1. @DouthatNYT is right, we're insufferable, but here's my take on Brett Kavanaugh. I was a year behind him at Yale, knew him slightly and considered him a frat bro & unfriendly jock wannabe. So what does l'affaire Kavanaugh say about the meritocracy? nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opi…
2. I was at Yale across three decades as undergrad, grad student & faculty, and also wrote a book on Meritocracy 1.0, as it happened at Yale in the '60s. The focus of The Guardians is Kingman Brewster Jr., Yale president from 1964-77 & uber-WASP reformer amazon.com/Guardians-King…
3. Hindsight: the mid-'80s was an odd time at Yale, a mix of fading '60s liberal idealism, '70s hedonism, & oncoming '80s conservatism. Many students drank way too much (me included) & I'm ashamed I didn't question more of the cultural attitudes of the era vox.com/culture/2018/9…
4. Rashomon rule: No one can say definitively what Yale was like then because it was something different to everyone. My impressions of Kavanaugh (or anyone/anything else) are unreliable because of the chips I carried on both shoulders in those days, plus mem'ry's haze
5. I support Deborah Ramirez & acknowledge the sexist culture on campus at that time, but also have friends who whole-heartedly believe Kavanaugh incapable of committing the acts he's accused of; it's a painful situation for many medium.com/@yalemen80s/an…
6. I believe that Kit Winter, Kavanaugh's frosh year roommate, endured social hostility/terrorism from K & his bro friends, but disagree with this article's characterization of the Yale culture of that era. For 1, prep/legacy dominance was not so overt thecut.com/2018/09/kavana…
7. For 2, Yale was then considered a liberal & gay-friendly school ("1 in 4"); "Beautiful People" were atop the social hierarchy, jocks & frat bros arguably at the bottom and dismissed as dinosaurs & dummies, which caused many of them great resentment
nytimes.com/1987/09/29/nyr…
nytimes.com/1987/09/29/nyr…
8. For 3, identity politics already was beginning to dictate status & sr. society taps, decades before the same logic became the ruling ethos of the left; as Franklin Foer put it, what had been a form of meritocracy "degenerate[d] into an elaborate quota system" (TNR 04/17-24/00)
9. Important to remember that frats were deeply uncool at Yale by late '70s; DKE was last survivor only because it was the founding chapter of the national order (see Phi inscription on what's now Rose Alumni House) & the national wouldn't let it go under nytimes.com/1979/10/17/arc…
10. Connecticut raised drinking age to 21 in 1985, which had the disastrous effect of handing campus social life over to frats; they exploded in numbers & power and became the bastion of counter-reaction against liberalism/diversity/equality/enlightenment yaledailynews.com/blog/2018/09/1…
11. As I often ask myself, What would Kingman Brewster have made of this all? For starters, consider the recent vintage of meritocracy -- Yale's Class of '67 was the first to have equal numbers of prep and public school students archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_12/a…
12. Meritocracy's antithesis was WASP aristocracy, which put up fierce resistance, but the logic of meritocracy eventually extended to the economically disadvantaged, Jews, African Americans & other minorities, and women newrepublic.com/article/67613/…
13. Arguably, Old Yale was even more prejudiced against Catholics than Jews; although Kavanaugh's grandfather did attend Yale, he belonged to the second-class Scientific School (with its 3-year PhB program) rather than Yale College ("Ac") theintercept.com/2018/09/29/the…
14. Catholic schools like Kavanaugh's Georgetown Prep became Yale recruitment targets only after the move toward meritocracy in the mid-'60s; if Kavanaugh had been born 15 years earlier, he probably would have gone to Georgetown for ex. rather than Yale slate.com/news-and-polit…
15. For that reason, in the '80s I found the claim by the likes of Kavanaugh to represent the "real" (or at least the "old") Yale spurious; they were as much the product of meritocracy as women and minorities
16. Also problematic was that these antagonists of "new" Yale didn't adhere to the WASP code of old Yale; pre-WW2 Yale expelled 1/3 of each class for bad grades & non-adherence to gentlemanly conduct standards. At the same time, disproportionate numbers served in both world wars
17. But by the late '60s, according to Shamus Khan, elite schools cultivated the sense among students "that the rules don't really apply to them & that they can act without much concern for the consequences" washingtonpost.com/outlook/kavana…
18. This corruption violated both old standards and Brewster's aspiration that meritocracy would strengthen "the hope that ours might become truly a society where the power of some people to push other people around would be progressively eliminated"
19. So Kavanaugh, as a proud alum of Lord of the Flies Prep and its essentially Satanic culture of "ins" getting their way at all costs, becomes the epitome of our corrupt, self-dealing, self-protecting elite johngraham.org/blog/the-kavan…
20. However, @dandrezner's piece points out that Kavanaugh is merely the product of one establishment track; there are many (#NotAllWhiteMales!) & some of the worst elites are those that do not admit they're elites washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/0…
21. The path toward real equality likely must go through another '60s-style meritocratic dispossession of the advantaged (_not_ identity politics) plus a return to old-school standards of morality and social responsibility
