When Signs Aren’t Enough: Ivy Leagues Require More Than Change

The case against Ivy Leagues has come from within and without, but how much change can be generated without abolition?

Princeton’s President Christopher Eisgruber said in a recent interview from The Atlantic that “over the space of years and decades, [Ivy League students] will blossom in ways we can’t even predict, and they will be able to address problems that matter.”

The “problems that matter,” here are intentionally vague. When Eisgruber cites James Madison as an exceptional (enslaving) alumni and Robert George as a professor with conservative views to defend, it becomes clear that the main objective of the Ivy League is performativity — or the optics of praising inclusivity while clinging to injustice at the same time.

Abolition of the Ivy League is argued from within and without. An article from Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits critiques that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford “collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent…legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages.”

Elitism, profit incentive, and conservatism — political and otherwise — punctuate the institutions by way of admissions, endowments, and the encouragement to promote students to jobs that exclusively serve the wealthy.

As per an October 2021 article from The New York Times, “Many endowments, like Harvard’s, have increased their allocations to private equity, venture capital and hedge funds in recent years…Yale’s fund had nearly 40 percent of its portfolio in private equity funds.” Markov Process International found that the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University “[have] some of the highest exposures to absolute return strategies, or hedge funds,” as well.

Beyond these “corrupt advantages,” though, is the origin of almost every Ivy League school. With the exception of Cornell University, every Ivy League university has had direct involvement with the enslavement trade or enslaved labor; to this day, statements of performativity are given priority over the internal and external calls to abolish the institutions.

Extending past its origins, Yale University previously named a residential hall after John C. Calhoun, as well as a dining hall of the same name featuring the depiction of two Black people picking cotton. The individual now labeled as the “head of college,” at Yale, used to be called “master,” with the back of the school’s Pierson Residence Hall previously being referred to as “[enslavement] quarters.” Columbia University, in the same vein, had constructed a statue of Thomas Jefferson and named a dormitory after Samuel Bard, both enslavers themselves.

A professor at Columbia University had challenged its nationwide ranking, asserting in his own now-well-known blogpost that “in every case where the data reported by Columbia to U.S. News could be checked against another source, substantial discrepancies [in nearly every area of the institution] were revealed.” While the statistics given only applied directly to Columbia, it appears that Ivy Leagues have more of an incentive to maintain their image than to create an environment where students can thrive — structurally, it is impossible for them to do so.

(Illustration by Liam Waldman / The Jaguardian)

Ivy Leagues prize renaming and restructuring over the abolition of their institutions.

As a counter to abolition, there is increasing encouragement to “think about what you actually have control over…you may just be able to change the system from within.”

When the idea of “making changes from within” comes up, it’s often paired with the idea that revolution, as a process, is preposterous — that it’s a distant horizon, on one level, and an outdated optimism of the past on another. To “make changes from within” means that the system is merely flawed, not harmful in its foundation. It means that, with enough hard work and determination, strides in the Ivy League can be made for the better — never from administration, though, it should be noted.

It’s not to say that individual changes shouldn’t be made, but rather that an emphasis on reform removes responsibility from larger systems — Ivy League schools are all backed by namesake corporations, after all — and from the oppression that they enable.

To call for abolition while existing in the space to be abolished is layered: As argued by student Caleb Dunson, “since we can’t change Yale, we have to tear it down.”