We have a problem here in America that I was recently discussing as the problem of the cursus honorum. All our leadership thinks alike, because nearly all of them went to Ivy League schools, then Ivy League grad schools, Ivy League law, then Wall Street or a ladder in government.
It's even worse in Britain. As the Guardian points out, the UK's government is almost wholly led by people who graduated from one university, Oxford, with exactly the same degree: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).
These schools, including Oxford, are not necessarily bad schools. They may well deserve much of the accolades and respect that attaches to them. But they produce tokens of a type, and that type has its own biases, and places where its mind is closed.
Of course, that view is the very reason that "diversity" arguments are floated at these very institutions: the idea is that more people from different backgrounds should undergo exactly the same education. What is needed is diversity on the other end, in terms of electing and appointing leadership.
That kind of diversity would undermine the existence of these schools, however. So much of what they do is built around producing the leadership class, which then hallows their position by sending its offspring back to the very same schools.
16 comments:
OK, I've been trying to keep my mouth shut, but the strain is too much :p
I don't think you can reasonably assert that everyone who goes to an Ivy (and they're VERY different in terms of culture, students, etc.) "thinks alike". That just hasn't been my experience at all.
If you take 10 people who have been through the same experiences, they don't all turn out identical because they come from different families, and more importantly started out with different personalities. I don't think all working class people "think alike" either - that doesn't match anything in my experience.
Or all middle class people.
This whole argument sounds like an attempt to oversimplify things. "Yes, the government is so enormous and so unwieldy that it is failing to function well... but *that's* not the real problem! The real problem is that the leadership class all think exactly the same!"
Even though the leadership class belong to 2 diametrically opposed parties with diametrically opposed notions of what good government looks like.
Even though most of government consists of civil servants who run the day to day business of federal agencies.
Maybe the problems we have here in America really *are* problems of scale. This is what the civil servants I know all believe, and I know civil servants from both parties. They agree that government is actually too big to function well. They agree that mission creep is making it hard to get even basic stuff done.
They just don't agree about where the cuts should be made. I think this argument places way too much emphasis at the top level. I also think things look a LOT simpler from the outside and from a distance.
If you take 10 people who have been through the same experiences, they don't all turn out identical because they come from different families, and more importantly started out with different personalities. I don't think all working class people "think alike" either - that doesn't match anything in my experience.
Doesn't it? Why do the Marines send young people from various different backgrounds through Boot Camp?
Education doesn't change everything about you, but it does create a degree of commonality in world view. Shared experiences, shared language, shared concepts, these things allow anyone who has been through the school -- or the Corps -- to know what they are supposed to do in a given case. They may or many not do it, and some people are better than others. There may be inflections on how they do it that come from their background before their education (that's what drives the diversity argument in higher education). Nevertheless, they'll have a shared sense of what right looks like.
Now, the article makes clear that this likeness is far from perfect -- that's why both British conservative and Labour leaders came from the same program. Nevertheless, I think it accounts for why the Tories are basically "Labour in slow motion," as the Republican Party's national leadership has so often been "Democrats in slow motion." George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard) had nothing to say about Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law), but finds himself moved to criticize Trump (who certainly merits some criticism: but so did Obama).
And what does he criticize? 'Racism and name-calling,' which were regular features of Obama's commentary -- but in the proper way. You say that someone is a 'typical white person,' or that they have 'privilege,' or something like that. To someone educated in the right schools, this won't even sound like racism. They'd probably mock the idea that these explicit appeals to race as an explanatory factor was anything other than a quest for justice. They can't even see it, and it's the education that makes this sort of appeal acceptable while the Trumpian sort is offensive.
I also agree that there's a problem of scale. There is also a problem of the collapse of shared American values, which is a fundamental difficulty.
Still, at least part of the problem is this uniformity of education. We could do with more people who came from outside this bubble. People like McMaster (US Military Academy, U. North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
I went to an Ivy wannabee, William and Mary. It is different from the Ivies, and from such academic competitors as Duke, Bucknell, etc. And the people from there, though they have had many of the same experiences, can be quite different.
And yet not, Cassandra. When I read the alumni magazine, it infuriates me in the same way every month. When my oldest son was considering it and we visited he found the overall culture almost oppressive. Everyone played a sport that involved holding a stick, and they all seemed to be majoring in International Relations, wanting to go to NoVa and get on with the business of ruling the world.
Presbyterians are different from Catholics are different from Baptists, yet there is a similarity among them that runs deep. I am a civil servant myself (social worker at the state psychiatric hospital), and we are indeed different from one another. Yet I am hugely different, and I am aware.
They couldn't keep choosing each other for the SCOTUS and other high positions by accident. Deep sounds to deep, and they know each other.
Somebody has to train the leaders. Ancient China had a bureaucracy test. If you had the knowledge and merit, you could upgrade your class from peasant, to an educated bureaucrat. But you had to pay for your literacy yourself, by passing the test.
