Great reflections. I stopped going to reunions because they were painful reminders of decline. What % of current Yale students come from white working class backgrounds like you, Rob Henderson, and JD Vance? That demographic seems to be shrinking every year in the Ivy League. They prioritize grooming CCP princelings and DEI commissars.
It just reminds you that progressivism/wokeism really is a religion or akin to one. Imo. That's why they treat political disagreement more like the person disagreeing is a heretic than someone to be rationally argued with.
Excellent essay. You are, of course, correct when you state ”…we continue to have an elite talent gap that no amount of populist thinking can wish away…”, but that reality is rapidly changing because of two interrelated reasons: 1) The inexorable flight of right-thinking elites, most of these Ivy League-educated, to populism or populist causes (see Trump/Vance, for example) and 2) the rapid disintegration of elite competence among those left behind (a function of that “damage” you reference above) since the type of Leftism that now reigns in academic institutions (not just the Ivies) inevitably leads to wholesale intellectual degradation and entropy.
I grew up in New Haven in the 1960s and 70s among scholars, many of whom were associated with Yale and most who were born before WWII. Exceptionally literate, broad-minded, courteous, healthy in mind. Three of us in the family earned Yale HGS diplomas within a generation. They (and we three) were scholars of a different sort -- interested only in the discovery of truth.
By the time I was at the graduate school in the 80s, with friends in various other departments, it was clear to me just how dramatically unscholarly much of the research had already become; the fraud of de(con)struction the star of the English department, Marxist-reinvented history (a theory in search of evidence, which always proves the fantasy it sets out to by denying what is true and affirming what is false) ran through the history departments unabated, and the Art school refused to teach drawing and perspective, telling students to "make it ugly," etc.
In the forty years since I attended, anecdotally (and perusing its research), one can not conclude but that Yale has led the Poison Ivy League further down the dead end of its treasured falsehoods -- central to them all being the principle to which they adhere, that there is no truth -- into the obliquity that Gramsci and his loathsome nihilist bedfellows desperately desired to bring about, such was their hatred of mankind and especially of God.
The misery of their ideas, the gibberish of their slovenly anti-scholarship -- I mean Yale researchers and Ivy Leaguers in general, with few exceptions -- comes at great cost to them personally (for they are filled to the brim with self-loathing, a prerequisite to the loathing of others), to all those associated with them who touch their ideas and, of course, to the institution itself, which people such as I now think of with equal measures of wistfulness and revulsion.
Yes. But I've come to the conclusion it is gibberish. Yes, it appears to make sense, subject verb object, but there is no meaningfulness expressed. I think, actually, many of them are insane.
This is exactly so. Decades of efforts to reform the institutions internally haven’t worked. The Ivies and others have proven themselves immune to reform. Why would they? There’s no incentive. Pay’s great and the accumulated prestige keeps the scheme going. People do need to lose funding, programs do need to be shut down and leadership does need to change. Tax the endowments. Tax them real hard.
I’m currently in Ithaca and I sense the same attitude. The dollar amounts are a bit smaller, but the participants are busy celebrating how wonderful they all are!
It is bizarre just how contradictory highly selective universities have become. They're in large part defined by the strong reputation of the very few elite students who are able to gain acceptance, but then these same schools promote a left wing ideology which usually seems to eschew hierarchy as something undesirable. The Ivy league has become an oxymoron.
Edit needed: “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.”
Great reflections. I stopped going to reunions because they were painful reminders of decline. What % of current Yale students come from white working class backgrounds like you, Rob Henderson, and JD Vance? That demographic seems to be shrinking every year in the Ivy League. They prioritize grooming CCP princelings and DEI commissars.
There's no question we need to have fundamental reforms.
And we can't expect Yale to do it without external pressure.
It just reminds you that progressivism/wokeism really is a religion or akin to one. Imo. That's why they treat political disagreement more like the person disagreeing is a heretic than someone to be rationally argued with.
Leftie has morphed his old slogan of "the personal is political" into "the political is personal."
Excellent essay. You are, of course, correct when you state ”…we continue to have an elite talent gap that no amount of populist thinking can wish away…”, but that reality is rapidly changing because of two interrelated reasons: 1) The inexorable flight of right-thinking elites, most of these Ivy League-educated, to populism or populist causes (see Trump/Vance, for example) and 2) the rapid disintegration of elite competence among those left behind (a function of that “damage” you reference above) since the type of Leftism that now reigns in academic institutions (not just the Ivies) inevitably leads to wholesale intellectual degradation and entropy.
I grew up in New Haven in the 1960s and 70s among scholars, many of whom were associated with Yale and most who were born before WWII. Exceptionally literate, broad-minded, courteous, healthy in mind. Three of us in the family earned Yale HGS diplomas within a generation. They (and we three) were scholars of a different sort -- interested only in the discovery of truth.
By the time I was at the graduate school in the 80s, with friends in various other departments, it was clear to me just how dramatically unscholarly much of the research had already become; the fraud of de(con)struction the star of the English department, Marxist-reinvented history (a theory in search of evidence, which always proves the fantasy it sets out to by denying what is true and affirming what is false) ran through the history departments unabated, and the Art school refused to teach drawing and perspective, telling students to "make it ugly," etc.
In the forty years since I attended, anecdotally (and perusing its research), one can not conclude but that Yale has led the Poison Ivy League further down the dead end of its treasured falsehoods -- central to them all being the principle to which they adhere, that there is no truth -- into the obliquity that Gramsci and his loathsome nihilist bedfellows desperately desired to bring about, such was their hatred of mankind and especially of God.
The misery of their ideas, the gibberish of their slovenly anti-scholarship -- I mean Yale researchers and Ivy Leaguers in general, with few exceptions -- comes at great cost to them personally (for they are filled to the brim with self-loathing, a prerequisite to the loathing of others), to all those associated with them who touch their ideas and, of course, to the institution itself, which people such as I now think of with equal measures of wistfulness and revulsion.
There's no doubt that the social science "scholarship" at places like Yale is particularly pernicious.
Yes. But I've come to the conclusion it is gibberish. Yes, it appears to make sense, subject verb object, but there is no meaningfulness expressed. I think, actually, many of them are insane.
This is exactly so. Decades of efforts to reform the institutions internally haven’t worked. The Ivies and others have proven themselves immune to reform. Why would they? There’s no incentive. Pay’s great and the accumulated prestige keeps the scheme going. People do need to lose funding, programs do need to be shut down and leadership does need to change. Tax the endowments. Tax them real hard.
I’m currently in Ithaca and I sense the same attitude. The dollar amounts are a bit smaller, but the participants are busy celebrating how wonderful they all are!
It is bizarre just how contradictory highly selective universities have become. They're in large part defined by the strong reputation of the very few elite students who are able to gain acceptance, but then these same schools promote a left wing ideology which usually seems to eschew hierarchy as something undesirable. The Ivy league has become an oxymoron.
Edit needed: “The left’s domination of institutions like Harvard and Yale is one of the reason why they tend to consistently outmaneuver us…”
Edit needed: “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.”