Fareed Zakaria calls out "elite" universities: "Which have gone from centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas"
When a CNN commenter says this, things are changing on the ground.
There was a time when I would have loved to have gone to Harvard. There was a time when I would have loved for my children to go to Harvard. There was a time when I would of loved to have worked (remotely though, Boston is too cold) for Harvard. But on all three points, no longer.
I am not singling out Harvard, nor are we saying that Harvard isn’t still chock-o-block full of excellent minds and still retains much of what made Harvard Harvard. And we use Harvard as a proxy here for pretty much all of the Ivy League (with the possible exception of Dartmouth). We will also say that some of our very favorite people are Harvard graduates, and still others we admire are associated with the august university in other ways. But “Harvard” has a problem. Actually it has many.
General Smedley D. Butler is famous for saying that “war is a racket”. But you know what else has become a racket? Higher education at many of our “elite” schools. As we’ve covered many times in the past in the earlier version of this publication, the cronyism runs deep at many top universities.
First, the Ivy to establishment old media pipeline is real.
When I was interning on The Hill for a news outlet I used to drive 60 miles in through traffic to do so. My university, Mary Washington (then a college), was and is excellent and has produced many leaders and people of distinction but it does not (currently) have the panache of Princeton or Georgetown. Most of my fellow interns however hailed from such schools and often were set up in nice little spots by their parents on The Hill. They’d go for drinks and I would gear up for an hour and a half slog through I-95 traffic. Not that I resented it. I was thrilled to be interning in Washington. Though I am the son of a naval officer who went to Annapolis, no one in my family had any political connections and I was just happy that my cold call to the senior producer at this news outlet worked. But that time in my life was the first time I became aware of the Ivy to newsroom conduit.
Some of my fellow interns went on to become journalists in prominent old media publications where they would quietly protect their guild, and the philosophies of their guild, which were largely born in their old schools. There was an acceptable worldview, which was liberal, northeastern, privileged, and even twenty years ago was enamored with the cult that is intersectionalism. To run counter to this worldview was to risk your potential career.
Did I mention that the place at which I interned was a “conservative” news outlet (not the one you are thinking of) and this was still true?
Second, the Ivies get gobs and gobs of taxpayer money.
That’s right, these universities, with massive endowments, get billions from everyday Americans. It is some of the most blatant crony capitalism we can see today.
Government gives billions in grants each year to Ivy League universities
Between 2018–2022, these 10 universities received $33.1 billion in federal contracts and grants. The largest recipient was Stanford, with just over $7 billion; Dartmouth was the only institution not to receive at least $1 billion, capping out at just over $755 million.
Of the $33 billion total, the report notes, only about $4.18 billion came in the form of contracts, in which work is done on behalf of a federal agency that then owns the results; the remainder, more than $28.9 billion, was distributed as grants, whereby an institution receives government money to fund its own projects.
It is, as a Harvard friend of ours might say, outrageous.
But all this would be bad enough if it were not for the political insanity that has infected most of these schools of late, which was on clear display in recent congressional hearings.
Sadly it took the attack on Israel on October 7th for many people to actually see what has happened to many of our “best” schools. There are people at many of our “top tier” universities who are not interested in excellence, but in the forwarding of their neo-marxist (yes that is a legitimate characterization) worldview which venerates intersectionality and derides merit.
Fareed Zakaria, who has long drawn his main paycheck (we assume his main paycheck) from CNN of all places has had enough, and just said so.
He begins his most recent commentary with this;
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Against Crony Capitalism to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.