{"id":15788,"date":"2024-11-14T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2024-11-14T08:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=15788"},"modified":"2025-11-15T23:12:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T07:12:16","slug":"issue-of-the-week-human-rights-economic-opportunity-war-disease-environment-hunger-population-personal-growth-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=15788","title":{"rendered":"Issue of The Week: Human Rights, Economic Opportunity, War, Disease, Environment, Hunger, Population, Personal Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Illustration by The Atlantic<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Since election day in the U.S., the writer here has been reflecting on and studying the results and reasons behind them from as many perspectives as possible. This will continue and manifest in a post in the near future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as a first response, The Atlantic Magazine published an extraordinary piece today by David Brooks. It will be the cover story in the upcoming December edition. Read the whole piece first. Then go back and hit all the links to other incredible related articles. It’s a lot of reading. And far past enthralling. It will pull you in with intellectual, emotional and spiritual illumination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here it is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROKE AMERICA<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The meritocracy isn\u2019t working. We need something new. By David Brooks<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

NOVEMBER 14, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every coherent society has a social ideal\u2014an 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\u2019t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were \u201cclubbable\u201d\u2014good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared about academics\u2014the \u201cgrinds\u201d\u2014were 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> that American democracy was being undermined by a \u201chereditary aristocracy of wealth.\u201d American capitalism, he argued<\/a>, was turning into \u201cindustrial feudalism,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson\u2019s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society. Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict. He presided during a time, roughly the middle third of the 20th century, when people had lavish faith in social-engineering projects and central planning\u2014in using scientific means to, say, run the Soviet economy, or build new cities like Bras\u00edlia, or construct a system of efficiency-maximizing roadways that would have cut through Greenwich Village.When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society\u2019s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won\u2019t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it<\/a>, \u201cAt least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.\u201d By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, Conant\u2019s record did not match his rhetoric. He couldn\u2019t afford to offend the rich families who supplied Harvard with its endowment. In 1951, 18 years into his presidency, the university was still accepting 94 percent of its legacy applicants<\/a>. When Jews with high grades and test scores began to flood in, Harvard limited the number of applicants it would consider from New Jersey and parts of New York\u2014places that had a lot of Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But eventually Conant\u2019s vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation\u2019s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation\u2019s social ideal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n