Brook No Argument
A friend recently sent me David Brooks’ article in the Atlantic entitled “How The Ivy League Broke America”, in which Brooks argues that a new definition of “merit” would solve the supposed leadership crisis the country faces, and asked me to comment on it. [Here is a link to a free version if you don’t get the Atlantic.] I normally avoid reading Brooks for my own mental health but did so as a favor to my friend. Here is my response:
As usual, I find myself once again infuriated by the inexecrable Brooks and his phony and facile arguments. Some initial context for the piece is needed here since, although Brooks doesn’t come out directly and say it, it comes across as a critique of current higher education. That theme has been a hobby-horse of the Atlantic for a few years now, largely focusing on the issues of free speech and censorship, and it increasingly appears the magazine’s editors have an agenda that is more focused on attacking the supposed failures of university leadership and less about maintaining the independence and ideals of higher education.
This focus seems increasingly incongruous with the actual reality of most higher education institutions in this country. US universities are probably the most diverse institutions in the country today. They are bastions of free speech, free inquiry, and free association, despite what the Atlantic editors continually claim, and more committed to those ideals than any other institution in the country. Meanwhile, conservative leaders like Rufo and DeSantis in Florida are engaged in dismantling those institutional ideals, claiming they amount to indoctrination; public funding for higher education, especially in Republican controlled states, has fallen precipitously over the last few decades, leaving particular fields of study like humanities, which even Brooks would agree are necessary for the well-rounded leaders he wishes to produce, under serious threat; and the President-elect and members of his entourage continually threaten to criminalize speech. Those threats seem far more worthy of focus than the Atlantic’s editors’ worries about the threats of excessive speech or attempts at censorship from overly passionate young adults.
The more specific criticism I have of the piece is that it is all too typical of Brooks: identifying real but often secondary problems, blaming the wrong people for those issues, describing his vision of a solution, yet providing no real pathway to get there because that would require addressing deeper, core issues and challenging the shibboleths of the establishment. Yes, and I’d like a pony too.
I had a rueful laugh at Brook’s characterization of the 20th century when he reports the St. Grottlesex/H-Y-P crowd gave us “the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction”. In reality, the Progressive movement and the New Deal were largely opposed by the elites; WWII was largely won by a greater industrial capacity fueled by the working class; and Pax Americana was largely the result of the other great powers being decimated by the war itself and was in many ways a mirage for Koreans, Iranians, Guatemalans, Brazilians, Filipinos, Haitians, Lebanese, Congolese, etc. etc. More laughable is laying the blame for the disaster that was Vietnam on the doorstep of the new meritocrats like…the Achesons and the Bundys? C’mon. And the world today for the vast majority of the people on this planet is a far safer and more prosperous place than almost any time in the 20th century.
Brooks decries the rising percentages of those who think the country is in decline; who think we need a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and the powerful; who now lack trust in our institutions. True enough. But the reason people lost faith in our institutions is because the prior elites that Brooks admires were shown to have lied to us all for decades. And the people today pushing the idea that we are in decline the hardest and consistently undermining faith in our institutions are certain segments of the conservative elite – Ivy League graduates like Trump, Vance, Stefanik, Hawley, the Kennedy with the fake Louisiana drawl and the Kennedy with the drug-addled and worm-infected brain, etc. etc. The people that Brooks should view as role models for his new meritocracy – the non-Ivy university educated Harris and Walz – still promote a positive vision for America. But Brooks, of course, never makes that connection nor explores its possible relevance..
His six sins are hardly a revelation – IQ is not determinative; book smart is not the same as street smart; the rich have enormous advantages; we live in a class system; career success does not guarantee a happy, fulfilled life; the gap between “winners” and “losers” in our current system is wide and widening and the “losers” are pissed. The idea that college admissions policies will resolve these problems is hopelessly naïve. Standardized tests have been used in US education since the early 1800s, but it was only under Brooks’ Saint Ronnie Reagan that standardized testing began to drive the curriculum taught in schools and that effort was further expanded under George W. Bush. Brook’s use of the word “caste” when he really describes “class” is one of his typical obfuscations and, again, it seems naïve to think college admissions might change that system. It’s not the universities’ fault that the country’s top law firms, businesses, and hospitals skim off the cream from the handful of elite universities. Similarly, reducing the built-in advantages of the wealthy in preparing their children for college would require both higher marginal tax rates and investment in true equal educational opportunity at younger ages, neither of which are priorities for Brooks’ conservative colleagues. In fact, those colleagues are far more interested in taking more money away from public schools and funneling it to their richer and whiter constituencies in private religious schools. But actually fixing those two “sins” would require challenging the existing “market-oriented” capitalist system and the property-tax funding system for elementary and high school education, something the Brooks always refuses to do. Likewise, addressing the problems for the non-college educated of lower lifetime earnings, shorter lifespans, and greater social isolation would require an expansion of access to university-like settings, but Brooks never addresses how his new meritocracy might accomplish that.
