Wayne O'Leary

Crumbling Walls of Ivy

Time was when America’s Ivy League colleges and universities were bastions of liberalism. No longer. Today, these reputable ivy-covered institutions tend more to be bastions of money and privilege; they’re also increasingly marked by their role in turning out conservative political leaders, and stifling free expression and left-of-center opinion on their campuses.

Not so long ago, the Ivies — their number includes Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Pennsylvania — were notable for producing liberal leaders and staffing liberal governments. Presidents FDR and JFK both matriculated at Harvard, as did Barack Obama, and their administrations reflected its influences.

The New Deal, in particular, owed much of its flair and innovation to Ivy League faculty and graduates, including members of the famous Rooseveltian Brain Trust, personified by Columbia’s Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell and Adolph Berle, and Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter, Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen. Kennedy’s New Frontier derived its liberal cachet in part from its Harvard cohort of advisors John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr, and the president’s brother Robert.

As late as the 1950s, celebrated Yale grad and right-wing intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. complained (in his book “God and Man at Yale,” 1951) of the malign leftist influences permeating his alma mater. He’d feel more comfortable now, despite the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton sojourned at Yale Law School in the 1970s. In more recent times, Yale Law has been represented by prominent Republicans, such as Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri (class of 2006) and J.D. Vance of Ohio (class of 2013), Donald Trump’s choice for vice president.

Harvard, meanwhile, formerly noted for graduating generations of Roosevelts and Kennedys, now advances the likes of conservative Senator Ted Cruz (R, Tex.), who took his law degree there in 1995 following undergraduate work at another Ivy, Princeton. Harvard Law also produced Arkansas’ Republican Senator Tom Cotton (class of 2002) and Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis (class of 2005); the latter received an Ivy League bachelor’s degree as well, from Bill Buckley’s Yale.

And let’s not forget the Bush family. The patriarch, George H. W. Bush, earned his B.A. at Yale (class of 1948), as did his son George W. (class of 1968), who went on to get a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard in 1975. The Bushes exemplify the importance of “legacy” in gaining acceptance to Ivy League institutions.

So, is it about fame and connections, or simply money? It’s both, actually. The money part of the equation was ably analyzed by a team of New York Times reporters last year (7/28/23) in an article entitled “Who Gets In? Elite Colleges Prefer Wealth.” The Times investigators relied on a recent study by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based, ironically, at Harvard; the examination quantified for the first time the extent to which wealth per se is its own college-admission qualification.

The conclusions reached confirmed what most observers suspected, but could not prove. The main takeaways: one in six students at Ivy League schools had a parent in the upper 1% in annual income (over $611,000), and among applicants with the same SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, those from families in the top 1% were 34% more likely to gain admission, while those from families in the top 0.1% were twice as likely to be successful.

(The analysis was based on federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college attendees from 1999 to 2015 and standardized test scores from 2001 to 2015. Included were all eight Ivy League schools plus four other elite universities — Stanford, Duke, MIT and the University of Chicago.)

The results of this research, said Times investigators, provide the clearest picture to date of “how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.” Only 1% of collegians attended the dozen elite institutions examined, but they accounted for 12% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 13% of the top 0.1% of earners, and fully 25% of U.S. senators. Statistically, this fortunate minority had double the chances of attending a top-rank graduate school and triple the chances of working for a prestige organization. The Ivies, in short, maintain and protect America’s socioeconomic elite (and by extension its political establishment) and do so deliberately by a policy of favoring the richest scholastic applicants.

How does this rank class discrimination translate politically? Accepting that accumulated money reinforces conservative tendencies, it seems obvious that, as their wealthy-alumni donor bases and investment portfolios have increased in recent decades — Harvard, for instance, now boasts an endowment of $50 billion — the Ivies have become a more cordial environment for establishment conservatives and a less cordial one for advocates of change, specifically for professors and students on the political left.

A resultant scenario played out over the past year in the campus response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Aggressively activist university presidents, urged on by reactionary boards of trustees and big financial donors, took hard-line initiatives at several Ivy schools (Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Brown) that banned peaceful protests, dismissed staff members, suspended students or had them arrested, censored college newspapers, and generally undermined academic freedom.

The outward rationale for the crackdown was that criticism of Israel was tantamount to antisemitism. An underlying consideration, however, was resistance to student demands for divestment of Israeli-related investments based on fears that economically powerful alumni donors might curtail their monetary support.

While public universities are struggling to survive budget cuts, large private institutions have become accustomed to living high on the hog. Since 1980, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, annual donations to schools like the Ivies have quadrupled to $60 billion, with 80% coming from 1% of the donors. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

There are other manifestations of the increasing rightward tilt of the Ivies, including one rather recent personnel incident that should interest progressive populists. It concerns the academic fate of prize-winning French economist Gabriel Zucman, who, along with fellow controversialists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, has pioneered in the study of economic inequality and tax evasion arising from the world financial crisis of 2007-09.

In 2019, Zucman, who’s employed at UCal-Berkeley, was offered a high-profile post by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; the university’s president, disturbed by the populist economist’s energetic attacks on wealth concentration, vetoed the appointment. That’s the mentality of today’s right-trending Ivy League.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2024

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