A little girl ignores the splendors of Siena's cathedral. Photograph taken with a Leica M6 camera and a Leica Summilux ASPH 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens. For more photo goodness, Visit my flickr photostream.I just watched -- couldn't tear myself away from a presentation on BookTV about
Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution by Charles Rappleye. The Brown family endowed Brown University, which is in Providence, Rhode Island.
Brown is my alma mater. I don't think about college very much, but this presentation set me to thinking about the people I knew there and the alumni I know now. It can't be any surprise that anyone who chooses to attend an Ivy League* school has a certain investment in the status quo. In Texas (where I was born) we say, "Dance with the one what brung you," and I think that is the natural attitude towards the system which puts a person into an Ivy.
What this means is, first of all, a fundamental conservatism. It also suggests allegience to institutions, rather than individuals. But these attitudes do not favor innovation and openness to new ideas, and that is a problem with Ivy grads, as a rule. There are exceptions, of course.
*The Ivy League is actually a football league: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale.
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