The Rot in the Ivy - A bit more...

  I'm the wrong person to write this post. I already hated Ivy League Schools. Right away I began this post and invective already flowed that had you read it would lose me friends. Powerful ones...

The Ivy League is based on models of privilege that go back to the feudalism of the Middle Ages, where universities were founded in the 1100's for the benefit of a few aristocrats, many of whom were not even the elite of inherited titles, but, rather, the second sons to whom the title never passed and were destined for a life in service to the Church and cloth, to whom education was deliberately hoarded to keep the masses ignorant. 

Even today, you can see how these privilege models stymie their countries. Nowhere more so than in Britain, where the elite go to Oxford and Cambridge, often after elite boarding school, and make connections that define their class and opportunities for the rest of their lives. Like the Ivies, there are the equivalent to 'lesser Ivies' in Britain: London schools like University College, Imperial College, King's College, but at the top two, you can get a 'third' (the equivalent of a 'C') or drop out, but the simple presence of 'Oxbridge' on your resume defines opportunities for the rest of your lives. Were the Oxbridge kids the smartest? Well, most of them were some of the smartest, but nobody can say there weren't kids just as smart at other colleges, but the vast majority of them come from poorer backgrounds who didn't fall into opportunities. 

For the better part of a millennium, these universities were not open to minorities: Christians of minority denominations, people of color, and especially Jews - the 'villains of Europe.' It's really too much to expect that they will ever reform into the true requirements of any time and place. They need to be regulated as much as any corporation needs to, and their graduates' monopolies on the institutions of government needs to be broken up as much as any corporate monopoly. 

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What astounds about educated discourse is that in the place where thoughtful nuance is supposed to reign above all, the embrace of simplistic ideology is inevitable. It was around 1900 Germany, the world center of university life at the time, where the most poisonous nationalism flourished that convinced whole generations of intelligentsia to initiate two world wars. 

There should no more be such a thing as the Ivy League than there should be billionaires or a corporate monopoly. Any institution powerful enough to dictate government policy should be broken up. The holdings of Harvard and Yale should be held by ten unaffiliated schools, old buildings and dorms be damned. The same should go for Princeton and UPenn, and the same for non-Ivies like Stanford and MIT. None of these schools should be more influential than the average liberal arts college where students go to smoke weed and write a thesis about juggling. The richest schools, with the most prestigious professorships and most ambitious students, should be the state schools; where future policy makers are forced to interact with those tens of thousands of peers most affected by the policies they'll implement. It'll go the other way too: the other students will see that the best students are real human beings, hardly different from them. The only real difference? The best students are more boring.