Brainiest President

JHS · June 1, 2011, 5:40pm

Harvard Law School does not admit students with as broad a range of “stats” as Harvard College, so it draws far fewer “what the heck?” applications. It’s true that Yale is tougher to get into (because it is only 1/4th the size of Harvard; there are many fewer places), but getting into either is a major accomplishment in the first place.

That said, of course there are people at Harvard Law School who are less than brilliant. Obama, however, was near the top of his class there. There isn’t anyone near the top of the (very large, very, very competitive) class at Harvard who is less than pretty darn smart. And then there’s the fact that he emerged victorious from the intellectual cage match that is the Harvard Law Review presidential selection process. His magna degree almost ensures that he made Law Review primarily on grades, by the way, not affirmative action or writing competition. It’s theoretically possible to graduate magna without doing that, but not very likely (and it would mean that he only missed making it on grades by a sliver, and also that he raised his grades while acting as President of the Review, which is about as likely as a sustained cold fusion reaction). Put 'em all together it spells very high intelligence credentials. Sorry, haters.

zoosermom: As I explained above, Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal is not the same kind of credential as President of the Harvard Law Review. A Japanese anthropologist might not notice the difference, but in the rarefied world of elite law review alums it’s taken for granted. Hanna is right that the Harvard presidency constitutes an effective entitlement to a Supreme Court clerkship, and that’s not true anywhere else.

Signed notes: Harvard has never had signed student pieces, as far as I know. Certainly not in John Roberts’ day, which was more or less my day as well, and not in Obama’s day, either. Authorship of pieces is well known within the Review, and the President’s office keeps a record of them.

hayden · June 1, 2011, 5:41pm

All our presidents have been smart, and many have been brilliant. But it’s just too difficult to measure/compare academic credentials over centuries. How do we possibly compare Lincoln to Clinton from an academic point of view?

However, being smart and having smarts are too different thing. I can’t remember who said FDR had a second rate intellect and and first rate temperament, but it really hits the nail on the head vis a vis successful presidencies. It would even have been better if he’d had a first rate intellect and a vfirst rate temperament.

frazzled1 · June 1, 2011, 6:14pm

cartera, maybe you can tell me if this is true - John Tyler (who might also be included in a discussion of brainiest presidents because he graduated from W & M at 17 - though in another era, of course) was W & M’s valedictorian? We’ve heard this at several W & M events, but I haven’t been able to confirm it in a quick online search.

Brainy or not, he had 15 children, which would make him the most fertile (or whatever the proper adjective is for men) president, possibly among other things … though I don’t think we want to go there.

cartera45 · June 1, 2011, 6:24pm

Frazzled - I have never heard that.

frazzled1 · June 1, 2011, 6:27pm

^^^ I think we’ve been had. We’re gullible about all things W & M. :)

Pizzagirl · June 1, 2011, 7:10pm

That would make both Sarah Palin and Rod Blagojevich brilliant people – neither of them was born into power, and both managed to get elected to governorship positions.

TatinG · June 1, 2011, 7:34pm

The mayor of L. A. is a really dim bulb. He failed the bar exam five times.

So I’d disagree with the statement that it takes some smarts to get elected. Street smarts, maybe. But there are few true intellectuals in public office.

sewhappy · June 1, 2011, 8:04pm

Pizzagirl - I thought it was understood that I meant “elected to the presidency” and not just elected.

Hanna · June 2, 2011, 11:00am

“getting into Harvard and just about all other Ivy League schools for undergraduate admission is appreciably more selective than for Harvard Law School”

It’s apples and oranges. Harvard College (rightly) fills much of its class with people who are academically strong but whose outstanding talents lie in the arts, athletics, devotion to service, etc. The bottom quartile tops out at ~2100 SAT, or the 90th percentile nationally.

Harvard Law’s selection criteria are overwhelmingly academic. Being an Olympic athlete or Yo-Yo Ma barely matters at all. The bottom quartile tops out at 169/170, or 98th percentile nationally. Applicants are rejected all but automatically with an LSAT in the 90th percentile (~163). Furthermore, the pool of LSAT takers consists of people who have or are about to complete bachelor’s degrees, a far more select sample than SAT takers.

