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Princeton Mom’s Kinsleyan Gaffe

Michael Kinsley famously said a “gaffe” is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. The Princeton mom who got into hot water by telling Ivy League girls that they should work on getting a MRS. degree at college committed a gap in the Kinsley mode. Ross Douthat says the woman’s remarks only disclose what American […]

Michael Kinsley famously said a “gaffe” is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. The Princeton mom who got into hot water by telling Ivy League girls that they should work on getting a MRS. degree at college committed a gap in the Kinsley mode. Ross Douthat says the woman’s remarks only disclose what American elites already know, but don’t want people to talk about. Excerpt:

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we’re supposed to do — our mothers don’t have to come out and say it!

Why, it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that’s what we’re already doing! (What Richard Florida called“the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places” is one of the striking social facts of the modern meritocratic era.) We don’t need well-meaning parents lecturing us about the advantages of elite self-segregation, and giving the game away to everybody else. …

Or it would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body “diversity” that’s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don’t need to be told — that’s how the system already works! The “holistic” approach to admissions, which privileges résumé-padding and extracurriculars over raw test scores or G.P.A.’s, has two major consequences: It enforces what looks suspiciously like de facto discrimination against Asian applicants with high SAT scores, while disadvantaging talented kids — often white and working class and geographically dispersed — who don’t grow up in elite enclaves with parents and friends who understand the system. The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite.

But don’t come out and say it!

Read the whole thing. It’s great.

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