Seriously. Is anyone surprised by these stories? Ivy League as a stop on the way to Wall Street? One of my favorite lines from Jerold Auerbach's Unequal Justice is that Columbia Law School and Wall Street are not just stops on the same subway line; they're stops on the same career line. I didn't need Auerbach to clue me in to this, though -- in the same freshman history class where we read Unequal Justice our TA asked whether Sinclair Lewis' character Babbitt was a positive or not. I almost started laughing because of course he was terrible; I thought our TA was just throwing us a softball to get discussion started. But you know what, someone else right away answered he's positive. That's just another vignette that shows that he knew how to get a conversation going!
What interests me is that anyone thinks this is news. It's been this way since time immemorial. Hasn't everyone read Craig Wilder's Ebony and Ivy by now? If they haven't, they ought to. And if folks had kept up with the latest on the southern academy in the pre-Civil War era they'd know that the faculty were telling the students what they wanted to hear, too.
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