Neoliberal culture and Ivy-ization have gone hand and hand in our Post Cold War World.
How’s that for a hook?
When I was a whippet, I went, as an undergrad, to Tulane, Emory, Centenary College of Shreveport and, via a Louisiana scholarship, Paul Valery Université, aka Université de Montpellier. I never met anyone at that prelapsarian time who was hung up on the Ivies. A friend from High School went to Harvard, but this friends stands out, to my mind, more for an accident that happened to him one summer when he was on a crew building warehouses. On this I-Beam about twenty feet up from concrete pad he sawed into his shoe with a mechanical saw, and had to hop to the outer wall and climb down the ladder to get help. This was a glory that surpassed all mere feats of grade-pulling.
To return to the hook. In the semi-social democratic Sputnik era, the top was filled with the products of state universities and small private liberal arts schools. Although Kennedy brought in a buncha Harvardites, and Nixon had his Kissinger, there was not another Ivy League prez until George W.H. Bush. And after that, ca, c’est le déluge.
Harvard Business school has always been, for me, the epicenter of neoliberal culture. It wasn’t just the churn of awful lawyers finding their way to the Supreme Court from Yale, like some radioactively mutant salmon, it was the Business school’s discoveries: for instance, that the upper management could never be paid too much. You see, the CEO isn’t in anything so vulgar as a labor market – no, he was a conquistador, or an entrepreneur, and thus amply deserved the hundred mill comp package. The use of management as a pillaging device, true, goes back a long way, and achieved its present for in the LBO years of Reagan: but the moral smugness, which is the true cultural content, stemmed from the HBS. And then, suddenly, social media moguls, and moguls of all types ,nepo sons and daughters, swarmed out of the Ivies and into our administrations and businesses, our Silicon Valleys and K streets, and life and its dreams visibly worsened.
Exhibit one: teen tv series. Adam is now eleven, and he has suddenly, and I suppose rationally, fixated on the teen rom com. Now, I remember the teen series from my youth, vaguely. It was very oriented towards the blue collar – the descendants of the Honeymooners. That is no longer the case. A stereotypical plot device, used over and over, is some California high school students dream of Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford. The viewing audience is supposed, evidently, to sympathize. Not that there aren’t a few outliers about, say, community college kids, but these people are comic fodder, of course. The college acceptance letter scene now looms larger than the first sex scene – it organizes our disappointments and surprises. And yet, never has there been a phonier representation of high school. The percentage of people who care if their darlings get into the best schools of all times is equal to the percentage of the population who owns more than they are in debt. Okay, equal to the percentage who owns more by 2 or three times that quartile that just barely owns more than they are in debt. Apparently, a lot of producers and writers of tv shows are among those vomited out of the Ivy League and laying around the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu, entertaining peak tv dreams.
It is no coincidence that the era of Ivy-ization and the era of monopoly capital trek each other. Any trustbuster from the good old days – I’m talking about 1890 – would recognize the university situation for what it is: a congery of monopolies that should be broken up. But no: regulation of private colleges and universities is shockingly absent. This regulatory vacuum has been filled up by the swinish ways of overpaid, way overpaid, just way way overpaid freaks and failures like the president of the University of West Virginia, a flameout named E. Gordon Gee who, like an academic Jack Dunlap (oh, my references age me!), is well on his way to undermining his third major university. It is like Elm University hiring Dutch Elm Disease to be its president.
One of the unexpected features of neoliberalism is that it flips quite placidly into neo-fascism. I didn’t see that coming! But as we allow an aristocracy of the wealthy to take over our policies, fuck up our atmosphere, decimate our land, and cheer our wars, I guess it makes sense. We’re fucked. Now, who wants my Yale Tshirt?