Brooks readily admits that university admission officers would love to “shift some weight from a narrow evaluation of test scores to a broader assessment of other qualities – for instance, the sheer drive a kid had to possess in order to accomplish what they did against great odds”. Sadly, they cannot because, under the Supreme Court’s affirmative action rulings, they are LEGALLY PREVENTED FROM DOING SO. The inability of higher education institutions to actually create the new meritocracy Brooks desires has nothing to do with the universities themselves, but everything to do with our legal system. Yet Brooks breezily ignores this elephant in the room by writing, “If colleges still want to…bring in kids from certain underrepresented backgrounds, they will have to find new ways to do that”. Perhaps he might tell them and us how.
He continues by espousing more fiction, writing, “[M]uch of what the existing cognitive elite do can already be done as well as or better by AI”. I’d love to see any real evidence of that outside of some highly repetitive tasks like reading and interpreting X-rays. Certainly, many of the AI products that have been released for more general use are excellent at spouting fictions with conviction, much as Brooks is doing here.
But the piece de resistance is his third point: “Third, the recent uproar over Gaza protests and anti-Semitism on campus has led to the defenestration of multiple Ivy League presidents, and caused a public-relations crisis, perhaps even lasting brand damage, at many elite universities. Some big donors are withholding funds. Republicans in Congress are seizing the opportunity to escalate their war on higher education. Now would be a good time for college faculty and administrators to revisit first principles in service of building a convincing case for the value that their institutions provide to America.” NO! NO! NO! Now is not the time to redefine the mission and values as Brooks wants to do. The “uproar over Gaza protests and anti-Semitism on campus” ARE the first principles, the sacred values, of higher education at work. The battles over speech, the battles against racism and anti-Semitism, the battles over politics and war have always been waged within the confines of a higher educational setting. The ability to have those discussions and arguments in a non-violent manner is realistically the entire purpose of education. And I would dare say there has been a deeper discussion of the issues surrounding the safety of Israel and the Jewish people, the role of Zionism, the rights of Palestinians, the effects of the occupation on both sides, and a potential genocide, on the college campuses of America than there has been in Brooks’ beloved New York Times or the Washington Post or even within the Biden administration.
His new metrics for merit are nearly as vapid as his sins. I would argue that universities are designed to reward the curious. Today’s schools offer the widest range of study and experience that we have ever seen. By bringing an incredibly diverse group into one space, schools are ideal for creating the “social intelligence” and “agility” that Brooks desires. And I can guarantee you, the top students have an incredible “sense of drive and mission”. The problem is they are focused on making money and thriving in our current consumer economy instead of being the transformative leaders that Brooks wants. Again, it is hard to see university policies changing that societal structure and Brooks offers nothing in how to affect change in those incentives.
Similarly, his small-scale ideas for implementing his new meritocracy within the educational system seem like pretty thin gruel. Many schools already offer some form of project-oriented group learning and Brooks again omits any discussion of how these new project-oriented classes and new “independent assessment centers” will actually be funded, because that, once again, would mean addressing a larger economic and political issue around equity. Nor does he explain how these independent assessment centers would not be gamed in the same way by wealthier parents in much the same way they can game the system now.
If Brooks really wanted to address the failures in elite universities, how might want to take note of the falling faculty to student ratio at the same time the administrator to faculty ratio has ballooned. He might want to talk about the fact that wealthy donors are now demanding control over curriculum and directing the expulsion of students who have views they disagree with. He might explore the thinking behind the running joke (with its kernel of truth like every good joke) that these institutions are simply hedge funds with side businesses in sports and a small education department. He might want to discuss the policies and problems around legacy admissions or why these elite institutions churn out such a large number of charlatans, crooks, and power-hungry narcissists. But that would mean confronting the powerful forces that Brooks usually serves. Simply redefining merit avoids those thorny issues. More importantly, as I’ve already noted, the admissions officers at these elite universities are already scouring their applicants for the very attributes that make up Brooks’ new meritocracy. Their problem is they are both legally and structurally restricted in their ability to admit many of them. The problem is not in the definition of merit, but in the design of the system itself.
Finally, the whole piece is really an exercise in the elite navel-gazing that Brooks is trying to critique. Less than 1% of college students attend these elite colleges and universities he talks about. And even within that 1%, there are many who follow their curiosity and passion into majors like classics, art history, theater, dance, etc. that have a limited career path after graduation. The vast, vast majority of students pursuing higher education today are in public four year and junior colleges, apparently, even according to Brooks, getting a good enough education to succeed. The fact that the 1% is vastly over-represented in their share of the wealth and the leadership in politics and business says far more about the societal structures that we live in. Simply redefining the terms of “merit” will do little to change that until you change the societal incentives. But Brooks offers no real path for doing so.
I’ll wrap up my ad hominem attack on him by just saying that for most of my life I have been forced to listen to Brooks provide this kind of empty, facile intellectual cover for often destructive conservative causes, largely targeted for delivery to liberals. The classic of this genre is one where Brooks declares that the (usually false) Republican critique of Democratic policies is correct and then offers his solutions which he recommends the Democrats adopt. But those solutions actually turn out to be exactly what the Democrats were already proposing but had been falsely described and then blocked by Republicans. This piece appears to be yet another example.