The Ivy League’s theory of legitimacy is under attack from two directions.

A renowned political philosopher, Amy Gutmann was in some ways an inspired choice to serve as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Germany. Over the course of a long and fruitful academic career, she has made enormous contributions to the theory of deliberative democracy, identity politics, and the role of educational institutions in a pluralistic society, lines of inquiry that are as urgent as ever on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the thick of Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is an undeniable resonance to having the daughter of a German Jewish refugee represent U.S. interests in Berlin.

But I suspect it was not Gutmann’s considerable achievements as a public intellectual or her ancestral ties that won her one of the nation’s most prestigious ambassadorial appointments. A more likely explanation is that the president felt he owed her a debt of gratitude, as she gave him something more precious than even the most eye-wateringly large Super PAC contribution.

Prior to taking on her new role, Gutmann served as president of the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years, where she was celebrated, and well compensated, for her prodigious fundraising and strategic acumen. Notably, she presided over the establishment of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in February 2017, which was initially led by Joe Biden, who at the same time was named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Having a former vice president on your faculty is no small thing, and Gutmann and Biden appear to have developed a strong rapport. And when Biden’s granddaughter Maisy Biden applied for admission to Penn in 2018, he intervened personally to press her case to Gutmann, who seems to have given the former vice president valuable advice about improving her chances. Despite an imperfect academic record, the younger Biden matriculated at Penn in the fall of 2019 and graduated this past spring. By then, Gutmann was comfortably ensconced in Berlin.

I don’t begrudge Biden for doing whatever he could to secure his granddaughter’s admission to a prestigious university, an admirable act of grandfatherly devotion, or Gutmann for having been receptive to his entreaties, as her job was in no small part to add luster to the University of Pennsylvania. The relationship between them is striking nevertheless. One would normally expect a university president to be solicitous toward a former vice president of the United States, not the other way around.

But Gutmann wasn’t the president of just any university. She was the president of an Ivy League university, and that made all the difference. Her relationship with the Biden family is a perfect distillation of the immense influence of the Ivy League and its peer institutions—and it points to how that influence might come undone.

Armed with billion-dollar endowments, America’s most selective universities have in recent decades transformed themselves into “the makers of manners” for the nation’s mass affluent population. By mixing the children of the rich and powerful with the children of designated disadvantaged groups, they’ve given rise to a new progressive elite that holds enormous sway over the nation’s cultural and political life. Now, as Ivy-plus admissions practices come under intense scrutiny from left and right, this potent alchemy is at risk, opening the door for a new set of elite-making institutions.

One of Gutmann’s distinguished predecessors as U.S. ambassador to Germany is James Bryant Conant, who served as the U.S. high commissioner for Germany and then as the first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic at the dawn of the Cold War. In a neat parallel, Conant took on the role after a highly consequential 20-year tenure as president of Harvard University.

Between Conant’s era and Gutmann’s, elite higher education in America reached the zenith of its power. But Conant’s vision for Harvard and Gutmann’s vision for Penn were strikingly different.

The product of a working-class childhood in Boston, Conant famously sought to transform Harvard from a finishing school for the WASP elite into a more meritocratic institution, tasking administrators at the university with finding an aptitude test that would select for the nation’s brightest, most capable young people, which later formed the basis of the SAT. He believed that Harvard could help realize “Jefferson’s ideal,” a nation led by a public-spirited intellectual elite, chosen through a rigorous, evidence-based process. To many Americans, some version of Conant’s thesis is the most compelling justification for the elevated status of Harvard and institutions like it, which is why departures from the meritocratic ideal tend to undermine the legitimacy of Ivy League eliteness.

This brand of meritocratic elitism has never been fully realized in practice, certainly not in the Ivy League. For one, Conant himself presided over Jewish quotas, and he’s been accused of indifference—at a minimum—to the scourge of antisemitism. A long line of university administrators in the decades since have abandoned meritocratic elitism, converging on a different and arguably more robust foundation for eliteness. In lieu of a single-minded focus on academic excellence, elite higher education has taken a more pluralistic approach, one that blends students selected solely on the basis of academic credentials with others whose presence is meant to enrich university life, figuratively and literally. For much of this period, these departures from a meritocratic paradigm were seen as concessions to the imperative of fundraising and other prosaic institutional objectives. In more recent years, however, this brand of admissions pluralism has been given a moral makeover. Call it progressive elitism.

In May 1995, Gutmann, then the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and dean of the faculty at Princeton, delivered the esteemed Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford. Her remarks were focused on racial injustice, which she referred to as “the most morally and intellectually vexing problem in the public life of this country.”