So yes, HLS is much easier to get into in the sense that there’s a formula. A 178 and 3.98 guarantee admission and Hail Mary applications just don’t work. But getting those numbers is much easier said than done, and most of the Harvard College population can’t come close. The median LSAT among Harvard College graduates is 165 – very strong, but a standard deviation below the HLS median of 172ish. This is despite the fact that it’s a select group of test takers; Harvard College students with low GPAs don’t usually take the LSAT, because they know they have no shot at the law schools they would want. If we’re talking just about intellect, not across-the-board talent, the HLS student body has cleared a much higher bar than the Harvard College student body. To then rise to the top of that pool…those folks are very, very smart.

sewhappy · June 2, 2011, 11:56am

Actually, Hanna, a 2100 is around 96-97th percentile nationally. Meaning that the bottom quartile of the Harvard undergrad admitted students is at the 96th to 97th percentile on the SAT.

<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat-percentile-ranks-composite-cr-m-w-2010.pdf[/url]”>http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat-percentile-ranks-composite-cr-m-w-2010.pdf</a>

As for who gets into Harvard Law School, I can tell you my son at Harvard has several friends at Harvard and Yale who are going to Harvard Law School with gpa’s considerably lower than your post suggests.

Finally, Harvard Law School is going to attract mostly applicants from the humanities and social sciences majors – both areas with considerably inflated grade averages than the technical fields.

So yes, it is apples and oranges. My post was countering an earlier post claiming that admission to Harvard Law is harder than admission to Harvard College. I really think that’s a big stretch to make that claim.

But then we’re talking about Obama presumably and what’s really kind of sad is that there seems to be an insistence on holding up his Harvard experience as “proof” that he’s smart. I actually think that’s kind of patronizing to the man and his office. Of course, he’s very smart. And the Harvard background is not really what we need to go by in forming that judgement. Or at least we shouldn’t be.

Hunt · June 2, 2011, 11:56am

And the fact that Obama didn’t take one suggests that he didn’t intend to make a career as a law school prof, which may also shed light on why he hasn’t written a bunch of law review articles. He didn’t go to one of the top New York law firms, either, something else which he could easily have done. Whether turning down that kind of dough is a sign of high intelligence is harder to say.

JHS · June 2, 2011, 12:11pm

At my almost-as-good-as-Harvard law school, a Hall of Fame-quality athlete WAS admitted, despite academic credentials and test scores that were OK but not up to the school’s usual snuff, because a substantial plurality of the faculty wanted to play pick-up games with him. (Students, too, of course, but they didn’t get a vote.) He lasted a year, then dropped out.

Law school is tough at that level. If you are very smart – as most people are – it is possible to skate by without killing yourself, but you won’t have good grades. Getting great grades requires a lot of brainpower and a lot of work. Getting great grades while maintaining a substantial extracurricular activity is next to impossible. And getting your classmates to acknowledge that you are smarter than they are is . . . well, not impossible, because someone always does it, but it’s awfully hard. That’s why Obama’s Harvard Law Review position, combined with his magna, marked him as really special.

And here’s another sort of objective measure: Its harder to explain, but Obama’s position at the University of Chicago is almost as meaningful as his Harvard Law Review presidency, maybe more so.

For the last 8 years before his election to the Senate, Obama taught part-time at the University of Chicago Law School, but not as an adjunct. He had an office at the school, and an unusual title: Senior Lecturer. I believe that at first only one other person held that title – Judge Richard Posner.* Posner has used that title for the past 30 years since President Reagan appointed him to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Now, if you know anything about Chicago and elite law schools, you know that (a) Posner was the dominant faculty member at Chicago for a generation, and is practically synonymous with the University of Chicago, (b) many, many people consider Posner the smartest person they have ever met**, and (c) Obama was not given Posner’s status lightly. I happen to know the dean who gave Obama that title – he is as intellectually demanding as they come, and he’s a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and personal protege of Posner’s. He made Obama Senior Lecturer because Obama knocked his socks off intellectually, years and years before anyone suggested he might be President of the United States someday.

