When ivy mediocrity turns against itself

After a very short but still agonizing period of deliberation, I have decided to abandon the format to which I swore allegiance in my first post. Three ideas are too many for a single post. I therefore reject the tyranny of my own rules.

The one idea I have for today is simply to attack Bill Deresiewicz's recent article in the American Scholar "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education". Deresiewicz was a professor of English at Yale until he was denied tenure in 2007. Readers of his most recent article might be amused to learn that Yale canned him in part for spending too much time on journalistic pursuits and not enough time on scholarship.

Well Bill, I've never read any of your scholarship, but if it's anything like your journalism, then we really should wonder about the worth of an elite education. The article is stunningly shallow, relying entirely on pious common-places and carefully avoiding surprising or insightful analysis. It's the kind of article you would expect to read on the op-ed page of a campus daily, not in a major literary magazine.

Deresiewicz serves up conventional wisdom of the most studenty sort. Instead of effectively exposing ivy mediocrity, he embodies it. Even the prose brings us back to Sophomore year, but at least in college awkward stumbles of phrase like "the constellation of values ceaselessly inculcated" or "the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization" might still be taken as signs of overeager intellectual promise. When you're as old as Deresiewicz they start to look more like signs of ingrained rhetorical deficiency.

Do Ivy leaguers feel entitled? Do they think they're better than everyone else? Are they often stupid and parochial? Of course, though most of them probably aren't as disturbed by having to talk to their plumbers as D-wicz. But in trying to prove these obvious, incontrovertible points, D-wicz ends up saying plenty of things that aren't true.

Like that Yale is easier than Cleveland State. Although the article is almost totally uninformed by data, when the odd number does show up, it actually undermines Deresiewicz's point. When trying to explain how easy it is to get an A at Yale, he cites grade inflation statistics intended to show a huge gap between grade distributions at Public Universities and Ivy League schools. The gap, though, is suprisingly small: 3.0 vs. 3.4. If you think that grades are supposed to reflect some absolute (imaginary) measure of academic quality, it would be shocking if the grade gap were any smaller.

Wiczy also tells us that ivyleaguers all want to become bankers, dignitaries, and "important people in New York", and that no one would degrade themselves, by becoming, say a teacher. A couple minutes of googling might have helped him find that becoming a teacher is the MOST popular post-grad occupation. Which just goes to show, I guess, that there are lot of entitled, snobby, dumb teachers out there. But this was another thing we already knew.

Along the same lines, the Wicz sounds the alarm about "the long-term drift of students" at Yale "away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics". The five biggest majors at Yale are History (by far), Economics, Political Science, English, and Biology. None of these majors is in the least "practical", and none is pre-professional. A lot of English majors (though hopefully few professors!) probably think that econ has to do with banking and stuff, but anyone who's taken an Econ course knows that the academic discipline of economics bears only a distant relationship to finance or accounting. There is some skill overlap, but not more than between English and journalism or philosophy and law. One of the things that makes the Ivy league such a rarefied and elitist place is that it is one of the last places where students are barred from the kind of 'vocational' training that D-Wicz decries.

Still, Dereciewicz is right that the Ivy League is mostly soulless and careerist. The best line in the piece is Wiczy's observation that "Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to". Ducking risk and rowing ducks is what most ivyleaguers have spent their pre-college lives doing. We can't expect them to behave differently after college.

Most of all though, Dereciewicz's piece fails because it doesn't acknowledge the complexity of the questions at stake. What is the purpose of a University, if not simply to reproduce the class system? What should be the job description of a college president? The answers are not at all obvious, though I feel pretty certain than an ideal university does not include a class on "the literature of friendship". Dereciewicz never fleshes out or gives content to the "larger intellectual journey" he mentions.

That would take some imagination and careful thought to figure out. Lucky for Bill, he's got a lot of time on his hands.