Every so often I read a column and stumble over a sentence. And that sentence bugs me so much that I can’t get past it. Or I can only get past it with the greatest of difficulty. That’s the way it was for me this morning reading David Brooks’s column on the emerging contours of the Obama Administration.
He opens with a list of appointments and likely appointments with the mostly Ivy League affiliations of each. Then there’s this:
This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs.
I know that he’s being sardonic, at least a little. But here’s the problem: in the timeframe in which most of these folks were admitted to their Ivy League alma maters the median SAT score for them was something like 1250. Now just to remind you if you were a history major like David Brooks, “median” means that half of the folks in their class had a score below that, half above. Sure, there were some small number of people who went to those schools who had perfect scores on their SAT’s. But most did not.
This is like that old medical profession joke:
Q: What do you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his class in medical school?
A: Doctor
Graduating from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton is no guarantee that the graduate is a genius. George W. Bush graduated from Yale as an undergraduate and graduated from Harvard Business School. Being smart is not the only quality that the admissions departments of these schools evaluate, indeed, I don’t believe it’s the most important quality. I think that they look for future prospect of success, at some level it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Success is only weakly correlated with intelligence.
In our society and particularly in academic pursuits and the practice of law success is largely a matter of keeping your nose clean, doing the necessary assignments, going to the right schools, taking the right jobs, and giving the expected answers.
Now it may be that what we need for the next four years (or eight years) is a bunch of reasonably intelligent, successful people giving the expected answers. Honestly, I think that’s what’s gotten us in the fix we’re in.
