(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
In the column, Leo deplored the “indifference, if not disdain” of the “chattering classes” at Ivy League universities for careers in “the FBI, the CIA and the military.” He noted that “Harvard threw the ROTC off campus during the turmoil over Vietnam” and that even today Harvard students who want to participate in ROTC “have to trek over to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to train.” At Yale it is worse: to “fulfill ROTC requirements, a student has to make a 150-mile roundtrip to the University of Connecticut.” “Princeton’s Army ROTC graduated a grand total of two people last May.”
The CIA is in comparable straits. “In recent years, the CIA has recruited heavily among top collegians, but has had much more success at Big Ten and Big 12 schools than at places like Harvard, Yale or Stanford,” even though “most of the network that founded the agency came from Yale.” Leo’s hope is that the recent terrorist attacks will end this tendency of Ivy Leaguers to hold “themselves aloof from the work of defending the nation at time of great peril” and that they will change their thinking about careers in the military and government security agencies because we “need our best young people to enter the fields that protect us from the threat of terrorism.”
And what is wrong with such a sentiment? On a certain level, nothing at all. No one would object to Ivy Leaguers joining the list of candidates for military and FBI careers. But…well how to say this without sounding peevish? Here goes: The fact that Ivy League graduates have not been flocking to the military and the CIA has not been that great a loss for the nation.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to sound like George Wallace mocking “pointy-headed intellectuals.” I am not belittling the talent and character of the typical Ivy League student. I do insist, however, that Ivy Leaguers are not superior to the better students at, say, the University of North Carolina, Notre Dame, Ohio State or West Point. Ivy League students and alumni are not the only members of the “nation’s elite.” We will survive if they go to work for Newsweek and serve on Joseph Lieberman’s staff instead of enlisting in the Marines.
You can ask anyone who is familiar with what goes on during the admissions process in the typical American high school to verify what I say. The student who is admitted to an Ivy League college nowadays is not always superior in scholarly ability or potential to those who are turned down. The selection process has become highly arbitrary, often downright quirky. There is an aphorism employed by the admissions counselors at the Ivy League schools these days that reveals why: “If we wanted to, we could fill our entering freshman class with high school valedictorians.” I have no reason to doubt that this is the case. There are a lot of high schools in this country, and the top students at those schools are more mobile than in decades past. The possibility of financial aid leads them to apply to expensive Ivy League schools that their counterparts of fifty years ago would never have dreamed of attending.
For a variety of reasons, the Ivy League schools have decided that it is better for them to admit a diverse mixture of students instead of all these valedictorians knocking at their doors. So, fair or not, other more subjective criteria than grades and scores on standardized tests now play a crucial role in the admissions process. Some are long-standing exceptions. For example, athletes, musicians, and sons and daughters of wealthy alumni and politicians are often admitted over students with superior academic records. As we all know, race also comes into play. Minority students are frequently chosen over candidates with better grades and standardized test scores.
What interests me just now is something else: a new politically correct yardstick that is used to evaluate candidates with similar records of classroom achievement. I have in mind the way “non-academic” and “community service” accomplishments are used by admissions counselors. Here is what happens. Admissions counselors at our prestigious schools are faced with piles of applications from students with superior grades and SAT scores. What to do? They evaluate the student’s accomplishments outside the formal classroom setting to differentiate between them. This would be unobjectionable, if it were not for the tendency of university admissions counselors to judge the student’s outside activities from the politically correct point of view that dominates the campus scene.
Let me give you a specific example of what I mean. A few years ago, a student at the school where I used to work was accepted by Brown University. She had good grades, but no better than several other students who were rejected. I found out from this student’s father what opened the door for her. She had volunteered to help register minority voters in a poverty stricken area near her home. The admissions counselor told her and her father that he was impressed by her social conscience and willingness to “get involved” in the political process.
And what is wrong with that? Nothing – if her social activism had separated her from a bunch of couch potatoes who spent their time watching MTV. But that is not the only type of student she was chosen over. I can’t prove it of course – just as I can’t prove that Hillary Clinton knew how the missing Whitewater files popped up on the table outside her office – but I am certain nonetheless that other categories of community service would not have helped this student in the admissions process.
Want to bet that if she had spent her time working with Right-to-Life groups her application would not have been evaluated as favorably? How much? Come on. We know that there is community service and there is community service. I would go so far as to argue that the kind of young person considered the All-American boy or girl of decades back would be at a disadvantage when applying to a modern Ivy League school. Jack Armstrong and Nancy Drew might not get a second look. Young people who study hard and do well in the classroom, who also work after school and participate in athletics, do not have the time to volunteer for AIDS clinics, environmental activist organizations and “community outreach” programs. They can offer no evidence of the “social conscience” that impresses the admissions counselor.
High school seniors know what I am saying is true. They can tell tales of truly impressive classmates who were turned down by Ivy League schools. And they have seen other classmates, racial minorities and those who know how to “paint” their applications with a record of participation in activist causes, admitted.
This shaky notion that Ivy Leaguers are the nation’s elite has insidious implications. It implies that the secular supranationalist ideology that is the consensus at those institutions is the lofty worldview to which the rest of us should aspire. Which is not the case. There are elites and there are elites.