equivocality » Blog Archive » The Old Boys of '99: Another Perspective

Posted in: Random

Note: I asked John, as a guest writer, to give his opinion. It’s funny to read his writing; the style is completely different. It’s obvious that years of law school have changed him.

When Jeff asked me to write about the “Old Boy system” at UCC, the first thing I asked was, “what system”? To me, “system” implies some order or plan or organization, and the alumni of UCC have no special kinship or bond. An “Old Boy system” connotes one that is different from the ones that exist in every graduating class from every school I know of.

I had mentioned to him that one of our classmates is in my year at law school and Jeff wondered aloud whether I would have mentioned it, or noticed it perhaps, if that classmate and I had not gone to UCC. I replied that I would have noticed him notwithstanding our attendance at UCC, as long as we’d been a part of the same high school class as I’m sure most people would.

My perspective on the “system” is that there isn’t one.

I find it interesting that many people seem to think that one exists, and note that the main evidence used to prove their case is the seeming prevalence of UCC alumni in the halls of power in this country. In response, I would point out that the two things, attendance at UCC and later professional success, more likely have the same root cause — money, family connections, or dare I say it, intelligence.

The likelihood of those things being the cause of one’s professional advancement is greater than or equal to the likelihood that some system of quid pro quos or school ties. Ockham’s Razor is a principle that I would bring up in this context to dissuade those who would claim that any system is behind the rise of Old Boys in their occupations, the tenant of that principle being that the simplest explanation is more often than not the accurate one, and in this case which explanation is the simplest and most elegant.

That Old Boys get together in some nefarious Cabal to chart the course of the country and select from amongst their number the chosen to lead it is a myth.

Or is it simpler to say that chaos reigns supreme and individual old boys make their own way in the world, without the kind of help that the phrase “Old Boy system” connotes?

The people singled out in Fitzgerald’s book are just that — singled out. There are, if I’m not mistaken, 71 old boys profiled in the book who graduated from the 1920’s to the 1990’s. In that time more than 5000 boys have graduated. The idea that 1.4% of those graduates are somehow a reliable and representative sample is ludicrous. Such a sample should not be used to draw any conclusions or to make any generalizations.

The Old Boys of ‘99 Series

4 comments — Follow the feed

#1Bean

Oooh. Interesting to finally hear from the John we have heard so much about. It’s a logical argument, but perhaps John just prefers to think that old-boy-systems too closely resemble conspiracies to be credible. The fact is that true old boy networks have been a feature of politics and other networks of power since the days of the first republic. While the normal people among us are likely to snort and imagine they are the work of paranoid fiction, history tells us a different story.

#2Xibee

1) Thanks to John re: enlightening me to the alternate spelling of Occam’s Razor;
2) There is in fact an Old Boy network in most such schools. That old boy network has never been about a group pooling to promote a croney; but rather a more subtle medium of shared experience, which leads to those in power promoting others to power because — that’s simply who they think of first; those known to them from their school. It’s a sheltered proximity that does the work. Thus the Old Boy network is not manufactured thoughtfully, but is more often than not the petrie dish of an incestuous or nepotistic (Is nepotistic a word? I’d better look that up, these are Canucks I’m dealing with…) think-tank. John neglects the point that the total of others outside the school make that empowered percentile even smaller in the eye of the general public — and the high incidence of empowered positions that more suspect.

#3Jeff

@Bean — It’s an interesting idea to think that true old boy systems have been around a while. Perhaps in the form of freemasonry.

@Xibee — Actually, he initially spelled it “Occam’s Razor” (which I had never seen spelled this way before), but changed it to Ockham’s.

I like your idea of a sheltered proximity and shared experience, and I think it makes a great deal of sense. John touches on it when he dispels the myth of a network, but leaves things as the simple answer being the truth. I’d never thought about it the way you present it before.

#4Pearl

Like this look at the other views. The purely precentage breakdown puts a new perspective on it.