Yale, The Demise Of Excellence, And The Race To The Bottom - A National Metaphor

Athena Phillips was a graduate of Wellesley College, one of the Seven Sisters, a group of women's colleges on an academic par with the Ivy League when Yale and Harvard were not yet co-ed.  She took her education and her privilege seriously, marrying well (Harper Davenport was a descendant of John Davenport who, in search of a more disciplined, rigorous, and faithful Calvinist environment than that of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded New Haven), establishing herself in New York and Palm Beach society but never losing her patrician noblesse oblige spirit. 

She was known for her elegant dinners, her equally well-bred circle of friends, and her collection of Greek bronzes. She had wealth, taste, and privilege but never retreated into that insular, hermetic community of the rich, remained active in civic and community affairs, and felt a duty to serve. 

She was not unlike George H.W. Bush, who before becoming President of the United States was a loyal two-term Vice President to Ronald Reagan, head of the CIA, Ambassador to China, and former Navy combat pilot in WWII.  Wealth hath its privilege, said Bush, but also its duty; and Athena Phillips was cut from the same cloth. 

Her husband, equally well-placed in New England society, Yale graduate, member of the prestigious Skull and Bones society, captain of the baseball team, and Rhodes scholar was not unlike the elder Bush. He entered J.P. Morgan, Wall Street's premier investment bank immediately after college and had made a small fortune before he was thirty. At the same time he set up a trust which, managed with vision and discipline, encouraged the best and the brightest - entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators. 

So it was with some concern that Harper Davenport saw the changes taking place at Yale and the Ivy League itself and the disturbing erosion of the of early American foundational values espoused by Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and his own Davenport family.  This heritage did not begin with the founding of the American republic.  Honor, courage, honesty, compassion, intelligence, and duty were enshrined in Ancient Greece and were the core values taught by Cato the Elder to the future leaders of Rome, and now they were not only dismissed but disparaged. 

 

Davenport and Athena wrote to the Presidents of Yale and Wellesley expressing their dismay at the rapid decline of academic excellence in the name of 'diversity'.  It was one thing to admit students of color who met the highest standards intellectual achievement and who would be valued members of the university community, another thing altogether to disregard ability in the name of 'equity'. 

The response Harper received from the President of Yale who replied in person out of respect for the Davenport family and their storied history, was courteous, respectful, but little more than polemic.  'The black man', he wrote, 'has for too long suffered under the yoke of white privilege and exclusivity, and it is time for Yale to acknowledge its role in imposing this entitlement and to open its doors to the underserved and marginalized'.  

 

To accommodate these newcomers, Yale revised its curriculum to both include a series of remedial classes and to provide courses that would 'meet the cultural needs and expectations of black students'.  The courses Harper had taken at Yale - 'Aeschylus, Sophocles, And the Greek Dramatic Episode' and King Lear, English Prehistory, and The Invention of the Human (this taught by the young Shakespearean eminence Harold Bloom) were gone, replaced by 'Slavery, Feminism, And The Heroic Journals of Enslaved Women', 'Incantation of Blackness - The Supremacy Of Tribal Consciousness'. 

Courses in philosophy, sociology, psychology and seemingly all the liberal arts reflected this same cultural bias.  The historic achievements of European civilization reflected in the arts, science, and literature were being erased and replaced by dogmatic recanting of received wisdom - European civilization was little more than a 'regional cabal of white supremacy'. 

With little investigation, Athena found that the situation was repeated at Wellesley, the other Seven Sisters, and throughout the Ivy League.  Administrators tripped over themselves to justify this race to the academic bottom, this 'closing of the American mind'. as scholar Allan Bloom wrote, and this racial idolatry.  The Dean of Students at Princeton wrote in a letter to all alumni that the university had finally shed its patrician, Southern cavalier image, and was now home to 'the real America'. 

'We have eliminated all traces of patriarchy and discredited notions of excellence', he wrote.  'SATs will no longer be required, high school transcripts and grade performance will be optional, and emphasis will be placed on 'social performance', essays recounting personal struggles and triumph'. 

Everything is subject to the Bell Curve, the normal distribution of people and events. Einstein, Kant, and Shakespeare are at one asymptote representing those with intelligence so rare that it is shared with very few. Severely mentally retarded adults are at the other end of the scale, doomed by crossed and defective genes to never advance beyond the age of a child; and the rest of us are in the middle, under arc of the curve, sharing modest intelligence with millions.

Artistic talent, practical genius, and religious insight all are subject to normal distribution.  There are just as brilliant Jivaro Indians in the Amazon as there are Descartes or Picasso. One only has to know where to look. They are the best hunters, the most accurate prophesiers, and the most charismatic priests.  They have been gifted with native abilities and the particular energy and ambition to use them. 

The Harvard Red Book, a journal written by Harvard graduates five years after they graduate and every five years thereafter was a good example of the pre-affirmative action ethos of excellence at the university. The initial five- and ten-year editions display the intellectual energy and drive of former students.  They may have started off as lawyers, doctors, or architects; but when they found that their chosen career paths were less rewarding than they had expected, they changed them; and went on to perform well and succeed in them.

The racist epithet, 'white supremacy' stuck in Harper's craw.  It was insulting, ignorant, absurdly reductionist thinking - an intellectual corruption thought only to have been experienced in the worst of Stalinist Russia, the Eastern bloc, and the brutal dictatorships of Africa.  A profoundly self-serving, facile, and unimaginable irrationality. 

Athena was no less livid.  To see her storied family history - one of English nobility, American talent and enterprise expressing the best of European descendancy and New World energy and individualism - derogated and dismissed as if thousands of years of cultural excellence meant nothing; and to see the tribal, Paleolithic culture of Africa lionized and instituted as a cultural ideal - was sickening at best. 

How did this philosophy - one that ascribes the same socio-economic and cultural value to the former slave, the migrant farm worker, and the assembly line worker as to the investment banker, the CEO, the cyber-startup genius, and the Frank Lloyd Wright - ever gain traction and currency?  And most importantly where did this profoundly revisionist view of history ever come from? 

It is not a matter of principle, but a matter of fact - privilege and elitism had been an essential, ineluctable, permanent aspect of human society since its first settlements. Human communities from the most remote Amazon tribe to Imperial Europe have been divided by ability and the power and influence which that confers. 

American public schools focus their investment and their attention on 'the disadvantaged, the underserved, the socially needy' at the expense of the gifted and talented.  Public education should be focusing its attention instead on the best and the brightest, those who will contribute most to their communities and America at large. Taxpayer money should be spent within this perspective of promised accomplishment, not invested in the unpromising. 

Harper and Athena continued to do their part, and gave millions to their private foundations to promote excellence, achievement, talent, and innovation.  The both stopped supporting Yale and Wellesley.