It didn’t dawn on me that there might be
a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a
house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my
kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox
cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have
the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his
experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very
language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of
small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher
education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff
and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend
of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from
other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who
was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of
my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach
you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have
shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to
flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for
them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You
learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts
needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most
cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being
created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are
being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not
only outrageous, but inconceivable.
I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or
opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or
what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these
skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions,
but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the
private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing
parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs,
the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away
from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and
around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is
ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity,
we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a
society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many
resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people
scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth
asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get,
because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of
reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.
The first disadvantage of an elite
education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you
incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride
themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a
matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are
largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our
great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the
children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing
alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and
professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate
liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical
position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while
being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness
the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry:
one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men,
both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to
believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school
weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the
unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best
and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was,
well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that
little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people
told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to
Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I
went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never
learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges,
often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are
smart people who don’t go to college at all.
I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.”
The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a
commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their
incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and
develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly
true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their
students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of
intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of
others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes
for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional
intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are
not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best”
are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away
from the educational elite to begin to discover this.
What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who
went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically
mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a
school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid
people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart
in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing
not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to
people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are
supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of
humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first
disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it
alienates you from.
The second disadvantage, implicit in
what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false
sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite
college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical
rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of
those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your
identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that
what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even
if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real.
The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth,
when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when
“better at X” becomes simply “better.”
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or
knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and
self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the
fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the
message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every
old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech
from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club.
And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence
here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at
elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those
students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT
scores are higher.
At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in
embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its
quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and
wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the
encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines
which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of
governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true
of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are
walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to
the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is
demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates
within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale,
the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the
open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose.
There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been
excluded.
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it
teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic
achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense.
But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than
stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain
does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I
would say, God does not love them more. The political implications
should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you
can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your
brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin
says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide
difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of
it.”
The political implications don’t stop
there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it
trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t
understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my
students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went
to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at
places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are
available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes
are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places
like Yale get an endless string of second chances.
Not so at places like
Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been
running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to
hand in her term paper an hour late. That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite
school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at
places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t
have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for
late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when
they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent
bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by
smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of
contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power
brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any,
of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in
profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants.
Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for
everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those
awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.
Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for
doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade
inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it
is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public
and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional
B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything
like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now
about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a
B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are
always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far
outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t
up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like
Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than
an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the
social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like
Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the
middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another.
They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no
extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination,
supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places
like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of
themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a
point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in,
there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject
academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even
threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all
three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just
wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy
network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture
excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I
know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the
mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not
so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of
you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.
Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world
(unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always
another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of
contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the
year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of
the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush
represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the
apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is
indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and
WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated,
it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries
paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who
remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the
notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will
understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the
club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t
need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again
last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.
If one of the disadvantages of an elite
education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the
temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so
hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably
say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the
opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to
be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away
the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the
greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We
live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to
provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other
countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty
or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United
States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights
lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort.
You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in
Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a
BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or
Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do
work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of
your life?
Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes
away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my
expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my
parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I
face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers
or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all
these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes,
and you miss your true calling. This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a
riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they
do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk
about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to
college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because
however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid
educational mentality places them outside the universe of
possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with
no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense,
especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less
debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a
while.
I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it
from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one
from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how
friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two
while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it.
Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success,
and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything
else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to
succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients
them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of
failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.
The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I
no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started
to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world. But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re
afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning
disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly
anti-intellectual.
This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite
schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic
sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any
previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not
the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing
your homework.
If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder.
They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about
something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach
them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs,
that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a
number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to
make minds, not careers.
Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about
ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of
pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches
at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students
don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for
themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many
wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative
kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of
them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education
had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education
as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of
the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks,
not least because they get so little support from the university
itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive
to searchers.
Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big
questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism
in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at
least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in
the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.
Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic
ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big
questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of
pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but
the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have
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.
William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. His book,
A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, was published in April. To read all the posts from his weekly blog, “All Points,” click
here.
