The CHYOS Superscript

 There’s a Mighty Old Name on the Scene

For the past half century or so, the University of Pennsylvania has not been treated as an equal in the Ivy League, let alone the CHYOS Club. Here’s a telling true story. At a recent Penn-Princeton basketball game, the Quakers had an insurmountable lead in the closing seconds, and the girlie-boys of Princeton started chanting, “Safety School…! Safety School…!” For many years, the preppy feeder schools for the Ivies with the toughest admissions standards had reliably used three schools as fallbacks (i.e., Safety Schools): the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Penn. A similar discrimination situation obtained with law schools. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and later Stanford got first pick, and Penn somehow occupied a lower rung. Here’s a direct quote from the website ‘wordhistories’ about the mutating epithet “Philadelphia Lawyer”:

The proof of this evolving lack of respect can be found in the history of the Supreme Court. Only one justice from Penn has been confirmed to the Court since 1789. 

But now the world of the power elite is changing. In a truly shocking development the law school rankings published this year by U.S. News and World Report, which used to alternate Harvard and Yale for the Number One spot, have incorporated a sea change caused by the evolving (or devolving?) political environment during the Biden Administration. Here are the current standings of the Top 15: 

No big deal, right? All these attorneys are going to get rich. All the Ivy League Law Schools are on the list. So there’s been a little shuffle. Not little if you’re the CHYOS Club. Here’s what it all means…

Penn’s relative weight in terms of world power and influence, not judiciary importance yet, has increased significantly since the Obama Administration. CHYOS power in government rests on two key factors, the Supreme Court of the United States and the Presidency. Between them, Harvard(8) and Yale(4) have provided the nation with 12 of 44 Presidents, more than a quarter of the total. Columbia(4) and Stanford(1) account for another 5, raising the CHYOS percentage to 39 percent. The Supreme Court is weighted similarly. Harvard(22), Yale(11), and Columbia(7) have supplied the Court with 40 justices since 1789. Stanford added two more to the CHYOS total in the 20th Century. U. Penn provided two, but only one got his law degree from Penn. Perhaps most significantly, the current SCOTUS lineup is evenly divided between Harvard and Yale Law School graduates, with the ninth a lonely heart from Notre Dame. That’s overwhelming power in the nation. So how can we possibly say that it is Penn’s fortunes which have risen dramatically of late, while others have stayed the same or declined?

The status of both key factors has changed. Until 2016, Penn had not had a single President of the United States. Donald Trump was the first. Joe Biden is the second. Howzat? He’s a member of the U. Penn faculty and the head of a richly endowed university organization called the Penn-Biden Foundation. Faculty definitely counts in Presidential counting. Eisenhower is one of the Presidents included in the Columbia count, for example. U. Penn now joins sneering Princeton as one of the two Ivies who have produced a pair of U.S. Presidents. The meaningful result is that Penn’s two POTUSes lift the percentage of Presidents from the CHYOS Club to 43. Nearly half. That’s a big deal.

Still, it’s not likely to change the makeup of the Supreme Court, is it? Or is it? Truth is, the fortunes of both Harvard and Yale are not as rosy as they might appear. In both of the key CHYOS factors, Yale is something of a Johnny-come-lately. Twenty years of Yalie presidents impacted Yale membership on the Court, and that outsized influence dates only from 1989, 200 years after the founding. So their surviving law school rank of Number One is possibly running on empty. Especially since the world turned with the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. For the first time in its history the justices of the Court were suddenly confronted by popular anger so intense that it led to sieges of their homes and in one case, an actual assassination attempt on the family of one justice. The Justice who wrote the inflammatory decision was a Yale member of the Court. So was the Justice whose family was put at risk. A third Yale Justice has also been singled out by the political left for his long history of conservative opinions. If this level of unpopularity continues, Yale may not receive future Court nominations, and its USN&WR rank may tumble. The Harvard reputation has suffered serious hits to its reputation already reflected in its fall from grace in the rankings. Controversial new Law School admissions policies, ongoing class-action lawsuits about discrimination against Asian and Jewish candidates, and the recent failure of the Harvard (or Yale) credential to cut the mustard in presidential campaigns (DeSantis, RFKjr, Ramaswamy?) are all contributing to a sense that the once great university is no longer much more than a fading reputation. And Jack Smith went to the Harvard Law School. Even Democrats who like Biden don’t like Jack Smith. Bad poster child for the greatest university on earth.

