QUESTIONS OF DEGREE
Bush Is In, Ivy Out
The president went to Yale and Harvard. Most of his appointees are in a different league.
I've really been worried about the future of the Bush administration ever since I learned how few of George W.'s cabinet secretaries attended Ivy League colleges. Dan Gross of the New America Foundation has pointed out that though Mr. Bush himself is a Yale and Harvard man, only two of his top appointees attended one of the Ivies. Donald Rumsfeld went to Princeton and John Ashcroft went to Yale. And let's face it, Mr. Ashcroft is not exactly your typical Ivy League product.
You couldn't have swung an ax in Bill Clinton's cabinet room without hitting a bunch of Ivy League grads, and probably a flattering of Rhodes scholars too (a group of Rhodes scholars is known as a "flattering"). But the Bush cabinet members are more likely to come from inland state schools. As Mr. Gross observes, none of Mr. Clinton's early appointees graduated from Big Ten colleges, while Mr. Bush has three from the conference: Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin), Spencer Abraham (Michigan State) and Roderick Paige (Indiana).
Mr. Bush also has a heavy Western tilt, with Condoleezza Rice from the University of Denver, Paul O'Neill from Fresno State, Don Evans from the University of Texas and Vice President Dick Cheney with a degree from the University of Wyoming. Even Linda Chavez, who was abandoned at the first whiff of grapeshot, attended the University of Colorado. (Her successor, Elaine Chao, went to the more tony Mount Holyoke and Harvard Business School.) Colin Powell, meanwhile, is from the unpretentious City College of New York, and Karl Rove, the brains behind the whole operation, has no college degree at all. If you'd tried to bring a non-college grad into the Clinton White House, the chandeliers would have fallen from their sockets and Al Gore would have begun crying big tears with tuition tax credits floating in them.
Now it's great that Mr. Bush has been able to find such excellent people from those wholesome inland colleges, where the people wear pastels and vote Republican. It's great to have an administration staffed by people who didn't go to colleges where the leading sport is fencing. But let's face it, the Ivy League has been training America's leaders for a couple of centuries now. They know how to do it. It's a brutal fact of life that graduates from these posh schools enter the world with certain necessary skills that the Bush crew will have a hard time matching:
• Bluffing. Ivy League grads know three facts about absolutely everything, and have been taught to weave these meager strands into conversational patter so fluid that it renders their full-of-it-ness irrelevant. For example, if you mention Joseph Conrad to any Ivy Leaguer, his internal search engine will come up with "Polish birth . . . 'Heart of Darkness' . . . 'Apocalypse Now' "--and that will be enough data for a 25-minute lecture on madness, anarchy and early modernism. Bluffing is essential to government service, in which officials must go from meeting to meeting, converse on subjects about which they haven't a clue, and project an image of decisiveness.
• False Modesty. If you ask a Harvard student where he's going to college he'll say, "Harvard?" with a little upward tilt at the end of the word as if to say, "Have you ever heard of it?" If you ask a Princetonian where he goes, he'll say, "A school in New Jersey," as if you were going to look at the orange and black necktie and the tiger tattoo and guess Weehawken Community College. False modesty is important for Washington officials, because truly important people are expected to pretend they are regular Joes. At the tippy-top of the power pyramid you get people who will brag that they fly coach, or that they've been to a supermarket in the past month--and then look around as if you were supposed to pin a medal on them for heroic service in the name of the common man.
• Paranoiaphilia. Some people from Ivy League schools believe that there is a small, tightly knit conspiracy that secretly runs the world. But instead of hating this elite, the way paranoids do, they love it because they think they are in it. They are under the misapprehension that everything they do has earthshaking consequences. So that when the economy boomed during the Clinton years, the Clintonites thought it was because of them. And when the crime rate dropped, they thought it was them, too. This delusion is absolutely essential for those in government service. Top officials have to feel monumentally self-important if they are to project an air of impressive dignity, as befits the leaders of a great nation.
• Insouciance. If you burst in on a Washington gathering and announced, "A purple elephant dressed like Cardinal Richelieu has just flown to the top of the Washington Monument and is reciting Whitman," a truly impressive Washingtonian would reply, "Yes, I've been expecting this would happen. I predicted as much last year on 'Meet the Press.' " You can acquire this level of pseudo-omniscience only at a truly expensive educational institution, where you spend your hours exhaustively one-upping the know-it-all weenies who share your cafeteria table.
• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. These are two impressive German concepts, and most people who attended normal colleges can never quite remember what they mean. But a top rank Ivy League grad will be able to drop these and other fancy-language mots into everyday conversation, thus arousing both awe and silent hatred. Moreover, the truly qualified Ivy League grad will know enough not to say "I know four languages." He will say "I have four languages, mostly Romance." If you mention that you are off to some obscure part of central Europe, he'll reply, "I suppose you can get by with a little conversational Magyar there?" This is just the sort of thing that sets hearts aflutter over at the State Department.
The odd thing is that the president went to not one Ivy League institution but two, if you count Harvard Business School. But far from admiring the aforementioned skills, which do represent the highest achievements of our civilization, he seems to have scorned them.
Mr. Bush seems to have opted for an entirely different variety of pretentiousness, the you-can-tell-I'm-a-cowboy-because-I've-got-this-hat kind. The skills he acquired in the Texas oil business are suited for a world in which success and failure are measured by tangible accomplishments, like oil production levels and after-tax profits. The skills I'm talking about here are suited to a world in which the definition of success is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind. You tell me which set of skills is most appropriate for Washington.
Mr. Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of "Bobos in Paradise: The Upper Class and How They Got There" (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
