I agree with your post 100%, but I guess it is the nature of generalizations. I'm sure there are a lot of Ivy Leaguers who feel entitled to a lot of things, but all I know is that I do all the copying and scanning at my unpaid and not-for-credit internship in the public sector, and the other interns (many of whom receive credit or are trying to get a job there) largely sit around and skip out early. I'm not saying my job was super difficult, because it wasn't, but I was perfectly willing to do any task assigned to me.

Unfortunately, one of the best examples of someone who expected to be doing interesting and challenging work and does nothing because she didn't get it, is a girl at Harvard Law. For every girl like that though, you have students who are willing to phonebank and stuff envelopes and make copies for hours on end because they know they are contributing to something positive and not just their own betterment.

I have no idea what I want to do after graduation, but one of the ideas I definitely had is to apply for a job in the Obama administration. My application shouldn't be looked upon more favorably because I earned my spot in a school that has an old boys network, but neither should it be disadvantaged because of that.

And advance warning: if someone tries to draw an analogy here with affirmative action (which is completely different but I don't feel like getting into it), I might punch the wall. Or a baby...

In my experience, both based on my time with the campaign during the New Hampshire primary and information from various friends who are on the campaign now, a blanket prohibition or discounting of Ivy League applicants. Ivy League kids constituted a disproportionate share of the interns in the offices where I've worked and visited, and - shocker! - we vary in talents, dispositions, and attitudes just about as much as the student body at UW-Madison. The hiring decision at the levels of a campaign where kids just getting out of college are generally qualified to apply - which is to say, mostly field organizing positions at a just-above-the-interns level - is very decentralized and very personal. My experience obviously reflects a bias towards the perspective of a summer intern, but I can't think of anyone I know who's ever been hired by the campaign without having worked with the person who hired them first. The campaign hired a good number of interns for the fall of 2007 after they had already worked in the office for at least two months, meaning that the people doing the hiring were informed by actual work experience, not just a resume. So I wouldn't be terribly worried that Harvard students will suddenly be deprived of the opportunity to organize house parties because some overly ambitious kids have spoiled our reputation.

That said, I do think that Ivies tend to attract a disproportionate share of people who have an excess of certain qualities - things like ambition (in a bad way), knowitallism, and the like - that do not mesh well with the way a campaign works. The vast, vast majority of person-hours that are devoted to any political campaign constitute what we're used to calling "grunt work" - stuffing envelopes, answering phones, making spreadsheets, and talking to people. I think that for some reason - I don't know if it's that Ivies attract students with a sense of entitlement, or that they encourage us to develop that sense, or what; Markus may be able to pin it down - many Ivy League students show up at bottom-level campaign jobs with the expectation that their pluck or polish or whatever will enable them to rapidly rise to the top and become speechwriters or policy hacks, and that's just not the case. Some people react just fine to having their dreams of political glory dashed, and they throw themselves into their unglamorous work; others are sulky or self-righteous about it. The latter people don't fit into what your correspondent calls the "general campaign culture" - which is to say, hard work that puts little stock in many of the talents that we're taught to value in the Ivy League.

Of course, this goes for everyone who shows up at a campaign office thinking that they're never going to have to do grunt work - but I guess the Obama campaign feels the phenomenon is particularly acute among Ivy League colleges, and I don't really dispute that. Markus has aptly argued that the Ivies attract elitists, rather than manufacturing elitists, but either way I think it's pretty indisputable that we don't live in the real world at Harvard. I have difficulty making that point convincingly to people who don't agree offhand, unless they come visit Milwaukee (which everyone is always welcome to do), because, to borrow from John Edwards, it's personal for me - but my point is that living in the weird bubble that is Harvard Yard doesn't do a lot to make most people any more down-to-earth or better-able to "be sensitive to existing communities" (as if they were geological phenomena pining for our recognition), and that that's a bad thing for campaigns.

All that said, one last quibble: who said he'd hire from UChicago and Northwestern? If, as I've argued, the hiring process often incorporates a strong personal knowledge of the candidates, there's no reason that the campaign would filter out snobby Ivy Leaguers but not snobby... Wildcats, or whatever they call that vastly inferior Big Ten team down south. There are, in fact, an awful lot of students at schools you've never heard of - in the Midwest and otherwise - who are both talented and hard-working, so maybe, in fact, the campaign might hire them. Go UW!

Don't worry, KosherDutchAfro is full of shit.

 He's a mentally disturbed 30 year old undergraduate with a huge chip on his shoulder about the Ivies.  His name is Kristopher Irizarry-Hoeksema, and he spent months whining on MyDD about UPenn, also without merit.  He wrote as BeThatBrighterDay and also TheBrokeEconomist (he never finished an undergraduate art degree, and is NOT an economist)

 So now he's making up sources.  Trust me, he has NO connections or sources.  He's a paranoid schizophrenic (literally) and a pathological liar. 

Check out this complaint he lodged online against an old employer that he harasses.  Notice their rebuttal. "Kris Irizarry was hospitalized for mental instability and actually stole all our equipment from our New York office. We have had our attorney contact him to cease and desist his defamation towards our company and to stop contacting our clients.

He has repeatably claimed to be going on active duty with US Army which we believe is false, in addition he has written our clients attempting to have them send money to his landlord. he has created factious emails claiming to be an investigative journalist, the bottom line is he is mentally unstable and was in the hostipal 95% of the time he claimed to work with us." 

Read his old stuff.  He's a nut.  Don't worry, your Ivy Leage access is intact.

Anonymous, where are you getting this information? The author seems pretty vanilla and non-confrontational to me, from his old posts... 

Eva, you make a good point: I was merely (1) being cynical and (2) making a link to the Northwestern blog that took this information optimistically and referred to not getting into the Ivy League.

I didn't think enough about the "self-righteousness" thing, but I feel like accusations of "knowitallism" are pretty rampant... that people in the progressive community I'm in are just so quick to point out elitism, and that can be stifling for any disagreement within a campaign. And while I understand that selflessness is part of the point, I'm not convinced that this is ultimately a good thing.