Educational Equality and the President’s Cabinet
Posted on May 15, 2009
By Joe Miller |
Why is it that the Obama administration has spent so much energy trying to prevent lobbyists from overrunning government, but spends little time on the fact that most (more than 50%) of the Cabinet is made up of ivy leaguers?
The President is someone who genuinely cares about equal opportunity. He is aware of class-based problems in education, like persistent achievement gaps, that have kept most Americans out of so-called “top” schools–he wasn’t always the best student. But what the administration has not done such a good job of is appointing a cabinet that truly reflects the educational diversity of the nation. And since educational diversity correlates with overall diversity–the entering classes at these schools are still very far from mirroring the population-at-large–this is an important omission.
Without casting aspersions upon the individuals who are currently serving on the cabinet, or even ivy leaguers, generally–wasn’t it ivy league elites who were at the helms of our financial institutions and government agencies when the entire American way of life all but collapsed? Why is it that the mere fact of being able to say that one went to a particular school is still essentially a license to run wild in Washington?
The American people also have a responsibility to question presidential appointments. We rejected lobbyists who were wreaking havoc on public policy–the President responded with a cocktail of rules that govern the way lobbyists are able to influence government. We should be making a similar inquiry into other institutions that wield so much power but which really have only been dubiously effective at doing what is best for the majority of the American people.
If the President is serious about hiring equality in the federal government, he should work with state and local university systems, especially those in rural and urban areas, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Native American Serving Institutions, to identify quality public servants from all walks of life. But that is not what is reflected on the current cabinet.
Cabinet members and schools are listed below. Traditional ivy league schools are listed in bold. There are several other schools listed below that are not in the ivy league but which are well ensconced in the hegemony . But rather than getting into the business of what U.S. News and World Report does, which is to identify which schools it thinks those are, I leave that to you.
Joe Biden, Vice President: University of Delaware and Syracuse
Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State: Wellesley, Yale
Tim Geithner: Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins
Robert Gates: College of William and Mary, Indiana University, Georgetown (has lectured at Harvard and Yale)
Eric Holder: Columbia
Ken Salazar: Colorado, University of Michigan
Tom Vilsac: Hamilton College, Albany Law School
Gary Locke: Boston and Yale
Hilda Solis: Cal Tech, Pomona, University of Southern California
Kathleen Sebelius: Trinity of Washington, University of Kansas
Shaun Donovan: Harvard
Ray LaHood: Bradley University
Steven Chu: Rochester, UC Berkeley
Arne Duncan: Harvard
Eric Shinseki: National War College, United States Army Command and General Staff College, Duke, United States Military Academy (on Advisory Board of the Center of Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.)
Janet Napolitano: Santa Clara, University of Virginia
“Cabinet Level” Posts
Christina Romer: William & Mary, MIT, UC Berkeley (Assistant Professor at Princeton)
Lisa Jackson: Princeton, Tulane
Peter Orszag: London School of Economics, Princeton
Ron Kirk: University of Texas at Austin, Austin College
Susan Rice: Oxford, Stanford
Rahm Emanuel: Northwestern, Sarah Lawrence
