I thought this book review by David Brooks yesterday was really, really interesting. I thought it was interesting that he didn’t mention affirmative action even once. But that might have detracted from the point he was trying to get at. Anyway, here’s the opener:

A few years ago, I wrote a book about the rise of a new educated class, the people with 60’s values and 90’s money who go to Starbucks, shop at Whole Foods and drive Volvos. A woman came up to me after one of my book talks and said, “You realize what you’re talking about is the Jews taking over America.”
My eyes bugged out, but then I realized that she was Jewish and she knew I was, too, and between us we could acknowledge there’s a lot of truth in that statement. For the Jews were the vanguard of a social movement that over the course of the 20th century transformed the American university system and the nature of the American elite.
This is a large part of the story Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells in “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”
Karabel’s tale begins in 1900, when young men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt graduated from academies like Groton, St. Paul’s and Choate, moved easily and almost automatically to Cambridge, New Haven or Princeton and set the cultural tone at the country’s prestigious universities.
When they arrived on campus, these scions of the Protestant Establishment didn’t concern themselves overly much with academics. Their main proving grounds were extracurricular activities and social life. Positioning themselves to edit the school paper or join the right secret society, they strove to establish their social worth and to prove how much they embodied the virtues of the Harvard Man, the Yale Man or the Princeton Man. That meant being effortlessly athletic, charismatic, fair, brave, modest and, above all, a leader of men.
In 1904, the Yale yearbook boasted of having “more gentlemen and fewer scholars than any other class in the memory of man.”