How the
Ivy League Broke America
The
meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.
By David Brooks
November 14, 2024
Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what
the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until
sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man
was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social
circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia;
Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate,
and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have
to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you
were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant,
Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.
Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared
about academics—the “grinds”—were social outcasts. But students competed
ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and
Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed
few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms,
to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House.
(From 1901 to 1921, every American president went to Harvard, Yale, or
Princeton.) People living according to this social ideal valued not academic
accomplishment but refined manners, prudent judgment, and the habit of command.
This was the age of social privilege.
And then a small group of college administrators decided to
blow it all up. The most important of them was James Conant, the president of
Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American
democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.”
American capitalism, he argued, was turning into “industrial feudalism,” in
which a few ultrarich families had too much corporate power. Conant did not
believe the United States could rise to the challenges of the 20th century if
it was led by the heirs of a few incestuously interconnected Mayflower
families.(…)
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