Columns

BEARD | Any Person, Any Study … Any Club?

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When I tell people back home that I go to Cornell, I tend to get a lot of groans. They are groans that encapsulate an outsider’s perspective of expensive private schools like ours. “Cornell” and “Ivy League” are terms that, in the public eye, are entrenched in privilege, wealth and selectivity. As much as I’d like to say the public’s presumptions about our school are wrong, the University has a lot of issues working against it which we need to address. More specifically, to fight this perception of rampant elitism on campus, we have to start with the toxic culture of Cornell’s clubs. 

The low acceptance rates and peer-to-peer competition of a selective admissions process don’t stop at Cornell’s gates.

Columns

GLANZEL | In Defense of The Ivy League

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A couple years ago, a former English professor at Yale published an article in the New Republic entitled, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” The title reflected a growing sense of hostility towards elitist institutions of higher education across the nation. Over the last few years, there has been a sort of a backlash against Ivy League-type schools — from President Trump’s attacks on university endowments, to the assaults from conservative media groups that label the Ivy League as a harbor for radical snowflakes. At the risk of sounding elitist and out-of-touch, I argue that the Ivy League — from its hyper-competitive admissions process, to its rigorous academics, to its army of loyal alumni — is actually good for society. Though there are certainly problems with the sort of elitism that emerges from these top schools, the Ivy League nevertheless has produced brilliant thinkers and powerful innovations that have pushed the human race forward. Among the first criticisms leveled at elite schools is the admissions process.