David Brooks says Harvard broke America? Bu Asian Americans broke Harvard.
by Emil Amok
The Game is this weekend—the Harvard-Yale game, of course.
It’s usually less about the football and more about the drinking.
This year’s event comes with a new twist.
The tailgate talk will likely include a discussion on who’s to blame over the impending reign of Trump the Disruptor.
And the demise of higher education.
You don’t have to be a Harvard or Yale grad to have read “How the Ivy League Broke America,” by David Brooks, in The Atlantic.
But it’s the nagging question in higher education these days after the Election of 2024, where a phenomenon is becoming an American truism.
Non-college folks vote Republican.
The college-educated vote Democrat.
And the college-educated lost.
Brooks says the Ivy emphasis on creating a cognitive elite, based on IQ and test scores, was birthed at Harvard in the 1950s to create a student body less about “heritage and breeding,” and more about building a leadership class that might be described as the “best and the brightest.”
And now, here we are in 2024 when a diverse mix of Black, Latino, Asian, plus non-college voters formed a coalition to reject it all.
It wasn’t a mandate, maybe just a 2-3 percent difference, a few million votes. They were willing to pledge allegiance to a guy like Trump—white, privileged, and a convicted felon—34 counts. Trump’s also twice impeached from the position he will assume again, known for philandering, a man who was declared in civil court as liable for sexual assault.
America wanted that.
Shunned was a smart, beautiful, successful prosecutor, former U.S. senator, and vice president, who is also a bi-racial, Black, and South Asian Indian woman from humble origins in Oakland, California.
Kamala Harris is the picture of American success and diversity–and she was rejected by the American people.
Brooks wants to blame Harvard and the Ivy League and its definition of a “meritocracy.” But is it really Harvard’s fault?
Brooks believes Harvard’s creation of the cognitive elite led to an “American Caste” system, which is a tough tag for what is supposed to be a democracy.
But to blame higher education alone seems harsh. Especially when the Supreme Court ended the means of mobility by banning affirmative action on race-based admissions last year.
The best social mobility tool and caste breaker was taken away.
Whose fault was that?
Asian Americans.
It was mostly Chinese American students who formed Students for Fair Admissions, the group behind the lawsuit. And they were just a front for the white anti-Affirmative Action careerist, Ed Blum.
A year after the SCOTUS decision, the suit didn’t bring an increase in Asian American students. It did, however, lessen the number of Black and Latino students at Harvard.
It also set the standard for colleges across America. Race-based affirmative action is now dead.
Imagine if Harvard had settled with the SFA and not engaged in a suit that would set a legal precedent. The damage would have been limited to Harvard and not to higher education nationwide. And affirmative action, the tool that even Brooks laments is gone would have survived.
Harvard broke America? In Brooks’ analysis, maybe. But so did the Asian Americans who formed the SFA and were willingly duped by Ed Blum.
I’ll TAKE SOME BLAME TOO
I was at Harvard at the same time that Supreme Court Justice John Roberts was. I was one of the few Asians at the school who was not a foreign national elitist. I was a working-class Asian American, the son of a fry cook from the Philippines. My dad, a colonized American, never made more than $400 dollars a month.
Had I made a more significant impression on Roberts’ and his ilk, maybe they would have seen the value of being in my presence. Or vice versa.
But maybe they didn’t even know I was there.
That might have saved affirmative action and America.
I had my chance to be a Harvard man. But when I got there, I just wanted to be me, not them. Corporate ladder? I wanted to be on the Lampoon. And the WHRB, the college radio station.
I took courses in history and the arts. A friend told me I should get an MBA. For what? At the time, he was always talking about leveraged buyouts, a technique developed by super financiers of the past and now practiced by today’s hedge funds.
Don’t blame Harvard and the Ivys for today’s “caste system,” blame the greedy MBAs. Because what we are really talking about is economic inequality created when MBAs created extreme wealth starting in the ‘70s.
That was exacerbated by the tech booms starting in the late ‘90s and 2000s. Start-ups and their stock options, and society’s turnover from analog to digital.
You can’t compete with that when you’re making an hourly wage.
The worst is yet to come with A.I.
In 2024, voters sensed something was wrong and shook things up. They voted for president based on the high price of eggs. (With maybe a little racism and misogyny thrown in).
And now it’s made intellectuals like Brooks wonder where it all went wrong. Not with higher ed and their obsession with IQ. It’s still capitalism and its obsession with the bottom line.
And so we end up with a person like Trump, and people who believe falsely that government should be run like a business.
The government should always be about people, not profits. But in a world where wealth rules all, tell that to the incoming ruler.
By the way, I have never attended a Harvard-Yale game.
I always scalped my student ticket to a desperate Yalie for a handsome profit.
But again, I failed.
It was still not enough to make a dent in America’s economic inequality.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning columnist and news commentator. He does his micro-talk show on www.patreon.com/emilamok and www.YouTube.com/@emilamok1
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