Team of Brainiacs.(The Talk of the Town)(government officials)

Last week wasn't such a boola one for the Ivy League: on Thursday, one of the cheerier items the Harvard Crimson could muster, as the university's administration announced that its endowment had lost nearly a quarter of its value, was that Shelby MacLeod, a freshman fencer, had gone undefeated in the Beanpot Championship in spite of a hamstring problem. In a Times column titled "A Team of Whizzes," Bob Herbert wondered whether the Obama Administration, "brilliant as it appears to be," would pursue an elitist agenda; meanwhile, recordings resurfaced of Richard Nixon (Whittier '34, Duke Law '37) excoriating Henry Kissinger (Harvard B.A. '50, M.A. '52, Ph.D. '54):

NIXON: The Ivy League Presidents? Why, I won't let those sons-of-bitches ever in this White House again. Never, never. None of them. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished. . . . Henry, I would not have had them in. Don't do that again. . . . They came out against us when it was tough. . . . Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never.

David Skorton, the president of Cornell, was apprised of Nixon's comments over the phone. "My mouth is open," Skorton said, after the line went quiet. "Gosh, what a negative thing to say. Ivy League schools, like all good universities, teach people to think and to reason, and why would anyone be against that?" Amy Gutmann, the president of Penn, noted that suspicion of Ivy League intellectuals is "a recurring undercurrent" in American politics: "The story I remember is from 1976, when the New York senator James Buckley referred to Daniel Patrick Moynihan as 'Professor Moynihan,' and Moynihan replied, 'The mudslinging has begun.' " So, whizzes or sons of bitches? A self-appointed statistician (an Ivy League English major) was moved to perform a quasi-scientific analysis of the educational makeups of Presidential Cabinets since Nixon.

The perception that Obama's Cabinet is unusually tweedy is, at least so far, correct: of the fifteen degrees that he and his nominees hold, forty per cent are from the Ivy League, among the highest proportions in the sample. (Count the other high-ranking team members James L. Jones, Susan Rice, Lawrence Summers, and Peter Orszag and the percentage dips to 30.7, but only because Rice, a Stanford alum, holds two advanced degrees from Oxford, and Orszag, a Princeton graduate, also holds two degrees from the London School of Economics. This diversification is more or less cancelled out by the fact that Summers, until he insinuated that women are dunces at science, was the president of Harvard.) Obama, of course, is a graduate of Harvard Law and of Columbia, whose fight song ...