We Need to Downgrade the Ivies

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, June 30, 2023

 

The emotions around elite college admissions run high for almost every single person writing about politics, almost every politician, and many more who long ago went through the college-application gauntlet. Why?

 

Simple. That college-application gauntlet is a major feature in selecting our political and cultural elite. Look no further than the Supreme Court itself: Eight out of nine went through Harvard or Yale Law School; the only exception is Amy Coney Barrett, who was just summa cum laude at Notre Dame. People are right to believe that a change in the behavior of admissions offices at these universities means a change for our nation in the long run.

 

The Ivy League lost its first monopoly on power in America because the American South had disproportionate political power and because America kept expanding westward. The academic corridor running from New Haven, Conn., to Bowdoin, Maine, became unfit for national leadership. This diminishment was reflected in the similar decline of the Federalists and “Adams men” in American political life. By the 1960s it looked like the California state system might be a threat to it. And yet, as travel became cheaper and top students from around the country could more easily make the trip to the East Coast, the Ivy League managed to reconsolidate and increase its hold over the American elite even as it continued to admit fewer and fewer students relative to the entire American population. This consolidation has consequences, and I suspect one of them is the pervasive level of groupthink among elites.

 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The United Kingdom has two top universities, Oxford and Cambridge. But France doesn’t surrender its entire elite to the Sorbonne. Instead, France also has its extensive system of “grandes écoles,” which teach a variety of disciplines important to civic life. Charles de Gaulle came out of the military academy Saint-Cyr. More recently, France has had a run of graduates from a grande école dedicated to political science, known colloquially as Sciences Po. France’s intellectual life remains more diverse and less immediately captured by its political parties.

 

Because the Ivies themselves have stopped growing with the overall population, and now because the law is going to force them to get more creative as they curate and socially engineer the elite, there are opportunities for other institutions to reform and compete. It just would take an injection of ambition and creativity.

 

Our military academies should feature a truly elite academic track, but they currently don’t. Such institutions could have provided a very different formation for the elite than what was available at the Ivies. And nothing is preventing a group of states from co-founding a regional university and then trying to make it competitive with the old schools of New England.

 

Perhaps the greatest pity is that those groups of Americans who felt in the past that the traditional American institutions weren’t welcoming to them stopped short of building institutions that were truly competitive with them in turning out an American elite. Notre Dame University grew and fell somewhat with the influence of Irish-American Catholics. But it became satisfied with a top-tier football program, not with turning out those who would be as desirable as Ivy grads in the top institutions of American national life. The same goes for historically black universities and colleges. These universities still do good work, but their mission would be so much more inspiring if they leveled up to the very top tier.

 

Many of the Ivies started as seminaries for the clergy. So existing seminaries could expand again and try to produce top minds in business, the arts, and sciences. For example, Westminster Theological Seminary broke away from Princeton almost a century ago. Why should the Presbyterian clergy have a near monopoly on the type of Calvinist scholars that Westminster can produce?

 

The stranglehold of the Ivy League on our elite has been bad for everyone. It impedes the circulation of elites that is healthy for a society. It turns the childhoods of our elite into a meritocratic gauntlet. And it produced our presidential leadership from 1993 to 2017, leading to the inevitable backlash in the form of Trump.

 

We have it in our power to build more avenues to success and influence in America life, to make our elite reflect better the diversity of our regions, religions, and, yes, our races, too. The future of our country should not be processed and evaluated by a handful of insular admissions offices.