551 lines
32 KiB
Markdown
551 lines
32 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2010-10-28T16:18:09.000Z'
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title: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
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url: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/
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author: zaveri
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points: 69
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 36
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1288282689
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_zaveri
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- story_1843491
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objectID: '1843491'
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year: 2008
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---
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# The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
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[Print](#)
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Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to
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make minds, not careers
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![](https://theamericanscholar.org/uploads/2008/06/grads-600x315.png)
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### By William Deresiewicz
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####
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June 1, 2008
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![](https://theamericanscholar.org/uploads/2008/06/grads-800x420.png)
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Listen to a narrated version of this essay:
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It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education
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until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing,
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and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy
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guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I
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suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to
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someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his
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values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in
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engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
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Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees,
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and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy
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retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on
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conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but
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I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
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It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my
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miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you
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is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have
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shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to
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flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for
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them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You
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learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts
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needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most
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cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being
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created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are
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being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not
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only outrageous, but inconceivable.
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I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or
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opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or
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what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these
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skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions,
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but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the
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private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing
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parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs,
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the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away
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from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and
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around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is
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ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity,
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we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a
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society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many
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resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people
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scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth
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asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get,
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because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of
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reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.
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The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen
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that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t
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like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that
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diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With
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respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed
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increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation
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and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of
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white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside
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the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and
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professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate
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liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position
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of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable
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to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two
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Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from
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Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly
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incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
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But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe
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that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t
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worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the
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unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best
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and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was,
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well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that
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little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people
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told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to
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Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where
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I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never
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learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges,
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often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are
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smart people who don’t go to college at all.
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I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The
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existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace,
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but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming
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classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one
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form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all
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universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and
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faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to
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such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One
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naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s
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advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and
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creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed
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preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest
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only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational
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elite to begin to discover this.
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What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who
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went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre
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public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she
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once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some
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people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways,
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and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how
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to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only
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real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a
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humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s:
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“nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite
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education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
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The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an
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elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an
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elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite
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college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to
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think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not
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only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your
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value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your
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ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is
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only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are
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encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes
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excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply
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“better.”
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There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or
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knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and
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self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the
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fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the
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message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every
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old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech
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from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club.
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And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence
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here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at
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elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those
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students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT
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scores are higher.
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At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in
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embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its
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quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and
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wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the
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encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines
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which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of
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governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true
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of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are
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walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to
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the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is
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demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates
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within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale,
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the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the
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open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose.
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There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been
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excluded.
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One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches
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you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are
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measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not.
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Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or
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talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more.
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Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God
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does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As
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John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any
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less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the
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power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains
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of work must always be….\[But\] there is a wide difference between being
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captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”
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The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only
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ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will
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lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began
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comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with
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the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There
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are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no
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one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking;
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threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried
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out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string
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of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once
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got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was
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coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour
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late.
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That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite
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school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at
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places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t
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have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for
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late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when
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they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent
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bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by
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smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of
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contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power
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brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any,
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of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in
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profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants.
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Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for
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everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those
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awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.
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Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for
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doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade
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inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it
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is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public
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and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional
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B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything
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like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now
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about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a
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B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are
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always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far
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outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t
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up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like
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Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than
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an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
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In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the
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social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like
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Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the
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middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another.
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They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no
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extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination,
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supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places
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like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of
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themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a
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point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in,
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there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject
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academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even
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threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all
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three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just
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wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy
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network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture
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excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I
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know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the
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mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so
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much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of
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you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.
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Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world
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(unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always
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another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of
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contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the
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year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of
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the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush
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represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the
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apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is
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indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and
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WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated,
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it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat
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salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-.
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Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay
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greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions
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will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in
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the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you
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don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out
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again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.
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If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it
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offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security.
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When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the
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best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the
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opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down?
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An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all,
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what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the
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opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with
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which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is
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itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole
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classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times
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existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can
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live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community
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organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any
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reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house
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instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to
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drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in
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Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set
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against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited
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for, work you love, every day of your life?
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Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away.
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How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive
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education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked
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so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my
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classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or
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important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all
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these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes,
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and you miss your true calling.
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This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a
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riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they
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do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk
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about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to
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college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because
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however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid
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educational mentality places them outside the universe of
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possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college
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with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense,
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especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less
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debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a
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while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it
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from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one
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from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how
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friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two
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while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it.
