PART 2 Self

PART 2 Self

Five What Is College For? "Return on investment": that's the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. How much money will you get out of doing it, in other words, relative to the amount that you have to put in. What no one seems to ask is what the "return" that college is supposed to give you is. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for? We talk, in the overheated conversation we've been having about higher education lately, about soaring tuition, rising student debt, and the daunting labor market for new graduates. We talk about the future of the university: budget squeezes, distance learning, massive open online courses, and whether college in its present form is even necessary. We talk about national competitiveness, the twenty-first-century labor force, technology and engineering, and the outlook for our future prosperity. But we never talk about the premises that underlie this conversation, as if what makes for a happy life and a good society were simply self-evident, and as if in either case the exclusive answer were more money. Of course money matters: jobs matter, financial security matters, national prosperity matters. The question is, are they the only things that matter? Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the

acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer's bottom line or the nation's GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you're curious about them. "Top Ten Majors" means the most employable, not the most interesting. "Top Ten Fields" means average income, not job satisfaction. "What are you going to do with that?" the inevitable sneering question goes. "Liberal arts" has become a put-down, and "English major" a punch line. I'm not sure what the practicality police are so concerned about. It's not as if our students were clamoring to get into classes on Milton or Kant. The dreaded English major is now the choice of all of 3 percent. Business, at 21 percent, accounts for more than half again as many majors as all of the arts and humanities combined. In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to "develop a meaningful philosophy of life," 37 percent to be "very well-off financially" (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we've been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job. You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What's the return on investment of college? What's the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a

productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What's at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human. The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. That's a cliché, but it does actually mean something, and a great deal more than what is usually intended. It doesn't simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines—how to solve an equation or construct a study or analyze a text—or even acquiring the ability to work across the disciplines. It means developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions. Before you can learn, you have to unlearn. You don't arrive in college a blank slate; you arrive having already been inscribed with all the ways of thinking and feeling that the world has been instilling in you from the moment you were born: the myths, the narratives, the pieties, the assumptions, the values, the sacred words. Your soul, in the words of Allan Bloom, is a mirror of what is around you. I always noticed, as a teacher of freshmen, that my students could be counted on to produce an opinion about any given subject the moment that I brought it up. It was not that they had necessarily considered the matter before. It was that their minds were like a chemical bath of conventional attitudes that would instantly precipitate out of solution and coat whatever object you introduced. (I've also noticed the phenomenon is not confined to eighteen-year-olds.) Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth. We pass our lives submerged in propaganda: advertising messages; political rhetoric; the journalistic affirmation of the status quo; the platitudes of popular culture; the axioms of party, sect, and class; the bromides we exchange every day on Facebook; the comforting lies our parents tell us and the sociable ones our friends do; the steady stream of falsehoods that we each tell ourselves all the time, to stave off the threat of self-knowledge. Plato called this doxa, opinion, and it is as powerful a force among progressives as among conservatives, in Massachusetts as in Mississippi,

for atheists as for fundamentalists. The first purpose of a real education (a "liberal arts" education) is to liberate us from doxa by teaching us to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it. In Teacher, Mark Edmundson describes the man who played this role for him when he was seventeen and thereby saved him from the life of thoughtless labor that appeared to be his fate. His teacher's methods were the same as those of Socrates, the teacher of Plato himself: he echoed your opinions back to you or forced you to articulate them for yourself. By dragging them into the light, asking you to defend them or just acknowledge having them, he began to break them down, to expose them to the operations of the critical intelligence—and thus to develop that intelligence in the first place. The point was not to replace his students' opinions with his own. The point was to bring his charges into the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and endlessly fertile condition of doubt. He was teaching them not what to think but how. Why college? College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance. It offer students "the precious chance," as Andrew Delbanco has put it, "to think and reflect before life engulfs them." You can start to learn to think in high school, as Edmundson did —you're certainly old enough by then—but your parents are still breathing down your neck, and your teachers are still teaching to the test, in one respect or another. College should be different: an interval of freedom at the start of adulthood, a pause before it all begins. Is this a privilege that most young people in the world can only dream of? Absolutely. But you won't absolve yourself by throwing it away. Better, at least, to get some good from it. College also offers you professors. Yes, it is theoretically possible to learn how to think on your own, but the chances are not good. Professors can let in some air, show you approaches that wouldn't have occurred to you and put you on to things you wouldn't have encountered by yourself. Autodidacts tend to be cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed. A professor's most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, responsibly, remorselessly, and not only about your

