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What Critics Get Wrong About the Ivy League
Time ^ | December 28, 2024 9:41 AM EST | Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Philip J. Hanlon

Posted on 01/01/2025 4:53:29 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

Barely a day passes without colleges scolded in the headlines over admissions or athletics and endowments or education and expression. Schools have become scapegoats for both good and bad reasons. Prominent commentators and populist political leaders from both the far left and far right now target higher education as a common enemy.

In fact the current fight over the meritocracy vs charges of elitism which would not characterize other fields such as sports or entertainment have torn open a seam on the right between Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk in favor of selectivity and merit on one side and Laura Loomer and Matt Goetz on the other.  Ramaswamy declared that American culture has  “venerated mediocrity over excellence" launching what is termed a “civil war” within the MAGA movement. 

Both extremes have arrived on shared areas of concern that include admissions criteria; tolerance of thought on campus; institutional voice; faculty bias in research and education; personal safety; academic integrity; donor influence; curriculum focus; government funding; financial viability, and administrative efficiency. Increasingly, universities, especially selective universities, have been labelled as elitist, self-interested, out-of-touch with societal needs, and lacking accountability.  

What is new is the convergence of a shared populist spirit of elements of the MAGA movement on the right and todays’ self-styled progressives on the left. Together, they find common cause in the skepticism of societal pillars from Wall Street financiers to college educators and politicians. These critiques have corroded public opinion on the value of U.S. higher education, just as the rest of the world treasures the real contributions to the economy, quality of life, scientific knowledge, and cultural...

(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...


TOPICS: Humor
KEYWORDS: academia; antisemiteu; college; ivyleague; poisonivyleague; wokeified
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1 posted on 01/01/2025 4:53:29 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

2 posted on 01/01/2025 4:56:24 PM PST by DoodleBob (Gravity's waiting period is about 9.8 m/s² )
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Garbage article, critics did not erode confidence, the ivy leagues and the DEI dolts they give degrees to did it all themselves, indoctrinating instead of educating.

Times is gaslighting hard.


3 posted on 01/01/2025 5:01:33 PM PST by Skwor
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To: DoodleBob

Explains Congress....


4 posted on 01/01/2025 5:08:05 PM PST by goodnesswins (Don’t be REALITY PHOBIC!)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum
I worked for 20+ years at Harvard Medical School's largest teaching hospital.My job resulted in me interacting mainly with Interns and Residents...junior doctors.

Every June we'd get a new batch of doctors...Interns who just graduated from medical school and Residents who just finished their internship.

A hospital as famous and respected as ours attracted the top graduates of the top schools.Not surprisingly we got a lot of Harvard grads. We used to joke about how easy it was to tell the Harvard grads from graduates of other schools because the Harvard grads could talk about the uvula for six hours...nonstop...but if you handed them a pop up umbrella they were clueless.

5 posted on 01/01/2025 5:15:08 PM PST by Gay State Conservative (Import The Third World,Become The Third World)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Fed-up parents’ novel education lawsuit is a chance to rescue our schools — and get rid of the lemons

https://nypost.com/2025/01/01/opinion/fed-up-parents-education-lawsuit-could-rescue-our-schools/


6 posted on 01/01/2025 5:17:12 PM PST by Libloather (Why do climate change hoax deniers live in mansions on the beach?)
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To: DoodleBob

My Dad worked for decades for a major company that employed many Harvard and MIT grads and many of them reported to him. He always expressed huge respect for the MIT grads (this was many years ago) but not so much for the Harvard grads. He used to joke: “you can always tell a Harvard man,but you can’t tell him much”.


7 posted on 01/01/2025 5:21:24 PM PST by Gay State Conservative (Import The Third World,Become The Third World)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

“Together, they find common cause in the skepticism of societal pillars from Wall Street financiers to college educators and politicians. These critiques have corroded public opinion on the value of U.S. higher education, just as the rest of the world treasures the real contributions to the economy, quality of life, scientific knowledge, and cultural enrichment provided by American colleges.”