One of Gutmann’s central arguments is that because “public policies and individual practices that would effectively address racial injustice are collective goods,” it is fair and reasonable “for blacks to criticize other blacks who benefit from their efforts to combat racial injustice but who do nothing to aid this cause or an equally urgent one.” That is, Black Americans “need to unite in order to combat racial injustice” by, for example, supporting affirmative-action policies.

And according to Gutmann, it is not just Black Americans who have a special obligation in this domain. “The fewer burdens of race we have to bear,” she argues, “the greater our obligations are to overcome racial injustice.” Americans who are not Black “have a special obligation to fight racial injustice so as to decrease the likelihood that they will be the beneficiaries of unfair advantages that stem from the racial stereotyping of social offices and other forms of institutionalized injustices that unfairly disadvantage blacks.”

If Gutmann is right that advantaged individuals and groups have a special obligation to eschew unfair advantages that reinforce racial inequality, how should one understand the concerted effort of President Biden to secure his granddaughter’s admission to the University of Pennsylvania—or rather, how should we expect the political philosopher Amy Gutmann to understand it?

One potential resolution is that the end justifies the means. That is, it is reasonable and appropriate for privileged people to leverage their status, relationships, and wealth to secure high-status educational opportunities if doing so serves the larger cause of racial and social justice.

Someone in Gutmann’s position could maintain that because the institution she controls is aligned with causes she and her peers deem worthy, admitting students who can enhance its centrality and prestige is in itself a noble pursuit. A commitment to egalitarianism gives Penn and universities like it not just moral license but moral imperative to fortify their student bodies with the children and grandchildren of the nation’s most privileged families. Doing so gives progressive university presidents like Gutmann a powerful tool to shape the rising generation of the American elite.

Crucially, this project of elite-making needs a more broadly acceptable theory of legitimacy. If meritocratic elitism is justified by the need to inculcate a sense of patriotism and civic duty in the best and brightest, progressive elitism is justified by the need to diversify the American elite. That means increasing the representation of Black Americans and other historically disadvantaged groups in prominent roles in American public life—but it also means protecting and strengthening the role of the Ivy League as an opportunity choke point. Under progressive elitism, the Ivy League isn’t just where dynastic wealth meets the dynamism of first-generation strivers. It is where America’s elite gains its moral imprimatur.

The Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case shed light on how this approach to elite-making has worked in practice. Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit legal advocacy group opposed to racial preferences, retained the Duke University labor economist Peter Arcidiacono to analyze who was admitted to Harvard and who was not, drawing on years of closely guarded data that the university was obliged to share with the plaintiffs. His expert testimony revealed the extent to which the university’s admissions practices disadvantaged Asian American applicants, which helped galvanize conservative critics of race-conscious admissions. Arcidiacono and his co-authors also drew attention to Harvard’s preferences for recruited athletes, legacies, prospective students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs), which were in some cases strikingly large.

Alarmed by Arcidiacono’s findings, critics and champions of race-conscious admissions united in denouncing preferences for ALDCs, a rare instance of cross-ideological agreement. But racial preferences and preferences for ALDCs are fundamentally complementary, and it is this complementarity that serves as the cornerstone of progressive elitism.

Consider the mounting evidence that the chief advantage of an elite education is not the quality of instruction but rather the access it gives to relationships with powerful people. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan described how the social binding together of students from privileged and less privileged backgrounds can redound to the benefit of the latter.

“Graduating from an elite school,” writes Khan, “affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings.” But while students from privileged backgrounds have access to networks of affluent, educated, professionally accomplished adults even before attending institutions such as Harvard or Penn, less privileged students do not. When these students are brought together, the privileged students gain a sense of validation—of their intellect, accomplishments, and character—and the less privileged gain social and cultural capital that can hasten their post-college professional ascent.

Though Khan is no defender of legacy preferences, he observes that “legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools.” This logic applies not just to legacy students but to other privileged students as well, including the children and grandchildren of prominent elected officials, major philanthropists, academic and cultural luminaries, and perhaps even accomplished equestrians and squash players.

And progressive elitism is doing much more than just shaping the manners, mores, and life trajectories of students attending elite universities. It allows admissions officers to engage in soulcraft on a much grander scale.

In 2010, the economists Valerie and Garey Ramey found that intensified competition for prestigious college slots from the mid-1990s on led to a dramatic increase in the time and resources college-educated U.S. parents devoted to their children’s development. In contrast, there was no comparable increase in rivalry among parents in Canada, where the prestige hierarchy in higher education is not nearly as steep. The Rameys conclude that the net result of this intensified competition has been a wasteful, zero-sum “rug rat race.”

