Emil Guillermo
It’s usually less about the football and more about the drinking. This year’s event comes with a new twist.
The tailgate talk will likely include discussion on who’s to blame over the impending reign of Trump the Disruptor.
And the demise of higher ed.
You don’t have to be a Harvard or Yale grad to have read the “How the Ivy League Broke America,” by David Brooks, in The Atlantic.
But it’s the nagging question in higher ed these days after the Election of 2024, where a phenomenon is becoming an American truism.
Non-college folks vote Republican.
The college educated vote Democrat.
And the college-educated lost.
Brooks says the Ivy emphasis on creating a cognitive elite, based on IQ and test scores, was birthed at Harvard in the 1950s to create a student body less about “heritage and breeding,” and more about peopling a leadership class that might be described as the “best and the brightest.”
And now here we are in 2024 when a diverse mix of Black, Latino, Asian, plus non-college voters formed a coalition to reject it all.
It wasn’t a mandate, maybe just 2-3 percent difference, a few million votes. They were willing to pledge allegiance to a guy like Trump—white, privileged, and a convicted felon—34 counts. Trump is also twice impeached from the position he will assume again, known for philandering, a man who was declared in civil court as liable for sexual assault.
America wanted that.
Shunned was a smart, beautiful, successful prosecutor, former U.S. senator, and vice president, who is also a bi-racial, Black and a South Asian Indian woman from humble origins in Oakland, California.
Kamala Harris is the picture of American success, and diversity--and she was rejected by the American people.
Brooks wants to blame Harvard and the Ivy League and its definition of a “meritocracy.” But is it really Harvard’s fault?
Brooks believes Harvard’s creation of the cognitive elite led to an “American Caste” system, which is a tough tag for what is supposed to be a democracy.
But to blame higher ed alone seems harsh. Especially when the Supreme Court ended the means of mobility when it banned affirmative action on race-based admissions last year. The best social mobility tool was taken away.
And that’s why I blame myself.
It's my fault.
I was at Harvard at the same time that Supreme Court Justice John Roberts was. I was one of the few Asians at the school who was not a foreign national elitist. I was a working class Asian American, the son of a fry cook from the Philippines. My dad, a colonized American, never made more than $400 dollars a month.
Had I made a bigger impression on Roberts’ and his ilk, maybe they would have seen the value of being in my presence. Or vice versa.
But maybe they didn’t even know I was there. That might have saved affirmative action, and America.
I had my chance to be a Harvard man. But when I got there, I just wanted to be me, not them. Corporate ladder? I wanted to be on the Lampoon. And the WHRB, the college radio station.
I took courses in history and the arts. A friend told me I should get an MBA. For what? At the time he was always talking about leveraged buyouts, a technique developed by super financiers of the past now practiced by today’s hedge funds.
Don’t blame higher ed for today’s “caste system,” blame the MBAs. Because what we are really talking about is economic inequality created when MBAs created extreme wealth starting in the ‘70s. That was exacerbated by the tech booms starting in the late ‘90s and 2000s. Start-ups and their stock options, and society’s turnover from analogue to digital. When you’re making an hourly wage, you can’t compete. The worst is yet to come with A.I.
But in 2024, voters shook things up and made people notice. They voted for a president based on the high price of eggs. (With maybe a little racism and misogyny thrown in). And now it’s made intellectuals wonder, where it all went wrong. Not with higher ed and their obsession with IQ. It’s still capitalism and its obsession with the bottom line.
And so, we end up with a person like Trump, and people who believe falsely that government should be run like a business. Government should always be about people not profits. But in a world where wealth rules all, tell that to the incoming ruler.
By the way, I have never attended a Harvard Yale game. I always scalped my student ticket to a desperate Yalie for a handsome profit.
But again, I failed. It was still not enough to eliminate America’s economic equality.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning columnist and news commentator. He is on www.patreon.com/emilamok and on substack.com/@emilamok
