What’s with people fretting over whether Obama is building a team made up of too many people from the Ivy League? Don’t we want our President surrounding himself with smart people?
Two weeks ago,
David Brooks, writing in The New York Times, praised Obama’s selections of advisers and cabinet members because they struck him, on the surface anyway, as being very smart. But now comes the backlash.
Frank Rich, in the same newspaper, reminds us that the brightest are not always the best. (That should seem obvious, but often it’s not.) Rich brings up Kennedy’s advisers during the Vietnam War, and Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, in the months leading up to the current economic meltdown, as extremely bright people who nevertheless made huge mistakes in judgment. Joseph Epstein, in the Weekly Standard, writes that he distrusts the kind of people who end up at top colleges and professional schools because they’re “rarely deep” and are marked by a “furious drive to burning if ultimately empty ambition.” And Alec MacGillis, in The Washington Post, surveys the opinions of several observers who are skeptical of those educated in elite institutions who haven’t done much outside of academe, seeing in them an arrogance, a penchant for theory, and a lack of managerial skills.
Back in the late 70s, when I moved to Los Angeles from the East Coast, I learned my lesson about the idiocy of school snobbery. I was startled to discover that my education — in the men-only Ivy days — at one of the Seven Sister colleges, which had caused me to strut around in early adulthood tainted by a vague sense of being somehow “better” than other people, didn’t count for squat. In L.A., the first thing people asked you wasn’t where you went to school, but what kind of car you drove. More than one Angeleno thought Mount Holyoke, my particular alma mater, was a nunnery. Lesson learned.
People who never quite get over having attended an “elite” college are typically vain and often a little silly about it. (I particularly remember one instance, at a parents-council meeting at the small liberal-arts college my daughter was attending, in which a fellow parent kept dropping hints about having gone to college “in Massachusetts,” “near Boston,” “just across the river,” etc., in a futile attempt to get me to ask, “Oh, so you went to Harvard?”) But they’re seldom actually dangerous.
They can become dangerous, however, when they enter politics and their vanity morphs into intellectual arrogance — a trait that is all too common to certain kinds of people educated at just about any college. Obama could choose his team exclusively from the alumni of community colleges and still end up with a bunch of self-important jerks who won’t listen to other people, insist that their pet strategies alone can solve the nation’s problems, and, down deep, regard democracy as an obstacle to be gotten around. There’s nothing wrong with a president starting out with a team of super-brains if they — and especially the president himself — understand that intellectual jerkdom has to be kept in check.
In Elia Kazan’s 1957 movie masterpiece, A Face in The Crowd, the Huey-Longish central character (and a kind of proto-Fox News personality), “Lonesome” Rhodes (portrayed unforgettably by Andy Griffith) puts up a big banner, right at the end of the film, quoting himself to the effect that “There’s nothing as trustworthy as the ordinary mind of the ordinary man.” If you’ve seen the movie, you recognize the irony. An ordinary mind can be as dangerous as an extraordinary one. And boy, have we seen examples of that over the last several years. So, let’s just hope that Obama’s picks — Ivy League alumni or not — turn out to be extraordinary.