Which makes the U. of Penn look a lot better by comparison. Real national power is still headquartered in the northeastern U.S.  Stanford and Chicago don’t really stack up as heirs to Harvard-Yale-Columbia type gravitas. Important, yes, but look at the fact that the history underneath the headlines suggests that of all the potential big boys in the room, Penn was there before everybody but you know who. 

Stanford’s younger than the above, and Oxford way way older.

They’re the third oldest university in the Ivy League. Everyone knows their founder, Ben Franklin. Genuine cool guy for the ages. Who knows diddly about John Harvard or Eli Yale or the other founders of CHYOS schools*? What other CHYOS school can lay claim to 7 national football titles and the first modern football stadium in the nation? Who’s got the most Egyptian mummies? For all Boston’s pretensions, which CHYOS school is located in the home of the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, and the Constitution? And over the decades and centuries, Penn has packed a lot of punch in all the vastly different areas the truly great schools do. The Penn Notable Alumni list is absolutely CHYOS worthy:

Click list to zoom..

They’re a wave of rediscovered popularity waiting to happen. In point of fact, only two Ivy League Universities offer undergraduate/graduate degrees in the humanities (BA) as well as law (JD), business (MBA), engineering (BS/MS)[Harvard’s engineering school is MIT], architecture (B. Arch/M.Arch), medicine (MD), and veterinary medicine (DVM): Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.

More importantly, they’re a ready source of legal talent that doesn’t have to live down the names of Harvard and Yale (or if Deep State scandal is going to come a’knocking for Obama, as it just might, Columbia). If the Progressives win the big Penn-Penn presidential battle and decide to pack the Supreme Court, Penn is the perfect feeder school. Even the snarky definition of ‘Philadelphia Lawyer’ might be the best possible fit for the post-Republic era of CHYOS leadership. 

Which brings us to the elephant in the room. China. You see how great it is that the influence of China on everything that happens here now can be concealed under a thick layer of plausible alternate explanations not involving treason, sickening greed, and profound moral corruption? The other big reason for the new U. Penn Superscript is the conduit for CCP funds provided by Penn-Biden Foundation, which is the rationale for the million dollar salary Joe Biden earns as a Professor who teaches no courses; without him, the university wouldn’t have the $200 million it has received as contributions from the next Number One Power on Earth. Possible explanation perhaps for the University’s silence about the revelation that Biden used an unsecured Penn office as a storage location for classified documents he acquired illegally when he was Vice President under Obama. The first Penn President Biden dealt with was named a U.S. Ambassador to Germany in 2022 after the President didn’t exert any influence on her to gain admission to Penn for his granddaughter. They only met the one time. No corruption of any kind here, you know what I’m saying?

You think I’m overstating the case? Prove me wrong. Solve this little puzzle for me. The one whose face we can’t quite identify for sure might be a key to the real story at Penn. I knew this guy who went to the ‘H’ place and was famous there, even as an undergraduate, for his encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet Union and a parallel interest in Red China, both of which he eloquently described as mortal enemies of the  United States. Subsequently, he directed his career toward the China side, presumably because the fall of the Soviet Union made a nation of 150 million people less threatening than a monolith of 1.5 billion people. Last I heard, he was a Professor at U. Penn. 

The missing puzzle pieces? You haven’t heard of him as a ferocious academic whistleblower about the dangers of both China and the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in U.S. institutions generally, including government, academe, mass media, and the corporatist sector.  I don’t talk to people in past lives anymore. They are uniformly disappointing. The puzzle is filled in as far as I can, or want to, take it. Play with the pieces if you feel like it.

There you have it. Why Penn is making a big comeback. The only question is, Can we survive that comeback?

See also the complete set of CHYOS-related posts here at Instapunk Returns (they’re all at the one link)

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*Anybody know anything about the guy who founded Oxford?