Harvard football fans supporting their team (with a little help from Yale)

In New Republic, Noam Scheiber explains the Barack Obama is more disciplined, efficient, ethical, and scandal-free than the last democrat president, Bill Clinton, and that the differences between the two are attributable to the differing culture and educational approaches of Harvard and Yale Law Schools.

If a transition tells you something about a president’s style–if not his chances of success–then Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could hardly be more different. Clinton was often at his worst as president-elect. Key rules were overlooked (Hillary spent weeks flirting with a cabinet job before learning that anti-nepotism laws precluded it) and key setbacks were self-inflicted (gays-in-the-military shot up Clinton’s to-do list after an offhand comment to Andrea Mitchell). Clinton spent so much time assembling his cabinet that he only had three weeks to hire senior White House staff. All in all, the process betrayed a stunning disregard for Washington protocol. Which was how the Clintons wanted it. Hillary had decreed that no Washington insider would get a job that could be filled by a friend or loyalist.

Obama’s transition was a contrast in almost every respect. His political decisions were free of sentiment or ego (who else would grant Joe Lieberman a reprieve?). His tactical maneuvering bespoke a reverence for Washington institutions (which is how GOP moderates like Olympia Snowe found themselves bathed in presidential attention). He rolled out his team with brutal efficiency and stocked it with Beltway know-how. Even his public pronouncements were strikingly spare. In December of 1992, Clinton staged a two-day, 20-hour economic summit, every minute of it broadcast on C-SPAN. In late 2008, Obama briefly fielded questions after closed-door meetings while his brain trust looked on sternly.

What accounts for these differences? There’s no doubt a characterological component–Obama’s self-control is nearly inhuman, Clinton’s is famously lacking. But part of the explanation also lies in the elite institutions that socialized them–namely Harvard and Yale, their respective law schools. The two schools stand on opposite sides of a cultural chasm in the academic world. Even more than that, they stand for different theories of governing. …

Whereas Harvard prided itself on instilling discipline, Yale believed its mission was to unlock students’ innate brilliance in an atmosphere of freedom, intimacy, and intellectual ferment. Harvard was, in certain respects, a three-year hazing ritual. Yale was more like a three-year Renaissance Weekend. Its graduates had been reassured of their eclat from the moment they set foot on campus.

Read the whole thing, then roll around on the floor a bit.

Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

Fight Fiercely, Harvard!

Joseph Epstein has taught for too many years to believe that conspicuous success in today’s elite universities is commonly a testament to good character. Au contraire, Epstein argues: “Some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools.”

Last week the excellent David Brooks, in one of his columns in the New York Times, exulted over the high quality of people President-elect Barack Obama was enlisting in his new cabinet and onto his staff. The chief evidence for these people being so impressive, it turns out, is they all went to what the world–“that ignorant ninny,” as Henry James called it–thinks superior schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the London School of Economics; like dead flies on flypaper, the names of the schools Obama’s new appointees attended dotted Brooks’s column.

Here is the column’s first paragraph:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

This administration will be, as Brooks writes, “a valedictocracy.” The assumption here is that having all these good students–many of them possibly “toll-frees,” as high-school students who get 800s on their SATs used to be known in admissions offices–running the country is obviously a pretty good thing. Brooks’s one jokey line in the column has it that “if a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.” Since my appreciation of David Brooks is considerable, and since I agree with him on so many things, why don’t I agree with him here?

The reason is that, after teaching at a university for 30 years, I have come to distrust the type I think of as “the good student.” …

Read the whole thing.

Roger Kimball savors Sarah Palin’s arrival on the political scene as a kind of Joan of Arc of the culture wars.

Sarah’s lucky that the establishment left is so thoroughly secularist, or they’d be preparing her stake now.

In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche. .. It was the smug, “progressive” liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. …

It’s only from the eyrie of the “Harvard” Weltanschauung that a largish random sampling of citizens is found culturally deficient. And this leads me to a crucial point about “Harvard” and the “progressive” consensus it represents: it is sophisticated about everything except its own naïveté. It champions cultural relativism–absolutely. It is suspicious when someone shows up peddling “the truth,” especially about moral matters; but it embraces its perspective on the world as inarguable. According to the gospel of “Harvard,” all right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) people agree with the various positions set forth in the catechism of liberalism. To champion the various dogmas set forth in that catechism, says “Harvard,” is simply to exhibit one’s contact with reality. To dissent from them is to exhibit one’s ignorance, bad faith, or malevolence. Nice work if you can get it!

If you can get it? The amazing thing is that there is nothing easier. The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here):

i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.

“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

William Deresiewicz, like some other people around here, spent time at Yale, and has some apt criticism of both the objectives and results of American elite education.

Even though he’s a liberal and a romantic who seems to think we need to be producing poets and revolutionaries, he is not wrong in noting that independent thought is not exactly what our most prestigious educational institutions are aiming at.

