Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (BA, Harvard) is in the news today because she’s been elected to assume Liz Cheney’s leadership role in the Republican Party–on the grounds that Cheney refuses to lie about the nature and causes of the January 6 attack on the US capitol and Stefanik is eager to do so, and by all accounts has tossed out a lifetime of principles in the process. My question is (and I’ve been thinking about it since Josh Hawley–Stanford, Yale Law–and Ted Cruz–Princeton, Harvard Law–explicitly encouraged the Jan. 6 attack): can we understand this ambition at the cost of principle to be endemic to the crazed HPYS-or-nothing mindset? More simply put: should these schools recognize that the kind of insane hyper-competitiveness they’ve fostered–both as process and ideology–is producing people like this, and is hence destructive not only for potential applicants but for US democracy itself?
I for one would prefer a community college kid with a moral compass over Hawley, Cruz, or Stefanik any day–and it’s hard for me to imagine most of the faculty and administrators at these schools wouldn’t say the same thing.