Can The Ivy League Be Reformed?

A Personal Reflection

Which way, Harvard Man?

It was an interesting experience to recently attend my 30^th college reunion with my wife, a Yale classmate, at the very time President Trump was threatening Harvard (and implicitly, Yale and other similar schools) with withholding billions of federal dollars because of these schools insisted on continuing and abetting various racially and religiously discriminatory policies.

Returning to campus, where I had not been back since our 20^th reunion a decade ago, reminded me once again that Harvard, Yale and similar institutions are places of extraordinary privilege.

The architecture alone was an reminder, as it was when I was an undergrad, to view your experience (and by less salutary extension, perhaps yourself) as “something special”—and it reinforced how everything about our education, from the financial resources to the architecture, from the occasional formal dinners to the presence of secret societies like Skull and Bones—reinforced that perspective, even while paying lip service to egalitarianism.

The beautiful interior of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, one of the world's largest, which was designed to look like a huge cathedral.

And returning as an alumnus, that privilege is still present and very visible. Even though the 30^th reunion is not a major reunion and even though many of my classmates give to Yale in ways and for programs outside of the class gift, the class as a whole raised over $30 Million, approximately $25,000 for every member of our class who entered Yale with us. Divide it by those who actually attended reunion (about 405 of the 1300 classmates) and giving was a staggering $75,000 per person. Of course, most people in the class gave far, far less than that or even nothing at all. But that remains that there is tremendous power and wealth at places like Harvard and Yale. We have a few semi-famous people in our class of 1300—but nobody who would be considered a universal household name. What we do have is a lot of people—people you have never heard of unless you would happen to work in their industry, who have made maybe $10 Million to a few hundred million dollars—earned on Wall Street or as successful attorneys or entrepreneurs, people for whom dropping a six, or even a seven figure check to Yale come reunion time (perhaps to help their own kid’s admissions chances) is a rounding error in their net worth.

Despite the rarefied levels of wealth present, one of the nice things about our reunion (at least at our age where most of us have far more of our lives and careers behind us than in front of us) is that, for the most part, wealth and professional success aren’t salient factors in how people view each other—people are re-living their college days and the memorable experiences they had with their college friends. I spent a fair bit of time laughing and talking with friends who could have bought and sold me many times over as well as friends who are concerned about where their next paycheck is going to come from or who are counting the days until retirement from very modest jobs—but there wasn’t really an obvious hierarchy between those classmates who had “made it big” and everyone else. Everyone was just happy to be back together again.

Branford College, our reunion headquarters and where many alums stayed in their old dorm rooms

And when it comes to high-powered or more modest careers, some had combined the two—at a reunion panel on career ambitions and mid-life career changes, one female classmate who had traded a high-flying career in Wall Street finance to become a large animal veterinarian spoke at length about her experience. Someone asked her whether when she was cleaning stables whether she had ever regretted her career decision and she paused and said:

“No—one day when I had my arm stuck all the way up a cow’s butt, I thought, ‘This is what I was meant to do” drawing gales of sympathetic laughter.

As for social mobility, many people had kids in college (or graduated) and while some had children enrolled at Yale or other similarly elite schools, most of their kids had far more modest profiles and academic ambitions—a testament to America’s ever churning social order.

Those who simply dismiss places like Yale as the home of coddled elitists are not totally off the mark, but they miss an important part of the story. While there were certainly a significant minority of my class that came from extraordinarily privileged backgrounds, the substantial majority of us came from very normal backgrounds. While my wife and I had families that valued education, the two childhood homes that I grew up in are valued today at, on average, well less than the U.S. median, and my family (living in a car-dependent small town) had one 12 year old car until I was a teenager. My wife grew up in an even more modest financial background. Both of us only attended Yale due to the availability of substantial financial aid. The inconvenient truth for the pure populists who like to hate Harvard and similar schools is that while they have their substantial share of legacies, major donor kids, insufferable left-wing political activists who got in because of their activism, the vast majority of students are ultimately there because they were very smart, hardworking, and talented. A more critical view might say that many of them are be also be the types that are “good functionaries” within the system, but that’s rarely all they are.

When I first visited Yale’s campus 35 years ago, I was impressed by grand (grandiose?) monuments like this one, in front of the Commons dining hall.

And that is also primarily, why they became successful. When I look at my class’ major financial givers for reunion, of those I knew, relatively few came from “elite” backgrounds. One of the reasons that these universities are so damaging today is not because they are propping up a bunch of entitled aristocratic losers, but because they are corrupting the minds of some of our best and brightest students who are going on to achieve quite a lot in the world.

The left’s domination of institutions like Harvard and Yale is one of the reason why they tend to consistently outmaneuver us—we continue to have an elite talent gap that no amount of populist thinking can wish away. Of course, there is a *ton* of talent that exists beyond the Ivy League—some of the smartest people I know didn’t even go to college at all. And anyone who has watched the performance of the so-called “best and the brightest” in government over the past several decades can tell you that IQ can be very overrated in designing good governance--but on a per capita basis, my classmates are a very accomplished bunch—and always have been.

And yet, despite all of the obvious problems in the Ivy League Yale’s new President, in her speech to alumni, seemed largely in denial about the nature of these problems. Two of the alumni “educational” panels offered during the reunion were one on “reproductive rights” and another one on gun control, both with a strong implicit message that, *of course* all right thinking people would view these issues one way.

I attended an event put on by the Buckley Institute (a group dedicated to growing free speech and intellectual diversity in the campus community) with a distinguished Yale Law Professor—a liberal, but of the old school who had consistently encouraged greater ideological diversity and defended increased conservative participation in campus intellectual life. And yet this same professor was in love with his own (admittedly prodigious) intellect and felt that the answer was to turn over governance of university to its most distinguished professors.—almost certainly a recipe for disaster—the professors are just as complicit as the administrators are for Yale’s sad current state.

As we were leaving reunion, a classmate who I had been friendly with as an undergrad, now a wealthy donor to the university, asked me whether, if I could merely lift a finger to save Yale from its current potential problems, would I do it?

I thought for just a second, and had to reluctantly conclude, even after an enjoyable reunion weekend, that I would not.

For all of the wonderful tradition, the enormously talented students and the non-negligible amount genuinely pathbreaking research at Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy League schools, they’ve simply become too corrupted to exist in their current form without major reforms. As I told my friend—they’ve put their hand on the hot stove, and they need to understand that when they do that, they get burned.

The Ivy League has shown itself to be incapable of reform without massive governmental pressure. We’ve been trying “internal reforms” for decades and they haven’t worked. People need to lose funding, programs need to be shut down and leadership needs to be changed. Until then, count me among the supporters of the large proposed tax on the endowments of these wealthy schools (as reflected in the current version of “The big beautiful bill”) and the continued withholding of federal funds. Their privileged position as charities assumes these universities are existing in the public service. They aren’t doing that today.

We’re not going to get a better country until we get better elites, and that means we need vastly better institutions to train them. My return to Yale, pleasant as it was to see old friends again, shows how far we still have to go.