In The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes with his usual wit and insight in refutation of a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times. Brooks touts the (mostly) Ivy League education of the Obamas and the President-elect’s foreign policy team, with the implication that we are in good hands with this “valedictocracy,” as he calls it. Epstein demurs because he has found through years of teaching that the “good students” may well be people of little principle — “brilliant, but rarely deep young men and women who, joining furious drive to burning if ultimately empty ambition, will do anything to get ahead.” They put Epstein in mind of the Italian character in Catch-22 who had flourished under the fascists and the Communists and was confident he would flourish under the Americans as well. Epstein is right. Judging a person’s potential worth as a public servant by his or her Ivy league education does not indicate sound reasoning.