In the New Yorker this week, Malcolm Gladwell explains why the Ivy League schools put a premium on “character” and “personality”: “The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for th students who would have the greatest succes after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance….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.”

Hey, just because my roommate Tod Lindberg and I spent our Saturday nights at the U. of C. watching “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island,” that doesn’t make us socially irrelevant!