<ul>
<li> Today, Chicago has 8-9 Senior Lecturers, all but one of whom fall into a few overlapping categories: World-famous retired faculty, former faculty sitting on the Seventh Circuit, and one long-time faculty member who is the master of a division of the College. The one exception is Richard Posner’s former business partner, who is also a Trustee of the University and now runs an investment management firm. I bet he’s really smart, too.</li>
</ul>

**Justice William Brennan, for whom Posner clerked in the 1950s, and with whom Posner had practically nothing in common ideologically, often said that Posner was the smartest person he had ever met, and Brennan met a lot of smart people in his day.

JHS · June 2, 2011, 12:39pm

Correction to my foregoing post:

There may have been other Senior Lecturers at Chicago contemporaneously with Obama and Posner. Today, there are nine, three of whom are world-famous emeritus professors (Kenneth Dam, Richard Epstein, William Landes), two of whom are long-time faculty members who now hold chairs elsewhere in the University, and four who hold only that title, including Posner. Three of them are former long-time faculty who are Seventh Circuit judges – Posner, Frank Easterbrook (a Posner protege), and Diane Wood (the first woman to hold a named chair at the law school, and famously short-listed for the Supreme Court appointment that went to Sonia Sotomayor). The fourth is an investment advisor who is a Trustee of the University and was Posner’s business partner in the 1970s. I bet he’s pretty brainy, too.

Anyway, the point is that “Senior Lecturer” is a title that connotes very, very high respect at the University of Chicago Law School, and Obama was unique in being given that title with no prior longstanding connection to the school.

Hunt · June 2, 2011, 12:53pm

I would like to second the suggestion that Teddy Roosevelt belongs on any list of brainy Presidents. His image as a macho character can make us forget how accomplished he was as a writer, for example.

bclintonk · June 2, 2011, 2:46pm

I would further point out that the average undergrad GPA at Harvard is 3.45. The 25th and 75th percentile undergrad GPAs for the entering class at Harvard Law School are 3.76-3.98. That means at least half the undergraduates at Harvard have GPAs that would make them not credible candidates for admission to Harvard Law, and probably another quarter of the undergrads, the second quartile (those in roughly the 3.45-3.76 range), have grades that would put them in the 4th (bottom) quartile at Harvard Law—IF they have the LSAT scores to qualify. Ivy undergrads are rejected from Ivy law schools all the time. Most of those in the bottom half of the undergrad class don’t even bother to apply to schools like Harvard Law or Yale Law. Because law school admissions is so numbers-driven, they know where they stand, and if they want to go to law school they’ll apply to schools where they have a more realistic chance of admission.

Sure, you can point to the occasional anecdotal outlier, but statistically speaking, the class as Harvard Law is clearly a cut above the class at Harvard College.

bclintonk · June 2, 2011, 3:23pm

Also notice how steeply undergraduate grades and LSAT scores drop off as you go from Yale and Harvard Law Schools at the very pinnacle, on down the list. Even at #4 Columbia, the 75th percentile undergrad GPA is approximately the same as the 25th percentile at Yale and Harvard.

US News rankings, Law Schools:

rank / school / 25th-75th % LSAT / 25th-75th % undergrad grades

<ol>
<li>Yale / 171-176 / 3.81-3.96</li>
<li>Harvard / 171-176 / 3.78-3.96</li>
<li>Stanford / 167-173 / 3.74-3.94</li>
<li>Columbia / 170-175 / 3.61-3.82</li>
<li>Chicago / 168-172 / 3.49-3.87</li>
<li>NYU / 169-175 / 3.57-3.86</li>
<li>Michigan / 168-171 / 3.57-3.85</li>
<li>Penn / 166-171 / 3.54-3.9</li>
<li>UC Berkeley / 162-170 / 3.64-3.87</li>
<li>UVA / 166-171 / 3.51-3.92 </li>
<li>Duke / 168-171 / 3.68-3.9</li>
<li>Northwestern / 166-171 / 3.4-3.9</li>
<li>Cornell / 166-169 / 3.55-3.8</li>
<li>Georgetown / 168-172 / 3.45-3.78</li>
<li>U Texas / 164-169 / 3.57-3.84</li>
<li>UCLA / 165-170 / 3.56-3.87</li>
<li>Vanderbilt / 165-170 / 3.5-3.82</li>
<li>USC / 166-169 / 3.46-3.73</li>
<li>WUSTL / 162-168 / 3.3-3.8</li>
<li>George Washington / 162-168 / 3.39-3.87</li>
<li> Minnesota / 159-168 / 3.36-3.84 </li>
</ol>

