Elitist or Essential? Ivy League Is Subject of Debate

The Ivy League is elitist and should be abolished, according to a prominent author and journalist who is defending his position Friday night at a sold-out debate at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian who graduated from the University of Toronto, this evening is expected to argue that the Ivy League admissions process is subjective and breeds elitism in American society, and that intelligent students will do just as well in life regardless of where they attend college. "It was Malcolm's idea — he's on a warpath," a professor of art history and history at Columbia University, Simon Schama said.

Mr. Schama, who will moderate this evening's debate, said he has no position on the issue, even though his children have attended Harvard and Columbia.

Mr. Gladwell, a writer for the New Yorker, is not alone in his criticism.

"I think it's vastly overrated," a professor of sociology at Harvard, Jason Kaufman, said of the Ivy League. "It's a poor investment of time and money to obsess about going to an Ivy League school. It's an unfortunate aspect of American society that where you get your degree matters more than what you've done with it."

After a good internship on Capitol Hill, a student might have more success attending George Washington University than Harvard, a professor of sociology at Harvard, Martin Whyte, said. "The Ivy League is not especially wonderful or different — those schools just have more money," he said. "I don't think you're ever going to eliminate elitism."

Mr. Gladwell will face off against another journalist and writer for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, who will argue against eradicating the Ivy League, which is defined as an athletic conference comprising Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. It was established in 1954.

While many faculty members and students at Ivy League schools said the experience there is overrated and the admissions process is elitist, they said abandoning the formal designation "Ivy League" would not help to extinguish the cachet associated with its schools. "I'm not going to pretend the degree isn't nice, but I still hate the idea that I might get hired for a job over someone from a state school because of that rather than on my merits," Lydia DePillis, a Columbia student who chronicles life at an Ivy League school on a Web log, Bwog.net, said.

Some students said abandoning the designation would be an unpopular move among Ivy League students. "Ivy Leaguers generally like being in the Ivy League at the very least for the artifice of it, even if they don't go around saying it," a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Jim Newell, said. The writer Gay Talese said the whole issue seemed like a joke. "The Ivy League doesn't mean anything because these kids don't mean very much," Mr. Talese said. "Campuses are almost irrelevant right now. The Ivy League and the non-Ivy League are connected in a lethargy of self-centeredness of their students." The debate is a part of the annual New Yorker Festival.