The best and the brightest?

"We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation." What is this fascination with the "best" universities? What is this admiration for "prestigious" degrees? People don't know that David Halberstam was frustated to his last days that people did not get that the title of his book (the Best and the Brighest) was in fact ironic. I also want to cite this passage: "Behind the 'unexamined nostalgia for the "Golden Days" of American intelligence' lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civil virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew government, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. 'In the name of what?' asked one critic. 'Not civic virtue, but empire.'" (Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 427)