So Yale and Harvard Law schools are essentially taking the elite of the elite, the very cream of the crop as measured by undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. I would expect most Harvard undergrads to do well on the LSAT; after all, standardized test-taking prowess is a big part of what got them into Harvard as undergrads, and success on the SAT should translate pretty well into success on the LSAT. But by definition, only a fraction of Harvard undergrads are going to be at the top of their class in grades. Perhaps only those in the top quarter of the class in GPA will be truly competitive for admission to Harvard Law or Yale Law. The “average” Harvard undergrad may be competitive for admission at Cornell Law, or Northwestern, or Georgetown, very good law schools where with a good LSAT it’s possible to get admitted with somewhat lower grades than it takes to get into Harvard or Yale Law Schools. Those further down in the bottom half of their undergraduate class at Harvard may need to go a little further down the law school pecking order, if they want to attend law school.

poetgrl · June 2, 2011, 4:10pm

Ergo, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law are the brainiest presidents. :p

Hanna · June 2, 2011, 4:31pm

“I can tell you my son at Harvard has several friends at Harvard and Yale who are going to Harvard Law School with gpa’s considerably lower than your post suggests.”

My post doesn’t suggest anything at all about any one student, or handful of students. It talks about the class as a whole, and quartiles within the class. It is a fact that the median LSAT at Harvard College is a standard deviation below the median LSAT at HLS. It is also a fact that Harvard College students near the top of their class take the LSAT much more frequently than those near the bottom of their class.

As it happens, I think it’s silly that law schools put as much emphasis on numbers as they do, and they’d produce a better group of lawyers if they didn’t. It goes without saying that some 180 scorers have no common sense, social skills, creativity, etc. But the LSAT is a decent measure of plain intellectual processing power (braininess), and HLS beats Harvard College on that measure, just as you would expect given the relative importance of ECs and personal qualities in their intake processes.

I stand corrected on the SAT percentiles – I was looking at an old source. It looks like HLS’s bottom quartile has gone up to 171, which is 99th percentile. 99th is still better than 96th, and LSAT takers are still a much more competitive crowd than SAT takers.

sewhappy · June 2, 2011, 4:41pm

Actually, Hanna, many would argue that the true top intellectual talent at Harvard would be found in concentrations such as theoretical math or physics . . . and that very few of those kids are interested in law, would ever dream of taking the LSAT and generally will have a lower gpa than their counterparts in the traditional pre-law concentrations. So by making the sweeping assumption that the “best” students at Harvard are the high-gpa students taking the LSAT, you are essentially dismissing what many would consider Harvard’s most extreme intellectual talent. That’s just a huge assumption.

And the average LSAT for Harvard is also arguably meaningless because, sadly, many times the students taking the LSAT and shooting for law school are not the top of the class but have concentrated in an area with limited marketability and are casting around for a way to make a decent living at some point.

I still say just about everyone who made it to the office of POTUS is very, very smart with a few exceptions along the way. What’s interesting is to consider that the best presidents who seem to have done the most for the country were not always the ones with perfect GPA’s or standardized test scores. I hope we can all agree on that here. I would especially hope that we can agree that academic record in itself is not a qualifier for the office. It takes more.

Hanna · June 2, 2011, 5:03pm

“Actually, Hanna, many would argue that the true top intellectual talent at Harvard would be found in concentrations such as theoretical math or physics”

I agree with you, but that’s a very small group of people – there are about 55 concentrators per year in physics, fewer in math. No doubt the average LSAT would go up a little if they all took it. (Larry Tribe was summa in math as an undergrad.)

However, I’m not making any assumptions about who takes the LSAT at Harvard College. I’ve seen the grids. The data show LSAC GPA, concentration, everything, for each individual. There’s a huge range, but it’s skewed toward the top half of the class, not the bottom. And the fields with limited marketability (I assume you’re talking about things like Folk & Myth, Classics, Art History) are not overrepresented. Government, Economics, and Social Studies are overrepresented; other fields across the spectrum pop up quite broadly, including in the sciences.

I never claimed that the “best” students at Harvard take the LSAT. The best academically in every field more often go for PhDs. But the LSAT takers include more from the top of the class and fewer from the bottom.

Brainiest President

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