Bizareness

So today I was making my regular runs through the blogosphere and stumbled upon Steven Levitt's latest. His post was just a brief reference to a Malcolm Gladwell article (the popular journalist/sociologist who brought us The Tipping Point and Blink) in the latest New Yorker. The article is about Ivy League admissions policies, it is very interesting (turns out the reason colleges started asking for essays and letters of recommendations was to keep Jews out), but it features this tidbit that Levitt posted:

In the wake of the Jewish crisis, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the “best graduates” approach to admissions. France’s École Normale Supérieure, Japan’s University of Tokyo, and most of the world’s other élite schools define their task as looking for the best students—that is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered).[Emphasis added]

So this naturally led to a flurry of comments that I decided to partake in. It would have been normal had Tucker Max (a University of Chicago alum) not began to comment. You will probably find it amusing to check out the comments, much Ivy League bashing and Tucker Max. Does it honestly get better than that?

So that is about the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the blogosphere yet. Here’s to many more.

-Mr. Alec