HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROKE AMERICA

THE MERITOCRACY ISN'T WORKING. WE NEED SOMETHING NEW.

- DAVID BROOKS

Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.

In those days, you didn't have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were "clubbable"good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there. Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared about academics-the "grinds"'-were social outcasts.

But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard.

These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House. (From 1901 to 1921, every American president went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.) People living according to this social ideal valued not academic accomplishment but refined manners, prudent judgment, and the habit of command. This was the age of social privilege.

And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up. The most important of them was James Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American democracy was being undermined by a "hereditary aristocracy of wealth."