name" schools is getting longer and is no longer so much "The Ivies Plus" of 15ish top schools but approaching something more like 25-30 that more or less place someone in the conversation of someone who very well might have made it into one of the super big names under a fairer system. This has created a lot of opportunities for schools on the move -- Northeastern has massively improved its reputation in recent years, Washington U in my hometown of St. Louis is getting a lot more attention and cred from the coasts than was once the case. Talent has always been more diffused than the discourse of "getting in to the best schools" has suggested, but it's much more and more obviously diffused now than it was say 20 years ago.
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.
Thanks so much, Christina, I'm glad the piece resonated with you. I think a lot of people, maybe even most, who have Ivy League experience are/were underwhelmed by the institutions, but are afraid that mentioning that will devalue their very expensive degree(s), limit their hireability, make enemies, etc. It's easier just to play along like the emperor actually has clothes. That makes it important for those of us willing to speak out to do so. Sadly, anyone critiquing prestigious places without direct personal experience of those places tends to be automatically dismissed as sour grapes, so it's incumbent on "insiders" to blow the whistle.
The debates surrounding merit at the Ivies have been interesting for me to witness, because IMHE the ivies select for prestige not merit (although the two can be correlated), and you are the first person I saw really making a good argument for that. However, something feels off to me about the conservatives focus on merit, it begs the question "who deserves to be elite?" instead of "how do we create institutions of great scholarship?" I think us Americans are too focused on wanting to believe that there is a path in life that can insure some of us against economy precarity and social irrelevance (which we may associate with economic precarity), rather than asking how we collectively can build a better society together, including great educational institutions. Looking forward to following your writing on this!
I'm not optimistic about removing hierarchical status games from elite higher education any time soon, but the short list of "name" schools growing longer could hopefully allow for more pathways for talented people to thrive in different environments. Anything that nudges the Ivies and their ilk off the pedestal is a positive development.
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.
The intellectual life of the Ivy League is already as mediocre as their football teams! The increasing emergence of heterodox alt-academia began as mostly ornery iconoclasts but has recently enjoyed an influx of converts and funding from troubled centrists as the backlash to "woke" has mounted. The most strategic move fancy institutions could make to appear fair would be to panderingly give some spotlight to the "just asking questions" folks and a handful of establishmentarian conservatives, but even minimal concessions have become so culturally unthinkable that even minimal course correction might have slipped beyond the range of possibility. It seems that conservativism may be permanently banished from the fancy places, where for the foreseeable future the realm of permitted discussion will range between left and the left end of center-left.
I think that mediocre intellectual life depends on the discipline. Mediocre ideas probably are dominant in, say, social science and psychology. But mediocrities probably can’t survive in academic STEM fields. And even here, The Ivy and adjacent schools have a commanding hegemony on science and mathematics and very nearly so in engineering.
To beat the football analogy to death, change came from employers (the nfl) before it was adopted by the colleges. Still, sports has one undeniable imperative: to win. Under those circumstances, whichever school “defects” first (by recruiting African American players) would have a decisive advantage over those schools that wanted to preserve a racial caste system. Of course, this advantage couldn’t last forever, and it didn’t, as all the schools had to rethink their approach to race. Because they all wanted to win.
This is also true in science and math- you have to be correct for real, not politically correct. Even under those ruthless conditions, the sciences and math flourish mostly at liberal, elite institutions. You just don’t expect Nobel prizes, or even NIH grants, from liberty university.
Maybe most of these mathematicians swallow their real feelings in order to be part of a liberal community of scholars, but I’m not so sure. Instead, I think most of them are liberal, and then they convince themselves that only liberals can do high level math.
But this does raise the question: are most mathematicians liberal, and if so, why?
I was being a little flippant to broadly characterize the Ivies' intellectual life as mediocre -- of course there are many brilliant students and faculty in almost every area of study, even if at a smaller proportion than the schools' reputations suggest. And it is indeed much harder to fake one's way through a STEM field than something squishier.
But STEM is hardly immune to the rot of the larger academy -- I did a piece about my many years at Columbia Engineering watching the field get more and more corrupted by politics: https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/social-justice-by-algorithm . To extend the football metaphor, it all depends on what constitutes "winning the game": that can be more about landing grants and news coverage and interdisciplinary kudos than especially impressive/valuable research in and of itself.
As for the question of why mathematicians/other STEM folk are leaning ever more reflexively leftwards, they tend to be hyper-specialized in particular technical problems, and to conceive of the world in scientifically optimizable terms without enough reference to the "crooked timber" of humanity as revealed by the softer fields and humanities at their best. Every career incentive points to endorsing managerial technocracy, and all the social cues are to outspokenly go along to get along, and those are the people likeliest to be get hired. Also, conservative intellectuals don't get the pop cultural exposure that left intellectuals do, so without doing a fair amount of digging on their own a lot of pretty smart people assume the entire right is Sean Hannity as opposed to, say, Thomas Sowell.
“ ....and Brown like, well, Oberlin”.
Split might laughing. 😂 He
Assuming the proportion of top-flight students and faculty in the population has not diminished, where have they gone now?
Frankly, I do think the proportion has diminished somewhat in this society of distractions and perverse incentives, but that's difficult to quantify. With admissions so arbitrary the shortlist of "name" schools is getting longer and is no longer so much "The Ivies Plus" of 15ish top schools but approaching something more like 25-30 that more or less place someone in the conversation of someone who very well might have made it into one of the super big names under a fairer system. This has created a lot of opportunities for schools on the move -- Northeastern has massively improved its reputation in recent years, Washington U in my hometown of St. Louis is getting a lot more attention and cred from the coasts than was once the case. Talent has always been more diffused than the discourse of "getting in to the best schools" has suggested, but it's much more and more obviously diffused now than it was say 20 years ago.
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.
Thanks so much, Christina, I'm glad the piece resonated with you. I think a lot of people, maybe even most, who have Ivy League experience are/were underwhelmed by the institutions, but are afraid that mentioning that will devalue their very expensive degree(s), limit their hireability, make enemies, etc. It's easier just to play along like the emperor actually has clothes. That makes it important for those of us willing to speak out to do so. Sadly, anyone critiquing prestigious places without direct personal experience of those places tends to be automatically dismissed as sour grapes, so it's incumbent on "insiders" to blow the whistle.
The debates surrounding merit at the Ivies have been interesting for me to witness, because IMHE the ivies select for prestige not merit (although the two can be correlated), and you are the first person I saw really making a good argument for that. However, something feels off to me about the conservatives focus on merit, it begs the question "who deserves to be elite?" instead of "how do we create institutions of great scholarship?" I think us Americans are too focused on wanting to believe that there is a path in life that can insure some of us against economy precarity and social irrelevance (which we may associate with economic precarity), rather than asking how we collectively can build a better society together, including great educational institutions. Looking forward to following your writing on this!
I'm not optimistic about removing hierarchical status games from elite higher education any time soon, but the short list of "name" schools growing longer could hopefully allow for more pathways for talented people to thrive in different environments. Anything that nudges the Ivies and their ilk off the pedestal is a positive development.