It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

You raise a very important point and one that is difficult to discuss.

I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to leverage educational opportunities and had the stability of a supportive family.

When we talk about culture and the Black community, many people become understandably wary. It's a fine line between invoking culture and being seen to blame Black people for their own problems. Not to mention that, in doing so, it can be easy to lose sight of the richness of Black culture and its extensive contributions to so many aspects of the American experience e.g. in music, sports, entertainment, art, literature, and cuisine.

Perhaps a better way to frame it is that when a particular community has suffered so much injustice and attendant compounded stagnation, it's very hard to find an expedient solution to bring that community to parity that doesn't involve constructing fresh and even revolutionary internal narratives around achievement (and not just academic). Without that sort of effort, it might take many more generations for a combination of government intervention and the natural course of progress to fully remedy the imbalance.

And there's also the problem of exacerbating racial animus in the course of addressing that imbalance.

While I understand the need for it intellectually, I have substantial misgivings about preferential treatment being extended specifically to Black (or Hispanic or Native American) people along racial lines. There is something that feels deeply wrong about attempting to cure racial injustice by inflicting new racial injustices on people whose only fault was being born a particular race at the wrong moment in history, especially when we are purporting to be an enlightened society that has learned its lesson in this regard.

The position is unpopular with many here, but it is my opinion that we should not be devising a society that argues that a boy from an underprivileged neighborhood in Philadelphia is more deserving of opportunity than a girl from a disenfranchised part of the Rust Belt because he's Black and she's White. Rather, we should be saying that they are nearly equally in need of help from society because they are both disadvantaged. While this is not perfectly fair insofar as it does not factor in race, I believe it is a policy position that on balance would help the Black people who are most in need of it without leaving anyone of another race feeling as if (s)he's experiencing undue discrimination.

Unfortunately I believe that quandary is even more fraught than the issue of police killings and therefore at present resistant to the possibility of honest discourse.

Their magic recipe is putting a bunch of smart, mostly rich, people in one place and then telling them they are part of an exclusive community. Then they give them access to the older successful members of the community and constantly remind them that once they are the older successful members they need to help out the recent grads.

I still resent my parents for not keeping any books in the house apart from the dictionary. I can't remember how many times I flipped through the dictionary out of boredom growing up. Whenever I'd go to my grandmother's place, I loved to take random books off the book shelf and read through them.

I honestly feel like a great way to educate kids is not to teach them anything directly at all, but to instead leave lots of material around for them to discover themselves.

> But reform will not come from within the Ivy League,

It's ironic that the article is written by two harvard ivy leaguers. They have to replace the Ivies with something else. It's hard to envision that from within.

Ivy League is the last intellectual bastion of the country.

If you break up Ivy League all you are left with is Silicon Valley cult of personality snake-oil salesmen and pump & dumpers posing as experts in every possible field when in reality their solely expertise is building social consensus around them.

How many nuclear fusion companies which are quietly shaping the roadmap for obtaining fusion in the next 20 years came out of MIT/Stanford/Harvard?

Facebook spun off Harvard, Microsoft spun off Harvard, Google spun off Stanford, Amazon spun off Princeton with a bit of D.E. Shaw thrown in the mix.

The author seems to me has watched too many videos from Lex Friedman and Eric Weinstein type where they endlessly talk about how broken those institutions are and never fail to mention Epstein for the extra views that it will generate.

As Bill Gates said the mainstream is always under attack and people of course will charge head down towards such Universites, forgetting how they (very much like the companies emerging from such Universities) are the envy of the world.