Those Incestuous Ivies!

Today's New York Times ran an article heralding the new Dartmouth College president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim (full story here). What caught our attention, though, was the headline: “Dartmouth Selects Its New President from Harvard.” An Ivy League president with ties to (gasp!) a different Ivy?

There’s something unique about that Crimson, though, that makes the Times’ college-cum-university presidential supercenter inference especially apt. Kim’s hiring will make three out of the seven Ivy League presidents educated at some point at Harvard. For those of you at home keeping score, Penn’s Amy Gutmann got her B.A. from Radcliffe and her Ph.D. from Harvard and Brown’s Ruth Simmons received a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Granted, Dr. Kim is inextricably linked to Harvard: in addition to working as an official at Harvard Med School, he got his Ph.D. in Anthropology and his M.D. at Harvard. But the article buries that fact that Kim also went to Brown undergrad, in the same paragraph that mentions his football prowess at his Iowa high school (he was a quarterback).

What consolation is there for us at Princeton? Well, three out of the seven Ivy presidents have at some point taught here: Gutmann, Simmons, and of course Shirley. So we’ve got that going for us.

SKG