Orange Orange (tag:yale)

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.

After the jump: Alright, we’re not intellectual enough. What’s the problem?