Harvard’s Civic Mission: The Growth of a National Elite in the Postwar Period

• In Event: The Education of Citizens and Statesmen

Abstract

This paper uses the famous 1940 address “Education for a Classless Society” by James Conant, president of Harvard, to develop the political implications of the transformation of the Ivy League universities in the aftermath of World War II. In the name of social mobility, these institutions produced a new, meritocratic elite. This elite should be understood as having both democratic and aristocratic aspects, a tension that may be responsible for contemporary dissatisfaction with educational meritocracy. The author develops the implications for today’s debates about the best path for the reform of both public and private higher education.

Author

• Luke Foster, Hillsdale College