When you're a member of the elite, you want a socially-acceptable wife who is sufficiently "physical fitness conscious" to be likely to retain her figure and produce healthy babies.
Besides, healthy women are hot
Posted on 04/07/2013 8:47:30 PM PDT by Bratch
SUSAN PATTON, the Princeton alumna who became famous for her letter urging Ivy League women to use their college years to find a mate, has been denounced as a traitor to feminism, to coeducation, to the university ideal. But really she’s something much more interesting: a traitor to her class.
Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.
Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.
Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It also explains why the GOP-e would rather lose to a liberal Democrat than win with a conservative Republican.
They believe the electorate should submit to their "betters".
That’s why I think Ivy League colleges are the most useless secondary education institutions in the country. Look at those who go there, get elected, and seek about destroying this country. They went to Ivy League colleges.
All one has to do is look at the State Dept. There they will see, scores of Ivy League graduates, walking the halls of every embassy and consulate in the world. Don’t forget about the Little Ivy’s as well.
And there, you will see people with $200,000+ educations, taking civil servant jobs. Why? So, they can travel the world and hob nob with fellow socialists, communists and progressives, all on the American Taxpayer dime.
They are some of the dumbest people you’d ever meet. But they got their paper from Yale, so that makes ‘em smarter than the rest of us.
Rumor has it that the easiest way to pass a class at Harvard, is to sit next to a player on the Harvard men’s hockey team. Hockey players, generally, ain’t the brightest bulbs on the tree and apparently, they get a little help. Or so I’ve heard.
I try to avoid sending click traffic eo the NY Times web site, so I have not read the complete article.
Does Douthat rip into Michelle Obama for the way that she milked the system to get a diploma and a high-paying job befitting the wife of a Democrat Senator despite being as smart as a box of hammers?
The problem is that the local elites in” flyover country” want their kids to go to Ivy league schools, or to have their own local colleges filled with Ivy league clones.
Yes, it does explain that a bit more clearly. And why, of course, Sarah Palin was never a consideration for THEM. Regardless ...
I wonder about the reactions over the breakfast table, on the train and at the office.
Douthat observes that white liberals scandalized by the letter just don't want to admit that they see colleges as social-register-breeding-farms for their children—and that, by the way, they do their best to keep out the smarter Orientals.
There are four main avenues into the ivy’s:
1) Alumni status.
2) Being in racially desirable group.
3) Athletic desirability.
4) Academic, board scores, and extracurricular achievements.
The last item does not so much facilitate entry as it does prevent the possibility of entry for substandard candidates. Naturally, the standards are significantly different for the candidates who are members of one or more of the first three categories.
Athletics has become a major means for the children of wealthy parents to gain entry to elite schools. This is particularly the case with Caucasian girls who otherwise have the greatest hurtles to gain entry (other perhaps Asian candidates). This is because both groups are overrepresented on campuses. White girls can use Title IX to their advantage, however.
Prep schools now place as much emphasis on sports as they do on academics. The results is a boom of such relatively obscure sports such as field hockey and lacrosse. Such sports are today’s way to game the system for wealthy white kids of both sexes.
While many elite universities still place academic demands upon their students (e.g. MIT, Vanderbilt, Purdue, Amherst), many such as Brown and Harvard notoriously inflate grades.
Odd, isn't it, that this "expose'" is coming from the New York Times -- a newspaper whose audience is exclusively composed of the article's topic, Ivy League elitists.From Twitchy:I wonder about the reactions over the breakfast table, on the train and at the office.
Follow the Twitchy link for examples of the NYT readers comments.
As @ExJon notes, New York Times readers (many of whom presumably attended elite colleges) didn’t think much of Douthat’s argument:
There are also plenty of conservatives and tea party folks who are graduates of fancy schools.
Princeton Mom to All Female Students: ‘Find a Husband’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3005005/posts
You’re right about the obscure sports (or also the playing of less popular musical instruments) for both genders, but not the white girls at Ivies. It is only at that very top tier where there are plenty of equally or better qualified boys, so not a ‘boy bias’. Also, Asian girls still have a higher hurdle than white girls.
A lot of white women I work with resent it when their Hispanic and black counterparts need time off work to deal with family matters because they themselves couldn’t be bothered to have families when they could. Now they’ve watched that opportunity pass, and they resent it - deeply. They are miserable people to work with; when a mother at the lunch table asked about having a family picnic where they’d have activities for the kids (as many companies used to have, when Americans had kids), one of the old “skirts” snapped back: “If we can bring our dogs”. It was an angry reaction to an innocent question, and I haven’t eaten with those old hags since; the lady who asked the question doesn’t, either; she simply goes to lunch with other mothers now.
In my area 9/11 seemed to have an impact on some females on this topic; maybe watching young women (some spouses/mothers themselves) jump 100 stories to their deaths made an impression. I remember some news stories at the time where some young mothers simply never returned to those jobs as things got back to “normal” afterwards.
It is also worth noting that the admissions officers of the most elite schools are keenly aware of their role of controlling the gateway into membership of what Angelo M. Codevilla terms the ruling class. They are loath to admit students who might seriously ruffle the highly uniform campus culture, and they certainly do not want to be responsible for empowering anyone who might threaten the prerogatives and power of the ruling classes in the future.
This makes it quite difficult for candidates who allow themselves to be recognized as, for instance, strong traditional Christians, or committed conservatives to gain entry. An admissions officers might allow such a candidate entry if they believe that the child can be molded to reject the core of their current convictions, and in their place, embrace the convictions of the elite ruling class.
It is acceptable, possibly even desirable, for a student to retain the outward form of their prior beliefs, so long as their true allegiance is to the class, and that their highest purpose is to sustain and grow the influence and power of the elite.
Princeton, the Fourth Reich!
True enough - Harvard has something like a 51% to 49% female to male student ratio so that is basically a level playing field. However, in recent years there have been considerably more qualified female candidates to the elite schools than male. So while the highest achieving male applicants in the STEM fields may tend to outperform the female applicants, as a whole it is the female applicants who face the greatest competition against members of their own gender for the available 1/2 of the student body.
This reality along with the imperatives of Title IX has resulted in an absolute explosion of female focused athletics everywhere from club level sports to the college preparatory private high schools. The young ladies are looking for an edge.
How is affirmative action and protected class culture a meritocracy? They wrote that with a straight face?
The author desperately needs the services of a head shrinker. Vanity leads to seething envy which leads to evil, hate, destruction, murder, war, and voting Democrat.
They are also simply enjoying sports.
And, as has been noted, boys still have an edge in that top 1 to .1% in terms of test scores, but after the very top tier is skimmed off, the girls are running well ahead in qualifications for most schools.
There’s one more phenomenon worth note: low-testosterone men and high-testosterone women tend to do better at pure mathematical reasoning. Thus, men who are academically gifted are less likely to be athletically gifted, whereas for women it is the opposite: those who are academically strong are also likely to be athletically strong.
When you're a member of the elite, you want a socially-acceptable wife who is sufficiently "physical fitness conscious" to be likely to retain her figure and produce healthy babies.
Besides, healthy women are hot
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