On William Deresiewicz's article & Ivy League entitlement

There's been a lengthy debate on Mather-Open, and maybe other email lists too, about this article from The American Scholar, in which Yale English professor William Deresiewicz decries how life in the Ivy League fosters classism and intellectual laziness among those who go there. Now, I'm sympathetic to this argument -- my regular readers will know that I've always believed Harvard is a sickening manifestation of the worst American elitism -- and most of Deresiewicz's article is a helpful reality check for those of us who live inside it. You should read it.

BUT, I submit, Deresiewicz has got his causation mixed up. This paragraph is the giveaway:

...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.

Okay, that is not a function of your education. That is a function of you being a douchebag. I'm sorry, but throwing up your hands and saying "The Ivy League MADE me an elitist! I couldn't help it!" is no excuse. There are plenty of us at Harvard who, for various reasons, manage to maintain an identity that's quite separate from the ruling-class Harvard Club sensibility, and the worst we suffer is a little bit of cognitive dissonance and a desire not to give any money to this place after we graduate. To be sure, arrogant, privileged douches who think in Deriesiewicz's terms are the overwhelming majority at places like Harvard, but that's not a reflection on the insitution itself, it's a reflection on its admissions policy.

So while Deriesiewicz is much more comfortable than most critics with the magic word that actually explains this problem -- class -- he still winds up overlaying it with a bunch of bunkum about how Ivy League schools somehow produce intellectual torpor in their students by the nefarious means of grade inflation and, wait for it, imposing architecture. (You must read this to believe it.) The argument is transparently ridiculous. Harvard, an institution where most of us barely go to class, would be well served if it produced ANYTHING intellectual in its students.

The problem is that a large, and socially dominant, proportion of our student body (and I am extrapolating here from Harvard to the rest of the Ivy League) was elitist and privileged well before it ever came here. They grew up in places like Westchester, went to school at places like Exeter, and spent high school summers driving one of their father's BMWs around places like Cape Cod. Of course a person with a background like that will wind up thinking and acting entitled. It'd happen to them at any college: the only difference at the Ivy League is, they reach critical mass here thanks to their built-in admissions advantages and subsume the rest of the student body. The subsequent failure of Harvard classrooms to produce a real liberal education is solely because Harvard has filled them with people who are incurious.*

Deriesiewicz has identified the right phenomenon -- his description of it as "entitled mediocrity" is absolutely perfect, and I'm going to start using that phrase -- but it's not, as he argues, an intellectual or institutional problem. It's a social problem. And you cannot sensibly analyze an Ivy League school until you recognize that fact.

Now, to lighten the mood, here is a dancing walrus.

*I should add, by way of a disclaimer, that I personally am also enormously intellectually lazy. My Harvard education is wasted on me; as far as I can discern, I'm here because the admissions office finds rural Canadians an amusing novelty. If I could restructure Harvard admissions to my own standards, I would not have accepted myself.