America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats) by David Gelernter

Author:David Gelernter [Gelernter, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781594036071
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2013-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Graduate and professional degree programs of all sorts have grown enormously since 1946, in numbers and prominence. We can trace the increasing size of the programs, but it’s hard to pin down their increasing influence—although we are all aware of it.

Consider the U.S. presidency since 1946. Neither Harry Truman nor Dwight Eisenhower nor John Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson had a graduate degree. Truman, in fact, was the first president since the nineteenth century without a bachelor’s degree—and he might be the last forever. But five of the eight presidents since Johnson did have advanced degrees: Nixon, Ford, Clinton and Obama from law school, George W. Bush from Harvard Business School.

The large influence of the elite universities continues to grow. Before the cultural revolution, Hollywood and the old Eastern universities, for example, were largely nonintersecting elites. The film studios had East Coast offices where Ivy Leaguers (lawyers especially) were sometimes to be found, but Hollywood itself was run by self-made men, many of them Jews, who had improvised a new industry from scratch in a faraway, sunny nowhere. An occasional Princeton-educated writer might go west seeking to cash in. But Scott Fitzgerald explains in The Love of the Last Tycoon, his unfinished last novel, why he at least didn’t make it as a screenwriter: storytelling in the movies is a new animal, dependent on quick, powerful connections between picture and emotion. The hero of the Last Tycoon, based on the legendary producer Irving Thalberg, is a new kind of industrial giant and a new kind of artist. He owes nothing to the old WASP elite.

But look at “Yale in Hollywood” today. It’s a branch of the Yale Alumni Society that runs its own meetings and special events. Read its list of Yale alums in the film industry and it’s clear that Yale today is all over Hollywood—and likewise Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago et al. Among the Yale graduates are actors and actresses, writers and all sorts of producers, heads of marketing and publicity companies, film-industry investors, movie-music composers, licensing-company executives, agents and (of course) Hollywood lawyers.

Welcome to American culture, where—now more than ever—the tony universities are the ultimate source of attitude.

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