Word: waspness
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...says goodbye to politics, predicting that instead religion will become the primary force in shaping society. Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, takes a different tack in answering the question, "Who Will Be the Next Elite?" The answer: not yesterday's Wasp or today's SAT high scorer, but the young entrepreneur who IPO'd his way into the ruling class...
This late-20th century American elite wasn't born; it was made. During the middle decades of the century, a group of influential university educators and foundation executives led by James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, undertook to unseat the Wasp elite, using the new multiple-choice college-admissions tests as an important tool. In some ways this project has turned out to be a remarkably successful bit of social engineering. The top universities still use heredity as a factor in admissions, but on the whole they have shifted from the raccoon-coat, football-weekend paradigm...
...Jefferson's much loved by Conant. Their generally liberal politics don't set the tone for the country. They are the object of populist resentment more than of admiration; they're the "cultural elite" that politicians like to use as a foil. Oddly enough, the members of the old Wasp elite, though their high positions weren't as hard-earned, didn't get the country nearly as steamed up as the current elite...
...will be wildly ironic if the end result of the attempt to replace the Wasp elite with a new one of philosopher-kings is, instead, a return of the plutocracy that was upended by the Wasps a century ago. Many of the best-known Wasp grandees (like Averell Harriman) spent their life trying to undo what their plutocrat fathers had done. The creators of the succeeding admissions-test elite wanted to take decision-making power about who got to the top away from the marketplace and give it to the schools. If the country has decided it would be neat...
...Nick B. Hobbs '02 is looking for a suitably WASP-y girl to while away his days in Vail with...