Total USDA 100% Bullshit. The CRITIQUES have not corroded public opinion about the Ivies. The reality of what they represent does. We see people educated there and teaching there and the utter immaturity and childish ways they think. Elizabeth Warren, Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kagan, Sheila Jackson Lee (U of VA and Yale) The rampant antheism, perversion, a third of Harvard is LGBT. Suzan Rice was Stanford...not exactly Big Bang Theory there. Obama? Bush? Janet Yellen from Yale.

You name it, the elite universities have rampant corruption, grade inflation, and poor educations to a self anointed class they deem our “betters”, meant to rule over America.

Every bad idea in America today, MMT and runaway inflation, BLM, intersectionality, homosexuality and trannies, global warming, gain of function COVID and Chicken Flu, etc all come from them.

No..... our criticism is not the cause of the problem.


8 posted on 01/01/2025 5:23:24 PM PST by DesertRhino (2016 Star Wars, 2020 The Empire Strikes Back, 2024... RETURN OF THE JEDI..)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Higher education has long been the target of satire from the Marx Brothers to Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School.” All institutions need constructive feedback to respond to changing societal needs, but the ideologically driven attacks on schools have lost their grounding, not to mention their humor, and risk promoting an age of ignorance.


It wasn’t ideology when they are attacking us.


9 posted on 01/01/2025 5:27:25 PM PST by PeterPrinciple (Thinking Caps are no longer being issued, but there must be a warehouse full of them somewhere)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

I’ll await an article on this subject (and many more) when one is written from one with a real degree...not journalism.


10 posted on 01/01/2025 5:33:59 PM PST by Da Coyote (H)
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To: Da Coyote

Then don’t comment. Neither of the writers has a journalism degree. I think the article is junk, but I at least had to read some of it to come to that conclusion.


11 posted on 01/01/2025 5:58:31 PM PST by x
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Time promoting division on the right.


12 posted on 01/01/2025 6:19:17 PM PST by marktwain (The Republic is at risk. Resistance to the Democratic Party is Resistance to Tyranny. )
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To: marktwain

‘ Time promoting division on the right.’

No help required.


13 posted on 01/01/2025 6:22:51 PM PST by Fuzz
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Ivy League and elite colleges have created more misery and murder than anything else in the past 150 years. Only college educated idiots can think marxism is a good idea.


14 posted on 01/01/2025 7:12:09 PM PST by Organic Panic (Democrats. Memories as short as Joe Biden's eyes)
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To: Skwor

Rut roh-looks like the Ivies and the other elite schools are starting to realize that they have a problem. All the antics, mayhem and general ridiculousness is starting to catch up with them. A more rationale world is coming to the fore.

I can say from having a child that is starting to look at Colleges, her friends and others are looking for: 1) value (read tuition that isn’t mind blowing; 2) NO DEI; and 3) someplace warm.


15 posted on 01/01/2025 7:16:04 PM PST by FlipWilson
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Another “They hate us because we have so much virtue” article.


16 posted on 01/01/2025 8:10:30 PM PST by glorgau
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To: x

Like you, x. I read the Time article - in its entirety. Wish I had those minutes back.

Victor Davis Hanson knows lots of stuff, and he especially knows education at so-called elite universities. He would destroy this Time article in three minutes or less by taking the bias out of the articles’s statistics and putting them in the proper light.

I got my graduate degree from an “elite” public institution and then worked with a number of Harvard and Yale grads. I was amazed at the basic things about our profession that they had never learned.


17 posted on 01/01/2025 8:13:29 PM PST by oldplayer
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

The Poison Ivy Universities


18 posted on 01/01/2025 8:19:41 PM PST by EC Washington
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Time trying its best to create a fight over a small difference


19 posted on 01/02/2025 2:00:51 AM PST by TheThirdRuffian (Orange is the new brown)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

There is absolutely nothing special about Ivy institutions other than endowments and connections. Nothing.


20 posted on 01/02/2025 3:11:21 AM PST by neverevergiveup
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