That filters down the riff raff from the maybe not so riff raff, but it doesn't base it on aristocratic blood like the British did. Their Empire kind of collapsed because their nobility wasn't worth the sword steel it was made out of.
These days the Leftist alliance controls higher and even lower education. They control who are the teachers, via degrees, who are the professors, via degrees, and who controls the schools, via public education and federal grants.
Bush senior for example, reads the New York Times. So he knew what they thought of his son at least. Then there's Yale and Skull/Bones. Kerry was in it too apparently. "Lots of stuff I can't tell you, but what I can tell you is that this President's policy is..."
Even though the leadership class belong to 2 diametrically opposed parties with diametrically opposed notions of what good government looks like.
Actually, I don't think that's true. I think both parties agree for the most part on what good government looks like, but they want to use that government for different purposes. And even many of their purposes are not diametrically opposed so much as a matter of emphasis.
As it happens, their view of what good government looks like has slowly diverged from much of the rest of the nation's view.
That said, Trump went to an Ivy as well.
Tom..."That said, Trump went to an Ivy as well."
Yes he did, but it doesn't appear to be a core part of his identify in the way it is for many individuals.
I've probably quoted this 1969 passage from Peter Drucker here before, but it's relevant in this context:
"It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman."
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…"
American society today has come far closer to accepting that claim than it had when Drucker wrote the above.
Yeah, David, you're right about Trump, but that's kind of the point. Going to these schools doesn't necessarily mean you'll adopt their identity.
On your Drucker quote, it's very interesting. I didn't realize how much Europe was like that.
It's even worse in Britain. As the Guardian points out, the UK's government is almost wholly led by people who graduated from one university, Oxford, with exactly the same degree: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).
C.D. Darlington, in The Evolution of Man and Society, makes an important point about Oxbridge. One consequence of the Restoration of the monarchy in Great Britain after the death of Cromwell was that only those who belonged to the Anglican Church could attend or teach at Oxford and Cambridge. This didn't change for centuries.
Darlington points out that nearly all of the advances in science and engineering from the 17th through the 19th centuries in Great Britain came from religious Dissenters. Who were Dissenters? Protestants not of the Church of England, such as Puritans, Baptists, etc. The only a way a Dissenter could get into Oxbridge, such as Isaac Newton, was to dissimulate. This meant that Oxbridge played a very minor role in those scientific and engineering advances. Oxbridge became a training ground for the clergy and government bureaucrats.
Advances come from those who are outside the mental place in which the dominant way of thinking is comfortable. It's only natural that dissenters are the ones who move the ball in science and engineering. Those are not team sports. :)
Venture investor Paul Graham on educational credentialism
http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html
AVI:
My husband, sister in law, and brother in law all graduated from W&M. Our oldest son was born there while my husband was an undergrad.
I just don't see this cookie cutter effect in any real people I know. And then there's David's point (Trump went to an Ivy).
Most of the folks I went to HS with went to Ivies or Ivy wannabes (the #1 school was UVA). Yes, there's a stereotypical UVA grad, but I also have dear friends who went there and I forgive them for it.
We'll have to agree to disagree here - I think the size of the government has much more to do with how events play out than the notion that one person or one type of school is the driving force.
Historian D S Cardwell, discussing the question of why England not France took the lead in the Industrial Revolution - even those France was significantly ahead in the sciences--made this point:
"The early leaders (of the emerging industries) were often Dissenters who were excluded from the fruits–some might say the corruptions–of office in State and Establishment. They were therefore free to devote themselves to business as their sole professional aim while the laws of England assured them their property and the profits their genius earned."
(Cardwell is using the term “Dissenters” in its religious sense–ie, these men were not followers of the Church of England.)
Had cotton-spinning and weaving been an “industrial policy” project of the Government, than these Dissenters would have not been the ones selected to create and run the cotton mills. Even leaving religious issues aside, those chosen would surely have been the connected and credentialed–categories that would have left many of the successful cotton masters out. And the history of British industrial development would have been very different.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10688.html
Cass,
We started with an article that is all about how the leadership of both parties in the UK come from the same school, and indeed the same degree program. Given that this program yields both Tories and Labour, no one is suggesting that the smokestack effect creates people who have no individuality or personality of their own. I think you're arguing against a position no one -- including the article's author -- actually holds.
Cass, I think one causal factor in the way events play out is the beliefs and worldviews of those who make the decisions. Universities have a role in shaping beliefs and worldviews.
On the other hand, as you point out, universities are not the only factors involved in this. Military service, religion, and other life experiences certainly shape worldviews, and are often greater influences than universities.
I look at what Grim is talking about as a tendency, not a rule.
Think more in terms of an Overton window. They are in more powerful and more influential positions, and shape the movement of that window a great deal. Who plotted the course of the American primary and secondary education system we're stuck with today? The diversity mantra? Who sets the standards by which journalism is taught? Who developed the legal theories like 'the living Constitution'?
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