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Elena Kagan, Organization Child?
Is Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan the perfect product of what is today’s parenting standard? David Brooks, writing in today’s New York Times, argues the answer is yes. And he is not happy.
David Brooks is, when he is not penning ridiculous odes to our current financial establishment, one of the more surprising critics of current middle class parenting practices out there. His piece for The Atlantic earlier in the decade, The Organization Kid, flagged the rise of the perfect child, the one who from infanthood on is schooled in the achievement culture, progressing from infant class, to perfect and agreeable student with just the right mix of extracurricular activities, seemingly bred for acceptance to the Ivy League, followed by just the right job on Wall Street or in the Washington establishment.
Unfortunately, this child comes with nasty side trait. “If they had any flaw,” Brooks writes today about the students in his original piece, “They often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged.”
They are, in short, conformists, people who like to standout from the pack for their work ethic, student smarts and diligence, not their creativity, unconventional opinions or quirky insights.
There is much being made right now by Obama administration opponents of the fact that if Kagan is confirmed, which seems likely, all nine Supreme Court justices will have graduated from Ivy League law schools. While I suspect many of them are seizing on this to continue their never-ending battle with the administration, I confess this does not sit well with me either. It seems to suggest that only a certain sort of person succeeds in life: One is either an Ivy League star or, well, one is not. This is not the sort of message I care to convey to my children, though, perhaps, it is an accurate one.
In the United States, we like to pride ourselves on our social mobility. That’s a myth. Our own social and economic standing is highly correlated with our family’s status when we were children, much more so than in supposedly hidebound Europe. While selecting a graduate of, say, the University of Texas law school to sit on the court might not have done much to change this fact, it could have sent a message that life is determined by more than where you went to school, and how well you did there.
As for Elena Kagan herself, I have no opinion. Of course, as Brooks points out, how on earth could I? That’s the entire point.
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hjp commented on May 12 10 at 8:57 pmComI am of the opinion that the Supreme Court is setting itself up for a legal challenge, as to whether or not 1) their opinions are in fact biased due to their common Ivy League education, and 2) they are engaging in discrimination, by limiting the Court to Ivy League Graduates.
The following applies to Kagan, just as it did to Sotomajor.
This editorial was created by 160 Associated Press readers under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution License 3.0 using MixedInk’s collaborative writing tool. For more about how it was created, see here. It can be republished only if accompanied by this note.
Obamas Appointment of Sotomayor Fails to Offer Educational Diversity to Court.
Sotomayor does not offer true diversity to our Supreme Court. The potential power of Sotomayor’s diversity as a Latina Woman, from a disadvantaged background, loses its strength because her Yale Law degree does not offer educational diversity to the current mix of sitting Judges. Once she walked through the Gates of Princeton and then Yale Law School she became educated by the same Professors that have educated the majority of our current Supreme Court Justices, and our Presidents.
Diversity in education is extremely important. We need to look for diversity in our ideas, and if our leaders are from the same educational background, they lose the original power of their ethnic and gender diversity. The ethnic and gender diversity many of our current leaders possess no longer brings a plethora of new ideas, only the same perspective they learned from their common Ivy League education. One example of the common education problem is that Yale has been heavily influenced by a former lecturer at Yale, Judge Frank, who developed the philosophy of Legal Realism. Frank argued that Judges should not only look at the original intent of the Constitution, but they should also bring in outside influences, including their own experiences in order to determine the law. This negative interpretation has influenced both Conservatives and Liberals graduating from Yale. It has been said that Legal Realism has infested Yale Law School and turned lawyers into political activists.
A generation of appointees with either a Harvard or Yale background, has the potential to distort the proper interpretation of our Constitution. America needs to decentralize the power structure away from the Ivy League educated individual and gain from the knowledgeable and diverse perspectives that people from other institutions can provide. We should appoint Supreme Court Justices educated from amongst a wider group of Americas Universities.
Harvard -
Chief Justice John Roberts
Anthony Kennedy
Antonin Scalia
Stephen Breyer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Harvard, Columbia)Yale
Samuel Alito – Yale JD 1975
David Souter
Clarence Thomas – Yale JD 1974
Sonia Sotomayor – Yale JD 1979Northwestern Law School.
Justice John Paul Stevens
The Presidents we have elected for the last twenty years, have themselves been Harvard or Yale educated. This has the potential to create an even more closed minded interpretation of our laws.
Yale – Bush Sr. – 4 years
Yale Law – Clinton – 8 years
Yale – Bush, Jr. – 8 Years
Harvard Law – Obama – 4 – 8 yearsWhen we consider that our Nation has potentially twenty – eight years of Presidential influece from these two Universities, as Americans, we should look long and hard at the influence Yale and Harvard have exerted on our nation’s policies. Barack Obama promised America Change, but he has continued the same discriminatory policy by appointing a Yale graduate over many qualified candidates that graduated from other top Colleges and Universities in America.ments
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