Building on this empirical foundation, the essayist Matt Feeney goes further still. In his 2021 book, Little Platoons, he denounces the hubris of selective college admissions, accusing admissions officers of arrogating to themselves extraordinary power over the inner lives of aspirational parents and their children.

Faced with a surge of applications as Millennials came of age, Feeney posits, “admissions people came to grasp that the selection power this competition had given them was also a deep and subtle sort of moral power … They could now tell their applicants which extracurriculars were better, and which sort of personal confessions were more pleasing in admissions essays, which sorts of person, as manifest in these essays and extracurriculars, they liked more.” By signaling these behavioral preferences to parents, teachers, counselors, and anxious young strivers highly susceptible to small gradations of status, admissions officers found that “they could now induce their applicants to become such people.”

A number of scholars and practitioners have called for using selective college admissions to “nudge” parents and students in several ways. In 2017, for example, Thomas Scott-Railton published a provocative article in the Yale Law & Policy Review urging elite colleges to give a substantial admissions bonus to applicants who had attended high-poverty K–12 schools even if they were not from low-income households themselves. “By rewarding applicants for attending socioeconomically integrated schools,” he argued, “colleges would mobilize the resources of private actors across the country towards integration.”

Leaving aside the merits of this particular proposal, it speaks to the extraordinary power that elite higher education has over the nation’s middle-class-and-up families. Scott-Railton’s proposal could be seen as an exercise in having Ivy League institutions advance a policy objective that Congress would likely reject. Striking legislative bargains in a culturally plural society is hard. Winning over the admissions office is a significantly lighter lift.

This disciplinary power has an ideological character, and it’s not always subtle. In 2018, an admissions officer at Yale University published a note reassuring prospective applicants and admitted students that they wouldn’t be penalized for suspensions or other disciplinary action imposed by their high schools for taking part in gun-control activism. “For those students who come to Yale,” she wrote, “we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Imagine a similar note cheering on prospective applicants to Yale for taking part in the March for Life—and then imagine the opprobrium that would follow for the admissions officer who published it.

The result is that the opportunity choke point of elite college admissions has become, in the hands of progressive administrators and admissions officers, a tool for transforming progressive pieties into elite social norms.

And that leads us to why Ivy League eliteness may have peaked.

If progressive elitism has allowed selective universities to reconcile moralistic progressivism with the elitism that is the source of their desirability, what happens when Ivy League admissions officers’ power to reshape social norms is no longer undergirded by an appeal to racial justice? Since the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision curtailed racial preferences, legacy preferences have come under vigorous attack, not least from the Biden administration, which has launched a civil-rights investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice. Amherst College abandoned legacy admissions in October 2021, and Wesleyan University announced this July that it would follow suit. If Shamus Khan is right, although the symbolic value of an elite education for less advantaged students might persist beyond the end of legacy admissions, its value as a source of social and cultural capital will be greatly diminished.

This in turn could create an opening for a different set of higher-education institutions committed to a different set of values—perhaps even a revival of the midcentury vision of elite institutions that would promote social mobility while instilling patriotism and a sense of civic obligation.

That, at least, seems to be the impetus behind a slew of new higher-education initiatives in red and purple states, where many voters, policy makers, and philanthropists are wary of Ivy League progressivism. The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, a public research university that has seen surging enrollment in recent years, is pioneering an approach to civics that welcomes debate and encourages a deep understanding of the nation’s founding principles. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee is creating a similar institute, which aims to inculcate an “informed patriotism,” through the state university system.

And then there is the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, a new initiative that is being led by Will Inboden, a distinguished scholar of international relations who most recently taught at the University of Texas at Austin. With more than 60,000 students at its Gainesville campus, UF is already one of the nation’s most respected public universities and, in light of the Sunshine State’s rapid economic and demographic expansion, it is well positioned for further growth. The Hamilton Center, aimed at fostering diversity of thought and improving the quality of civic education on campus and throughout the state, represents a bet on UF’s enormous potential. One possibility is that it will serve as the seedbed of a new liberal-arts college that would compete with the likes of Penn and Harvard, attracting bright and capable students from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds. To date, UF hasn’t distinguished itself as a beacon of social mobility. But that could soon change.

No one expects these fledgling efforts to dislodge the Ivy League and its peers from their place at the top of America’s higher-education status hierarchy, at least not yet. What we can say is that many young Americans and their families are looking for alternatives to elite education as we’ve come to know it, and a growing number of civic entrepreneurs are hoping to revive something like the still-resonant meritocratic ideal.