Why disgrace is unlikely to erode the allure of Harvard
- A failure of top leadership is not something that deters people aspiring to join an exclusive club—and that’s what an Ivy League university ultimately is.
A few days ago, the president of Harvard University resigned in disgrace. There is a perception among cultural observers in America that the episode has eroded Harvard’s prestige. That cannot be true. Disgrace does not diminish an exclusive club. That is not how prestige works. What ends prestige is, in fact, equality.
After Hamas slaughtered over a thousand Israelis in a single day, wounded over 3,400, and raped an unknowable number, there was widespread denouncement across US universities. Not of Hamas, but of Israel. In political turmoil, university students tend to back the poorer player when their own stakes in the region are very low. But their timing was atrocious. Their protests against Israel began just hours after the massacre. There was another factor at play. Humanitarians have invented sustainable ways to disguise hatred. On American campuses, a dislike for Jews, who have an outsized political influence, can masquerade as love for Palestinians. All this was in full flow in the Ivy League, including Harvard University, whose president Claudine Gay failed to stop extreme posturing against Israel. Influential Jews responded by hitting where it hurts most—donations. They also levelled charges of “anti-Semitism" against some varsities. In a Congressional hearing, when Gay was asked whether calls for genocide against Jews on Harvard’s campus violated its rules on bullying and harassment, she said it depends on “the context." As the face of Harvard, her testimony was a disaster. But she somehow kept her job. Oddly, what brought her stint to an end was the less grave charge that many years ago, in her scholarly works, she had lifted whole paragraphs from the works of other people.
Not just Gay, Harvard too has emerged poorly from the turmoil. But that does not affect its allure for most of the social and economic elite of America and the rest of the world. The weak moral intellect of an exclusive club is not something that repels most aspiring members of the club.
The myth of the Ivy League is that these colleges seek only exceptional students. The world has seen many duds from these universities. Even so, the nature of the world is to give an exclusive club a long rope. Even most people who denounce the Ivy League have some complicated respect for them. There are some whose disdain is honest, who truly do not want to join overrated clubs, but they are very few.
In 2019, news broke that some parents had paid millions of dollars in bribes to secure Ivy League admissions for their wards. Even this did not diminish the lure of these big brands. In fact, the scandal put a financial price on the abstract idea of being a legitimate Ivy League student.
There was a time when the best colleges in the world attracted the best students. In the West, it was a long time ago, in the golden age of the elites when only they had access to quality in any walk of life. Their haunts do not hold the same promise now. But all prestige needs is social exclusivity in the guise of intellectual exclusivity. People grant this halo to a handful of institutes, despite recurring evidence that a typical individual who passes out of these clubs is ordinary or worse, or successful only by the dint of being born in the right home that equips him with exceptional social contacts.
Everything that seems unfair about the luck of the average person who walks into an Ivy League is what makes it alluring. To give an impression of fairness, the Ivy League simulates equality by seeking something that sounds like equality but is not— ‘diversity.’ This is generally an expanded colour palette of cream. With some exceptions, it is the privileged among African-Americans, Hispanics, Indians and Chinese who have the best shot at an Ivy League. Diversity in a system only expands the cultural diversity of its snobs.
If disgrace and mediocrity cannot affect the lure of a prestigious club, what ends prestige? Prestige is not eternal. The moment an exclusive club is breached by an alarming number of the poor and lower middle class, the elite stop applying, and then a college is suddenly not prestigious anymore. This is what happened to many elite Indian colleges. They followed a socially just system for admissions—an entrance exam. That is not how Harvard screens. It has opaque processes. But in India, rising economic democracy, especially for necessities like food and schooling, created a surge of poor and lower-middle-class applicants for engineering, medicine and civil services. Upper-class students could not compete anymore. Once, IITs had among the finest quizzers, writers and music bands. Now people have filled those places who did not have the luxury of pursuing things that have no point. So the IITs have lost their allure among upper classes, who find it easier to enter colleges in the West.
Why is it that when social equality helps the less fortunate gain access to a prestigious club, it ceases to be prestigious? Because prestige is not about that hollow thing called ‘merit’; it is always about the fellowship of an aristocracy.
This principle is at play not only in economics. Take, for instance, the scaling of Mount Everest. Its prestige has been diminished by economic democracy that has made the feat possible for numerous ordinary people, including the disabled.
So what can ruin Harvard is not some disgrace here and there or the mediocrity of its alumni. Harvard will be ruined when its admission process becomes socially just.
