"Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates"

I ran into this op-ed at yesterday's Wall Steet Journal that somehow escaped their paywall, so I'm not sure how long it will be up. The thing that strikes me is that the author, R R Reno, who according to the thumbnail is editor of First Things, thinks something changed about elite schools after he graduated (but they were at one time fairly recently, i e, when he was an undergraduate, definitely OK places):

I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.

I went to the First Things website, and immediately I got a pop-up message from the same R R Reno, Editor, that informed me:

First Things is firmly grounded in the truths that endure. We enter the fray of contemporary cultural and political discussions with the confidence that it is God above who oversees our victories and setbacks. This confidence allows us to see clearly and speak soberly during uncertain times.

So I have a few questions for R R Reno, Editor. The first is, precisely when did the big change in the Ivies take place? He implies it must have been just within the past decade, certainly since the turn of the millennium. And Reno is clearly a very smart guy. I mean, he went to Haverford, although this is a safety school, not actually an Ivy. Exactly what changed, and when?

As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.

It's almost as if he was cruising along and happily attending class reunions and alumni dos, but last fall, somebody flipped a switch, and the students suddenly became thin-skinned narcissists, while the administrators became self-abasing poltroons. Just like that. Almost overnight.

R R Reno, Editor, did you ever watch Animal House? I especially liked the "road trip" episode, where the Delta guys visit Emily Dickinson College, see a campus paper headline, "Sophomore Dies In Kiln Explosion" and pick up dates from sorority sisters of the deceased sophomore on the claim that Otter is the distraught fiancé of the explosion victim.

That was the Ivy campus culture of the 1960s, which I lived through. I had lots of dates from sister schools of Emily Dickinson. The Delta guys saw their fellow Ivy students as shallow, self-congratulating, pampered, sheltered, marks. They saw their classes as worthless, and their professors often as not as corrupt opportunists on the make for pretty coeds. Dean Wormer, when it suited him, was a self-abasing poltroon. According to Wikipedia,

In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed Animal House "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was No. 1 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies". It was No. 36 on AFI's "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list of the 100 best American comedies. In 2008, Empire magazine selected it as No. 279 of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time".

I've loved Animal House since it came out. We have it on DVD. It spoke to the not fully formed insights I had at the time about Dartmouth -- one of the schools it was based on -- in a very basic way. I'll grant that most of my schoolmates at the time didn't see things through the same eyes. The whole Ivy admissions routine, then as now, was that the Ivies select the best and the brightest, based on grades, SATs, and extracurriculars, and prepare them to be the next generation of blah blah blah. The students are the first to buy into this; they've played the game, and they've been told they won it. But they're pampered, sheltered, marks.

It's not unusual for Ivy alums to follow campus news and get some inkling that all wasn't as represented to them when they got their letter from admissions telling them they'd made it. The reaction is pretty much uniform -- something's changed! That wasn't how things were at Faber College back then! And generation after generation, decade after decade, there are little alumni revolts.

Maybe R R Reno, Editor of First Things, can get another one going. He's convinced that back in the day, the Ivies produced nice, talented kids. I would suggest he's got some image roughly like the sophomore who died in the kiln explosion at Emily Dickinson. What concerns me is that the editor of First Things shows so little insight into a key cultural issue.

But then, I can't think of even half a dozen pieces I've read in that mag over the past several decades.