How Higher Education Can Win Back America

Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University (CT), writes:  

Anti-elitism runs so deep in American culture that even our founding fathers thought it was old news. In 1813 Thomas Jefferson warned that the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents,” represented “a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.” Like James Madison and Ben Franklin, he worried that this elite was interested in protecting its own privileges rather than the good of the Republic. Madison, Franklin and Jefferson agreed on one major antidote to the evils of hereditary privilege: education. Jefferson started a university, in part, to pull “from the rubbish,” as he once put it, students who lacked economic resources but who made up for it with drive and intelligence. From their ranks, he envisioned a new class of leaders based on talent rather than fortune.