Mark Shields had Ivy League fatigue — and he had a point
from The Boston Globe — also in the print edition (pdf)
The late pundit prized civic trust and the common good. With his death, I wonder: Do America’s elite schools even teach those ideals anymore?
By Jim Sleeper | Updated June 28, 2022
When President Obama, a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, nominated the former Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court in 2010, the PBS News Hour’s Jim Lehrer asked its commentator Mark Shields what he made of the fact that, with her confirmation, all nine justices would hold degrees from Ivy League universities.
Shields, a son of Weymouth whose death on June 18 has left a hole in the soul of TV punditry, gave Lehrer an unvarnished answer: “I am so tired of Ivy Leaguers, I really am. I want somebody who went to a state university . . . who worked nights, maybe, to pay for their own books, who either was in . . . the enlisted ranks of the United States military or knows somebody who was, somebody who . . . is west of the Hudson and east of Malibu. Why do we . . . restrict it to this pool . . . ? I really just think it is terribly elitist, I mean, it sounds like the British ruling class.”
The Ivied overgrowth that rankled Shields wasn’t rectified by President Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch (Columbia University, Harvard Law School, Oxford PhD) and Brett Kavanaugh (Yale College, Yale Law School). Only Amy Coney Barrett (Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tenn., and Notre Dame Law School) has broken the pattern. Shields, himself a University of Notre Dame alumnus who respected her qualifications, nevertheless considered her rushed, partisan confirmation “a sham or just a pretense.”
His quick wisdom came from a Massachusetts Irish Catholic working-class-parish sense of right and wrong, tempered with compassion and an impish appreciation of absurdity. When he deadpanned that some hypocritically censorious public authority would “ticket you for double-parking outside the orphanage on Christmas Eve,” his point — that political hacks wouldn’t let even a good deed like giving toys to poor kids on Christmas go unpunished — reflected his sense that bureaucracy and consumerism were draining the life out of what G.K. Chesterton had called “a nation with the soul of a church.”
Since Shields’s death, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own experiences inside the elite bastions about which he was so skeptical. I was a Jewish public school kid from Western Massachusetts who’d never heard of the WASP, patrilineal private preparatory schools of the Yale classmates I’d found aristocratic and chilly when I first arrived in New Haven in 1965.
Early one morning in 1969, stumbling across a residential college courtyard after an all-night party, I came upon two groundskeepers contemplating trees festooned with streams of toilet paper hurled by my drunken classmates. I tried to commiserate, but a stolid veteran of such cleanups cut me short. “It’s OK,” he said. “You guys deserve it once in a while. You’ve got a lot on your minds. You’re up late most nights studying.” I remember thinking, If only he knew how little it’s true.
Now, that man’s successors’ trust has likely curdled into easily tapped anger. And today’s elite college graduates scramble out of their gilded incubators lacking civic compasses and commitments deeper than platitudes and shareholder values. Rare among them will be those who make the time or have the inclination to double-park outside an orphanage on Christmas Eve.
And yet, the old colleges were founded to nourish dedication to the public good. The old colleges knew that the world isn’t flat but that it has abysses that open unpredictably beneath our feet and in our hearts, and that students need coordinates to plumb those depths and to face down the demons in them and in themselves. That root has been displaced by STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — to which faith and virtue are instrumental but not foundational.
Shields knew that a good society needs to ground meritocracy in civic trust. He knew that the best leaders might come from Little Leagues as much as from Ivy Leagues. He knew they arise from state universities, historically Black colleges, and religiously denominational colleges like his own Notre Dame. And he knew they were to be found among immigrants, union halls, and civic organizations and movements.
Many of those civic crucibles were opened and led by Ivy League alums, but I wonder how many of my former students appreciate that nation-building achievement. Shields spoke for Americans like the two groundskeepers I met that morning in 1969, before colleges like Yale and Harvard became career-networking centers and cultural gathering places for a global elite that is no longer accountable to any democratic polity or moral code.
America feels a long way from the days of civic-minded Ivy grads such as Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and his brothers Robert and Teddy, and Barack Obama. I wonder: Do the old colleges still balance students’ training for worldly success with the arts and disciplines of citizen leadership and truth seeking, whatever the political or economic risks?
Jim Sleeper, a journalist in New York, taught expository writing at Harvard in the 1970s and seminars on journalism, liberalism, and democracy at Yale from 1999 to 2021.