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Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success,
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and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything
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else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to
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succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients
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them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of
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failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.
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The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no
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longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to
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learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.
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But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins
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to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite
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education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem
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counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around,
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at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than
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anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They
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do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an
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intellectual means more than doing your
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homework.
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[![](https://theamericanscholar.org/uploads/2010/03/deresiewicz-new.png)](https://ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/AMS/app/live/subscriptions?&org=AMS&publ=AS&key_code=WPDER1&type=S)
|
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If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They
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are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something
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bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along
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the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most
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important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a
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name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not
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careers.
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Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about
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ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of
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pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches
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at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students
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don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for
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themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many
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wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative
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kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of
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them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education
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had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education
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as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of
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the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks,
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not least because they get so little support from the university itself.
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Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to
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searchers.
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Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big
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questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism
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in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at
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least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in
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the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.
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Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic
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ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big
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questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of
|
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pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but
|
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the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have
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||
made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top
|
||
research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their
|
||
scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a
|
||
conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
|
||
|
||
When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to
|
||
think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills
|
||
necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a
|
||
humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as
|
||
universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they
|
||
hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and
|
||
when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask
|
||
the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses
|
||
that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught
|
||
by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the
|
||
notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts
|
||
education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have
|
||
already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior
|
||
journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are
|
||
slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational
|
||
training.
|
||
|
||
Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a
|
||
reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of
|
||
power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all
|
||
allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their
|
||
budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering
|
||
institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie,
|
||
says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of
|
||
course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the
|
||
long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic
|
||
sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics
|
||
has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career
|
||
office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or
|
||
business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to
|
||
discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their
|
||
degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The
|
||
liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center
|
||
of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be
|
||
parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
|
||
|
||
It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find
|
||
themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them
|
||
last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the
|
||
upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s
|
||
hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell
|
||
theirs.
|
||
|
||
Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the
|
||
passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized
|
||
of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my
|
||
most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the
|
||
18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social
|
||
transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a
|
||
vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by
|
||
speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means
|
||
foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and
|
||
to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and
|
||
courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says,
|
||
“even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as
|
||
eternity, too.”
|
||
|
||
Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your
|
||
assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into
|
||
elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work
|
||
within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it,
|
||
to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they
|
||
turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers,
|
||
getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher
|
||
or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular
|
||
activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time.
|
||
Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and,
|
||
in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most
|
||
prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools
|
||
because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less
|
||
gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more
|
||
independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t
|
||
be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the
|
||
ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular
|
||
passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with
|
||
looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their
|
||
room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of
|
||
kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in
|
||
the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving
|
||
college bearing questions, not resumés.
|
||
|
||
I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks.
|
||
You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a
|
||
college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and
|
||
no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable
|
||
kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them
|
||
vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and
|
||
suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of
|
||
appearance—and affect—that go with achievement. (Dress for success,
|
||
medicate for success.) I know from long experience as an adviser that
|
||
not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is
|
||
exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny
|
||
of the normal must be very heavy in their lives. One consequence is that
|
||
those who can’t get with the program (and they tend to be students from
|
||
poorer backgrounds) often polarize in the opposite direction, flying off
|
||
into extremes of disaffection and self-destruction. But another
|
||
consequence has to do with the large majority who can get with the
|
||
program.
|
||
|
||
I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One
|
||
day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a
|
||
group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of
|
||
them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose
|
||
the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey
|
||
arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and
|
||
emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A
|
||
pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part
|
||
about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of
|
||
this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place
|
||
where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel
|
||
uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a
|
||
paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another
|
||
student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson
|
||
says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip
|
||
you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that
|
||
meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need
|
||
solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t
|
||
do with a friend?
|
||
|
||
So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for
|
||
solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much
|
||
talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its
|
||
corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always
|
||
get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that
|
||
students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble
|
||
finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is
|
||
enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the
|
||
urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing
|
||
a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time;
|
||
indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for
|
||
intimacy.
|
||
|
||
What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude?
|
||
The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that
|
||
day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and
|
||
the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this
|
||
in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of
|
||
self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really
|
||
excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the
|
||
mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant
|
||
mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an
|
||
educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.
|
||
|
||
The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us
|
||
our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses
|
||
junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring,
|
||
the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one
|
||
wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe,
|
||
let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or
|
||
a government. She will have many achievements but little experience,
|
||
great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is
|
||
that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.
|