Education
It’s the Elites, Stupid
How are we going to build anything if we’re trapped beneath the rubble produced by those in control?
James B. Conant—first chairman of the National Science Foundation, scientific advisor to the Manhattan Project, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and Harvard’s 23rd president—did much to make Harvard a recognizably modern, elite university. He introduced the SAT, dispensed with mandatory Latin, and built out professional schools around the undergraduate college. In his meritocratic ideals and insistence that it was better to “advance” than to “perpetuate” learning, as well as his application of his own learning to the scientific and political challenges of the day, Conant…
