My dear friend Tony Arend is prompted by recent complaints that you have to have gone to an elite law school to have a shot at being a SCOTUS appointee to observe that:
There is a very strange consensus developing relating to the next Supreme Court Justice nominee. [Namely, that President Obama should choose a judge without an Ivy League education to replace John Paul Stevens.]
What troubles me is that this would-be consensus seems to be part of a general tend in American politics to reject anything that has the appearance of being elite. And while I believe it is proper to reject leaders or judges that are snobs or disconnected from reality or condescending or patronizing, I think that in our leadership– both political and judicial– seeking the “elite” is not a bad thing. While the word “elite” has come to be associated with snobs, one of its core dictionary definitions is “the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.” Using this definition, don’t we want an elite surgeon to perform our neurosurgery? Don’t we want an elite group of commandos to rescue a person held hostage? In other words, don’t we want to try to get the best for our most challenging tasks? I don’t really care where the next Supreme Court Justice when to undergrad or law school, but I do want to try to get a person that would be among the best– among the elite.
OTOH, Tony's clearly right if we're using elite to mean "the best." OTOH, there are lots of meanings we give to "elite" these days that are properly rejected.
The best doctor I know didn't go to an Ivy League medical school, but I'd rather trust him to diagnose what ails me than any Harvard-educated MD.
I've never met any Yale-educated law professor that I would let represent me in court. The best litigator I know in fact went to a Tier 4 law school, but I'd want him at my side in court nonetheless.
I wonder whether the consensus to which Tony refers is perhaps motivated by a concern that modern American "elites" are a self-replicating sliver of society entrance to which requires certain credentials. There are those who will tell you that social mobility in the United States is not as easy as we like to think. Indeed, as the Economist's Lexington observed a couple of years ago:
AMERICAN universities like to think of themselves as engines of social justice, thronging with “diversity”. But how much truth is there in this flattering self-image? Over the past few years Daniel Golden has written a series of coruscating stories in the Wall Street Journal about the admissions practices of America's elite universities, suggesting that they are not so much engines of social justice as bastions of privilege. Now he has produced a book—The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates—that deserves to become a classic.
Mr Golden shows that elite universities do everything in their power to admit the children of privilege. If they cannot get them in through the front door by relaxing their standards, then they smuggle them in through the back. No less than 60% of the places in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra “hook”, from rich or alumni parents to “sporting prowess”. The number of whites who benefit from this affirmative action is far greater than the number of blacks.
The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidates—George Bush and John Kerry—were “C” students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they had not come from Yale families. Al Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit “legacies” (ie, the children of alumni). Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants overall. Amherst admits 50%. An average of 21-24% of students in each year at Notre Dame are the offspring of alumni. When it comes to the children of particularly rich donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Harvard even has something called a “Z” list—a list of applicants who are given a place after a year's deferment to catch up—that is dominated by the children of rich alumni.
Why do Mr Golden's findings matter so much? The most important reason is that America is witnessing a potentially explosive combination of trends. Social inequality is rising at a time when the escalators of social mobility are slowing (America has lower levels of social mobility than most European countries). The returns on higher education are rising: the median earnings in 2000 of Americans with a bachelor's degree or higher were about double those of high-school leavers. But elite universities are becoming more socially exclusive. Between 1980 and 1992, for example, the proportion of disadvantaged children in four-year colleges fell slightly (from 29% to 28%) while the proportion of well-to-do children rose substantially (from 55% to 66%).
If this is what's driving the consensus to which Tony refers, I have no problem with that consensus. Indeed, I think it's over due. I refer you in this regard to Christopher Lasch's book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch. The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."
In a final section titled "The Dark Night of the Soul," Lasch examines what he considers a spiritual crisis at the heart of Western culture. This crisis is the product of an over-attachment to the secular worldview, he maintains, which has left the knowledge elite with little room for doubt and insecurity. Traditionally, institutional religion provided a home for spiritual uncertainties as well as a source of higher meaning and a repository of practical moral wisdom. The new elites, however, in their embrace of science and secularism, look upon religion with a disdain bordering on hostility. "The culture of criticism is understood to rule out religious commitments," Lasch observes. Today, religion is "something useful for weddings and funerals but otherwise dispensable." Bereft of a higher ethic, the knowledge classes have taken refuge in a culture of cynicism, inoculating themselves with irreverence. "The collapse of religion," he writes, "its replacement by the remorselessly critical sensibility exemplified by psychoanalysis, and the degeneration of the 'analytic attitude' into an all-out assault on ideals of every kind have left our culture in a sorry state."
In sum, if by elite you mean the end result of a meritocracy -- a fair tournament in which everybody competes on a more or less even playing field (equality of opportunity) -- than I agree that I'd like the next SCOTUS to be an elite judge. But if by "elite" you mean one of Lasch's new elites, with their children of privilege, and their contempt for religion and traditional American values, then count me out.
My guess is Tony will accept this as a friendly amendment. But let's ask.
