One of the questions we might ask before concluding that David Brooks little ethical Area 51, dba “Humility”, at Yale is some sort of uniquely middlebrow, learning-annex hack job is just how unique it is, because this is an Ivy League, after all, and I suspect the course catalog is pretty well-larded with these sorts of PoliSci Rocks-for-Jocks offerings by notable alums. Brooks just has the bad fortune of being uniquely self-unaware enough to title an otherwise bland exercise in celebrity “intellectual” egotism Humility. If he’d called the class, “AmHist Colloquium: 201: The Decline of the Eastern Protestant Establishment from World War II to the Reagan Revolution,” no one would’ve said boo, and exactly the same gang of future legislative aides would’ve taken it. If you find yourself making fun of David Brooks or Yale, you probably don’t understand what either institution represents, or what their respective purposes are in the American life of the mind. Where do you think the sort of people who put David Brooks on the Times op-ed page and NPR Fridays and so on come from, Pomona? Bard? Who do think nods sagely at all those Tom Friedman columns you find so gloriously incoherent?
Jacob Bacharach 
“Week 11. Seemliness…..We will ask whether it is proper to put a Yale window sticker on the back of your car.”
It goes on the front of your car, duh. That’s where my Skull & Bones sticker is.
Totally off-topic, but a friend of mine recently mentioned you were back in new form. Still catching up but just wanted to say: I never really commented on your previous blog and while we probably wouldn’t always agree I found your writing such a refreshingly honest/scathing/thoughtful/oh just many good things. I didn’t get a chance to say that your writing was an important part of my day in the past and if you drop off the internet again I would feel bad for not having expressed my appreciate. So thank you.
normals.
“Where do you think the sort of people who put David Brooks on the Times op-ed page and NPR Fridays and so on come from, Pomona? Bard?”
When the culturo-intellectual history of the 21st century is written, the question will be asked as to whether the actual forebears of the famed polemicist Jacob Bacharach were actually those stalwart English mercantilists of the 17th century, who thumbed their nose at aristocrats still laboring under the delusion that money would always derive from land.
The kids are alright, and are going to give Brooks a licking. Hopefully it will be filmed.