As one student responds to Deresiewicz in class: “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

No, he’s calling you “tools,” actually.

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. …

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

How about the endowments of major universities? Massachusetts is thinking about doing just that.

WSJ:

Massachusetts legislators, demonstrating a growing resentment against the wealth of elite universities in tight economic times, are studying a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion.

After all, as Jim Manzi notes:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

Hat tip to David Nix.

Never Yet Melted March 4, 2008:

Fight Fiercely, Harvard

concerning the scandal about Harvard’s admissions of basketball players on the basis of lower academic standards.

New York Times
March 9, 2008:

Editorial Notebook
Fight Fiercely, Harvard
By PHILIP M. BOFFEY

concerning the scandal about Harvard’s admissions of basketball players on the basis of lower academic standards.

The Boston Herald reports:

Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men.

In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.

At Harvard, that’s called progress.

When I asked Harvard spokesman Bob Mitchell about this new Sharia-friendly policy, he denied that they were banning anyone. “No, no,” he told me, “we’re permitting women to work out in an environment that accommodates their religion.”

By banning all men from the facility, right?

“It’s not ‘banning,’ ” he insisted. “We’re allowing, we’re accommodating people.”

Muezzins will soon be summoning the faithful to prayer from towers at Harvard like this one, too, as another “accommodation.”

advises a football song often sung at the little school in Cambridge.

Sunday’s New York Times suggests that Harvard’s desire to become competitive in Ivy League basketball recently may have been fierce enough to have produced violations of NCAA rules.

Harvard has never won an Ivy League title in men’s basketball and has not reached the N.C.A.A. tournament since 1946. This season, the team won only 8 of its first 28 games. Like all the universities in the Ivy League, Harvard does not award athletic scholarships.

Yet the group of six recruits expected to join the team next season is rated among the nation’s 25 best. This is partly because Harvard Coach Tommy Amaker, who starred at Duke and coached in the Big East and Big Ten conferences, has set his sights on top-flight recruits. It is also because Harvard is willing to consider players with a lower academic standing than previous staff members said they were allowed to. Harvard has also adopted aggressive recruiting tactics that skirt or, in some cases, may even violate National Collegiate Athletic Association rules.

Harvard’s efforts in basketball underscore the increasingly important role that success in high-profile sports plays at even the most elite universities. In the race to become competitive in basketball, Harvard’s new approach could tarnish the university’s sterling reputation.

Two athletes who said they had received letters from Harvard’s admissions office saying they would most likely be accepted have described tactics that may violate N.C.A.A. rules, including visits from a man who worked out with them shortly before he was hired by Harvard to be an assistant coach.

Read the whole thing.

Results.

Hat tip to MeaninglessHotAir.

Steven Stark explains:

John Edwards’s campaign seems to have hit a roadblock that could seriously hurt his chances of securing the Democratic nomination. And it has nothing to do with any of his perceived screw-ups that have gotten their share of media attention, including his $400 haircut, his new compound in North Carolina, and his hedge-fund experiences.

There’s no doubt that Edwards made a mistake with the haircut, and that wealthy populist candidates are not easily forgiven for reminding people that they have money. But most candidates on the trail spend a lot on personal appearances — it’s part of the game. As for the value of Edwards’s house, it’s probably comparable to that of the Clintons or a lot of other Democratic candidates, including former Democratic nominees Al Gore and John Kerry. And the hedge fund? Please show me a major candidate whose family hasn’t raked in some cash from a few major investments or consulting. Most are pretty well-off.

No, Edwards’s problem is different, and it’s not even about his politics. It’s about a piece of paper that hangs — or doesn’t hang — on the wall of his office.

Edwards, you see, didn’t go to Harvard or Yale.

In the Democratic landscape of 2007, that doesn’t seem as if it should be a problem. But you’d have to go back to 1984 to find a Democratic nominee (Walter Mondale) who didn’t attend one of those elite universities for either college or graduate school. Before that, a number of Democratic also-rans, including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and Jerry Brown, were also graduates of either Harvard or Yale. And the pattern will continue in 2008 if either Hillary Clinton (Yale Law) or Barack Obama (Harvard Law) wins the nomination.

It’s a trend that hearkens back to the old country, where it’s assumed all leaders belonged to the same debating club at Oxford. Even other Ivy League schools — such as Columbia, Princeton, and Penn — don’t seem to be good enough for the Democrats, much less the Atlantic Coast Conference schools of Clemson, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina, at which Edwards received his education.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Andrew Olson.

Abstinence should be no problem for all those nerdy types at Harvard. They won’t be running into a lot of opportunities to sin anyway.

CNN story.

Meanwhile, at Yale….

La plus ça change, la plus c’est la même chose.

I knew he was a commie, of course. But not until I read Martin Peretz, in the Wall Street Journal, did I realise that he is an hereditary commie of impeccable red-diaper origins: old money, with Exeter, Harvard, and Stalin as family traditions.

Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.