Really excellent insights weaved in with personal experiences. It’s amazing that you are able to brandish such successful skills after doing poorly on the SAT and then going to OU. I’m even “worse” though, and won’t reveal my scores and schools, since they can’t even meet your middling achievements that you clearly overcame to write such lucid well-written pieces. That’s my attempt at humor. I hope I did a lousy job.
The point is that achievement and reaching a great height has complexities that can’t be attributed to attending an IVY League School or not. Some of our most bigot and vile politicians went to only the top Ivy League schools. The Harvard trained lawyer who wrote up an insurrectionist plan that was then carried out, resulting in over 100 dead black Americans, many federal soldiers and one a black state representative executed mafia style, clearly was such scum. His name was Witherspoon Gray and I’ve recently discovered a copy of his plan to overthrow the election in 1876 in South Carolina in certain counties. His plan was successful! They blocked the polls with guns in these largely black American counties, won those elections, which help “freeze” the federal election results, resulting the great compromise of 1877 where the result of the presidential election was made at a table in a hotel instead of the ballot boxes. It reminded me of the 2000 election where Bush won by the vote of one judge in a black robe.
When the foundational morality of inalienable rights is not understood by graduates at Ivy League, then clearly they are not functioning well at all. Yale was an all white male (and jewish male) college until 1974. That’s over 200 years of segregation, functioning on such deeply rooted and practiced autocratic ideology, that now the natural reaction is to deflect and try to keep out blacks and browns by automatic intellectual reflex. They are programmed, because of “rich tradition” and allegiance of donors, to sanctify these schools and embed them with an untouchable image of greatness that is based on historical historical segregation. To idolize such places that produced more white wealth while keeping out black potential is nothing to be proud off, unless your beliefs are to defend autocratic tendencies where greatness and wealth come from the “best” traditions. Democracy, however, is anathema to that underlying symbolic emotional sensation of worship and attention given to these schools.
These top ten schools get more collective donations than the bottom 40 percent of four year institutions. And I would be willing to bet a dollar that Harvard has more in its Alana Matar trust fund than all the community college donation funds combined. We are giving to people and institutions who don’t need it, depriving not just from those who do. And it is not just monetary resources but journalistic, symbolic and legal resources. Our institutional debate and Supreme Court case on affirmative action is focused on schools that nature the education of the elite one percent. Not the bottom fifty percent. Community college should be suing and these focal debate should gravitate, in a healthy democracy, around them.
Where I am, in Harris county Texas, home to Houston, the two community colleague systems take in 90,000 students—more than all four years colleges in this area, which includes on Ivy League school, Rice. Yet the dropout rate is 50 percent. That’s 45,000 humans endowed with the same inalienable rights, denied fair debate about why they are failing, yet little debate focuses around them and instead our intellectual energies as a society are rallied around these elite colleges, the one percent. That mentality of autocracy is crippling our country. No matter who wins this SCOTUS case (and I wish it were affirmative action but it won’t), The great legal minds in the country are focused on solving a problem that won’t affect at all, no matter what the outcome, the 45,000 thousand students who can make it through the first year of a two year school that they desperately need. You are correct, no matter where the “rejects” go who can’t and don’t get into Ivy League schools—like you and I—they will encounter success in education in college. We will get some sort of well paying job that won’t be stocking shelves with a sense of being entrapped.
What a wonderful piece that felt inspiring to think about. Thank you.