Henry, William. In Defense of Elitism.
New York: Anchor,1994: 146-7
A Rutgers University professor who surveyed fifteen thousand students at thirty-one major universities found that sixty-seven percent of humanities majors admitted cheating at least once during their college years. What are we to make of such admissions? Are the accomplished to be reassessed as undeserving? Or are the pressures in universities too great, the demands and standards too high, so that the occasional lapse is only to be expected? Are we decaying into a society so forgiving of dishonor, so ready to accept almost anyone as a victim, that women and minority students feel entitled to take advantage and white men feel beleaguered into a perverse form of self-defense?
Or is all this simply a product of an educational system so egalitarian, so anti-elitist that even the elite don't learn what they need to learn? There is troubling evidence for this latter view. Another survey, conducted among 3,119 students at the eight Ivy League schools, found that fifty percent could not name their own two U.S. senators, fifty-nine percent could not name as many as four justices of the Supreme Court, forty-four per cent could not name the speaker of the House of Representatives, and thirty-six percent did not know that the speaker follows the vice president in the line of succession. While a less alarming eleven percent did not know who wrote the Declaration of Independence, fully seventy-five percent did not recognize the phrase "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" as having been spoken by Abraham Lincoln. (It is, of course, from the finale of the Gettysburg Address.) None of this is quite as jarring, however, as what happened when a Stockholm newspaper gave five stock analysts the equivalent of $1,250 each and had them compete as investors for a month. The winning analyst, publisher of a newsletter, pushed his holdings up an impressive ten percent. But the contest also included a chimpanzee, who chose his stocks by throwing darts-and improved his portfolio by fifteen percent.
I view all these as cautionary tales that life is not only unfair but often unprincipled. Oscar Wilde was on to something when he wrote, "The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is the meaning of fiction." Any system that holds the downtrodden wholly responsible for their sorrowful fate is plainly defective. So, equally, is any system that does not demand of people that they make the most they can of their circumstances. In the delicate calibration of elitist toughness and egalitarian compassion, however, elitism ought to win out for two reasons. It directs society's resources where they have the most chance of stimulating growth and change and making a better life for everyone. And it keeps the pressure on every individual capable of self-improvement to be better than he used to be and to think more about that than about how someone else is always and unjustly going to be better still.