Jesse Singal (who we can’t reply to on Twitter, because he blocks us) Tweeted this:
Can’t load tweet https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1345821145757573123: Sorry, that page does not exist
If you have difficulty reading it, it’s this:
“Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled — as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High … [over] … Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.”
A rump of Yale’s corporation resisted: when Clark made a presentation to the corporation about constructing a new American elite based on merit rather than birth, one member interjected, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table. These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”
How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits, p 115 Emphasis added.
To be clear, only the quote about preferring the Mexican-American is Buckley’s. The other is from an anonymous member of Yale’s Corporation, roughly its board of directors.
One Tweeter asks what was the context of Buckley’s quote:
I can answer that, because I’m old enough to have read Buckley’s 1970 collection The Governor Listeth in paperback. (We're not, institutionally, in the business of defending WFB’s legacy, but this is unfair … and he’s not the only target.)
Buckley wrote this:
The effect of such policies is in part to absorb new members into the governing class, in part to demote others even if they have done nothing to earn that demotion. “You will laugh," I wrote a while ago, and some people did laugh, “but it is true that a Mexican-American from El Paso High with identical scores on the achievement tests and identically ardent recommendations from their headmasters has a better chance of being admitted to Yale than Jonathan Edwards XVI from St. Paul’s School.” [Emphasis added.]
That was inWhat Makes Buckley Run, originally published in the Atlantic as What Makes Bill Buckley Run, April 1968. So what Buckley was complaining about was deliberate discrimination against his own race (and class). Deliberate discrimination against what we call "The Historic American Nation."
What he was running for was a seat on the Yale Corporation to discourage Yale’s attempt to create a "new elite." It was Buckley’s position that universities, while they may be be open to talent, are not in the business of creating a new elite by squashing the old one. (And if they really don’t want to be supportive of the "old elite," i.e., their alumni, why do they keep sending them begging letters?)
Buckley wrote:
I am, of course, aware that you are not permitted to use the phrase “governing class” in America. What makes the term invidious is its association with the class system, or even the caste system, in such societies as England’s or India’s. Curiously, there is no opprobrium attached in America to the concept of individual families being associated over the course of generations with public service, loosely viewed.
We are proud of the Adams family, of the Lodges, of the Rockefellers, of the Roosevelts. We should also be proud of institutions an exposure to which sets the mind to thinking in terms of a general sense of obligation to society. Instead, we denounce them as havens for the privileged, summon the spirit of Andy Jackson, and reach for our democratic leveling guns.
There are those who so overstate the imperatives of the democratic tradition that they find themselves, in effect, hard at work attempting to fracture the elite. That spirit is, of course, codified in the progressive income tax that rises, or did until recently, to levels of 91 percent. It is a robust and thoroughly commendable American tradition that there should be instant access to the top for everyone who qualifies, and that there should be ample opportunities to qualify. But recent admissions policies of the large private colleges seem to argue that it is equally important to fracture coalescing classes of governors.
The effect of such policies is in part to absorb new members into the governing class, in part to demote others even if they have done nothing to earn that demotion. “You will laugh, I wrote a while ago, and some people did laugh, “but it is true that a Mexican-American from El Paso High with identical scores on the achievement tests and identically ardent recommendations from their headmasters has a better chance of being admitted to Yale than Jonathan Edwards XVI from St. Paul’s School.”
Any college that wishes to serve within the American tradition should guard against exclusivity for the sake of it. It should never exclude the talented in order to give preferences to its own grossly untalented. But it should not decline to include its own simply in order to multiply opportunity. We should bear in mind that there must emerge a reason for the private college if the private college is going to survive. If Yale has no sense of obligation to its alumni, no sense of adherence to any special traditions, why should it be private? I have no doubt that the State of Connecticut would gratefully accept the gift of the plant, facilities, and faculty contracts of Yale University, which gift would (a) provide the final solution to the problem of financing Yale; and (b) forever allay any suspicion that Yale is undemocratic. [Emphasis added.]
That’s the point here; why is the business of Yale to discriminate against and destroy the old elite, the Historic American Nation, and in this case, the Historic Sons Of Eli Yale?
Why, as early as 1968, were American private universities treating their own people as if they were what the Soviets after the Russian Revolution called "Former People"?.
“Clark cast Yale’s new admissions standards as “a statement, really, about what leadership was going to be in the country and where leaders were going to come from.” The old elite understood this and tried to fight back. Yale’s admissions officers received frosty receptions at prep schools that had once embraced them. Alumni grumbled — as in William F. Buckley’s complaint that the new standards would prefer “a Mexican-American from El Paso High … [over] … Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.”
