Orange Orange (Jue's Blog)

William Deresiewicz, an English professor at Yale, is disappointed. Really disappointed. In you. Why? Because thanks to your cleverness and ruthless ambition, Ivy League schools are turning into glorified professional academies:

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…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.
["The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" via The American Scholar]

…and dens of nepotism:

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.

That’s not the worst part of going to Yale. You’ll also become a robot…

The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring…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.

…and lose your intellectual drive. Or maybe you didn’t have any to start with.

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia…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.

I’m not insensitive to Deresiewicz’s lament–I, too, long for beautiful summer days when I can sit under a tree and plumb my soul after a day of searching for scientific truth at the lab. Like yesterday.

The author complains about the dominance of a white upper-middle class, but makes some predictably white upper-middle class assumptions himself: that elite universities exist primarily to help students ponder big questions of life and existence; that we don’t have enough philosophers and artists; that in the absence of the big, bad, universities, more people would be inclined to wander around searching for the human spirit, in between Virginia Woolf novels and heart-to-heart conversations.

Whatever the merits of Deresiewicz’s humanist utopia, the problem isn’t the schools. I’ve embraced intellectualism the way that any Chinese-American immigrant, at Harvard or state college, would–with meek ambivalence. Even if we ignored my lower-middle-class upbringing, the years spent with my parents in near-poverty, and the personal, familial, social pressure–my own intellectual curiosity aside–to live well in the future, I’d still hesitate to blame Harvard. Let’s be honest. We don’t live in an intellectual society to begin with. American anti-intellectualism didn’t start with Harvard, Yale, or even President Bush. It started with the Declaration of Independence, and its promise for equality. Regardless of gender or race, as a society, we value work, production, and above all, progress. Advancement, as defined by the capitalist equation of material well-being. Frankly, if we had more socioeconomic diversity at Ivy Leagues, as Deresiewicz would like, there would be more pre-meds and Wall street traders, not fewer.

Maybe the intellectual in all of us would flourish more in Renaissance Italy or Classical Greece. Maybe even the Ivy Leagues were, once upon a time, welcome places for the unconventional thinker, as long as that thinker was white, male, and upper class. But now that the armor of racial elitism has been breached (but by no means abolished, as Deresiewicz aptly points out), are we really going to be torn up about minority kids wanting to make some money? Heaven forbid our aspiring pre-meds actually help alleviate the national doctor shortage, or use that energy we’ve put into “editing three campus publications while double-majoring” toward something other than brooding over literature.

Related posts

• Want AIDS? How about dwarfism? (1)
• Mr. Science, Meet Captain Obvious (0)
• Letter to a young procrastinator (2)
• Hello world! And thoughts of a non-parent (0)
• Blog Addiction: More Fuel for the Fire (0)