23 October 2018

Yale Adopts Character Standards – 1970s




The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In 1967, Yale dropped personal evaluation categories and photos. The effort to classify and predict personal qualities and leadership potential had not been abandoned, but its technology was being re-tooled. Yale retired its predicted grade algorithm in 1972. This radical departure for Yale’s tradition of measuring academic ability could be seen as yet another move away from objective measure of brains toward subjective selection based on character. Yale proposed to conduct research on reliable measures of personality.

They immediately set about translating those factors into behavioral types and came up with seven types of successful students and five types of unsuccessful students. The seven were artists, athletes, careerists, grinds, leaders, scholars, and socializers. The five failures were alienated, directionless, disliked, extreme grinds, and unqualified. Yale could cherry-pick from among privileged and prepared youths while reserving room for legacy and racial targets.



A Life in Our Times by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1981, Excerpts

Primary responsibility is exercised, even monopolized, by a small group of well-connected, upper-income Americans selected for the task by family membership and attendance at Groton, Exeter, Andover or St. Paul’s and Princeton, Harvard or Yale. They are attracted to the State department because manner there is as important as knowledge and more easily acquired and because it is the one government department where a true-blue gentleman can work. Among Harvard men, it is not important that an individual be intelligent, but he does have to be superior.




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