Jim, thanks for the article. I couldn’t agree more with Shields. I came from a small central Indiana town that had a mediocre public high school. Maybe it wasn’t even mediocre by Eastern standards. Coming to Yale was as much a cultural upheaval as an academic challenge for me. At the time, Yale apparently made the decision that it’s student body would be enriched by greater diversity – more students from public schools and places west of the Alleghenies. The same no doubt would be true for our Executive and Judicial branches – more people from non-Ivy universities and from backgrounds that are not tailored to send students into the Ivies. Surely greater diversity would bring new perspectives and new perspectives might help us get out of the mess we’re in.
Having said that, I don’t think I agree with your hazy reminiscing about the “old colleges” of our youth that prepared students to go into the world to do “public good” and fight against temptations, or, as you put it, “to face down the demons” in the abyss. I defer to you in judging today’s graduates. I haven’t mingled with college students, let alone Yale students, since we left in 1969. However, I don’t think, as a whole, the graduates “of old” were necessarily any less driven by ambition than the graduates of today that you describe. Certainly the Kennedys were driven by ambition. David Halberstram’s “Best and Brightest” may have cloaked their participation in the mythology of public service but there is no question they too were ambitious. Teddy Roosevelt was an aggressively ambitious person. The wealth and power gap we have today was orchestrated and promoted significantly by our generation. Add to that the haphazard and reluctant efforts to address global warming. To be sure, there are plenty of people who graduated from the “old colleges” who went into the world and served the true public good without regard to their own personal rewards or prestige. But there is no question that we…the “old” graduates of those colleges…played a major role in bringing us to where we are now. I guess time will tell whether today’s graduates do a better job of steering the ship than the graduates of the “old colleges.” If they don’t, we’re all hosed.
Fred, I really appreciate this. We’re both actually pretty much “on the same page” — more so than my Globe op-ed piece may have suggested in a few hundred words. I’d love to hear other classmates’ reactions to that column and to your response, but let me try to summarize what I’ve been arguing in many venues about the “old Yale” that we entered in 1965 and the Yale that’s been graduating a different cohort since the late 1970s. Btw, I don’t think that co-education was the huge turning point; I think it’s that, since around then, the socio-economic class composition of Yale undergraduates, and the nature of American civic-republican ethos, have changed pretty dramatically.
The “old Yale” ethos has been buffeted and indeed transformed by global economic, technological, demographic, and cultural riptides that I do blame on big-corporate and financialized capital, but I won’t go into that here. I don’t think that the old ethos should be romanticized, although it really did have some very valuable components that have been lost. If I had to summarize that in a sentence, I’d say that when the old colleges quite rightly threw out the dirty bathwater of their institutionalized racism, sexism, and elitism, they also threw out the baby of strong social bonding and of Platonic Guardianship of the Republic that animated people like Kingman Brewster Jr and William Sloane Coffin Jr, and more than a few of us. How do we save the “baby” of deep, almost patrilineal social bonding while throwing out the bathwater of racial and cultural homogeneity and depth in which that baby had been bathed? Yes, that baby could be insular, snobby, etc., and the old ways had to be transformed. I know only too well — and I’ve written only too often — that the old ways were both strong in a good sense and perverse in a bad sense, all at once.
Now, it’s my belief that even as the old colleges were trying, quite nobly, via leaders like Brewster and Coffin, to broaden their composition and to become more cosmopolitan they also became more shallow, in the sense that — as I imply in the Globe piece — the colleges began to admit and to graduate people who would be maestros of STEM and spread-sheets and “world is flat,” neoliberal ventures (like Yale’s with Singapore) but who would lack any cultural anchors, foundations, call it what you will.
Having taught Yale undergrads from 1999 -2020, I love many of them, and I certainly don’t dismiss them all as neoliberal functionaries. But I think that many of them are suffering from a lack of foundations and directions — as is the whole country and its republican institutions. Some of them are “better” than we were, in that they’re more cosmopolitan and more comprehending of the world beyond Yale and the United States. But many of them are too adaptable to whatever is being generated by the forces that are dissolving trustworthy social bonds. The conservatives among you may blame those forces on “woke” liberals, but that’s not what’s really driving them, and you know it if you think about it.
Graduates of the “old colleges” (like many of us) were too parochial and insular and social-class bound, but to the extent that we were truly touched by “liberal education” in the good, classical sense, we learned to leave a margin of room for dissidents, even “radicals” to speak freely and act conscientiously. We saw this playing out in our own time, when Coffin was leading protests against the Vietnam War. Plenty of my posts on this website covered all this, so I’d better stop here. Suffice it to say that our generation had some grit and some principles by which it was at least willing to be called to account, even if it wasn’t always living up to them. Today’s generation, by contrast, tends to lack the grit and the grounding, so it’s more “open” but less decisive. I really will stop there for now!