a workshop of republican virtue: reasoned debate, principled dissent, respectful mutual engagement. There is much to be said for this idea, but it sells the enterprise extremely short. Before and beneath the public good that such an education does, there is a private one—we might say, the private one. "You're here for very selfish reasons," the legendary Columbia professor Edward Tayler would say to his freshmen the first day of class. "You're here to build a self." Whether this activity redounds to anybody else's benefit is, for the time being, beside the point. A self is something that you need to develop for your own sake, and it is not a quick or easy or even, often, a pleasant process. Building a self: the notion may sound strange. "We've taught them," David Foster Wallace wrote about today's young people, "that a self is something you just have." It isn't that you don't have one at all, when you're a kid; there just is not a whole lot to it. In the words of the great Romantic poet John Keats, the world is a "vale of Soul-making." Not a "vale of tears," in the traditional phrase—a valley of sorrow that the soul is compelled to suffer through on its way to a salvation that lies beyond this world. And not a "soul" in the traditional sense, either, something eternal and unchangeable, somehow remote from and certainly other than our earthly self, and only involved, in any case, in matters of sin and virtue. By soul, what Keats meant is our earthly self, understood in its totality—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, our whole being. And by calling the world a vale of soul-making, he meant that experience itself is the crucible of its creation. "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is," he wrote, "to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" (Necessary pains and troubles—helicopter parents, and those who wish to play it safe in general, take note.) The world is still a scene of sorrow, in Keats's conception, but also of pleasure and love and every other emotion: "a Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways." The heart feels, he says, and the intelligence is educated by reflecting on that feeling. Everyone is born with a mind, but it is only through this act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. And that is what it means to develop a self.

So what does college have to do with it? College helps to furnish the tools with which to undertake that work of self-discovery. It's very hard, again, to do it on your own. The job of college is to assist you, or force you, to start on your way through the vale of soul-making. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways: all these are incitements, disruptions, violations. They make you question everything you thought you knew about yourself. "True liberal education requires that the student's whole life be radically changed," writes Allan Bloom. "Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything." The process isn't comfortable, but it is exhilarating. There's nothing "academic" about it. If it happens right, it feels like being broken open—like giving birth to yourself. "An education," Lapham quotes an old professor, "is a self-inflicted wound." I talked before about thinking your way beyond received opinion, doxa, and now I'm talking about thinking about yourself, but these are finally a single act. To change the way you look at the world is inevitably to change the way you look at your life, and vice versa. They are not even really separate things. Of all the beliefs we absorb before we're old enough to question them, the most powerful, as well as the most personal, are those that tell us who we are—that seek to determine our identity and our values. College is the place to start to determine them for yourself, to figure out, as the Columbia historian Mark Lilla has put it, "just what it is that's worth wanting." To find out not just who you wish to be, but who you are already, underneath what everyone has wanted you to think about yourself. To discover new ideals and new desires. To start to answer for yourself that venerable pair of questions: what is the good life and how should I live it? The truth is that I don't particularly like the phrase "develop a meaningful philosophy of life" as a description of what you're supposed to do in college. For one thing, it's bloodless. "Develop a philosophy" sounds like you're composing a treatise. For another, it's static. You develop "a" philosophy, and then you carry it around in a box for the rest of your life, removing and applying it as needed. The process goes much deeper than that—it goes all the way down to the bottom—and it's incomparably more fluid and provisional. It doesn't stop the day you

graduate, or really ever. Lapham's wound never heals, for the self that sustains it cannot return to a state of innocent unconsciousness. What you should really want to develop in college is the habit of reflection, which means the capacity for change. I've been using the word soul, and though I'm not religious, I find that only a religious language has sufficient gravity to do these questions justice. For we are speaking of the most important thing: no less a thing than how to live. We might propose, then, that you should arrive at college as at the beginning of a pilgrimage—a movement toward the truth and toward the self. That you should come to seek conversion, though you know not yet to what belief or way. That you should approach ideas as instruments of salvation, driven by a need to work things through for yourself, so that you won't be damned to go through life at second hand, thinking other people's thoughts and dreaming other people's dreams. It's been said that people go to monasteries to find out why they have come, and college ought to be the same. We are born once, not only into nature but also into a culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we are granted such grace, we are born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul? Far from only training workers to contribute to the GDP, or even citizens to play a role within the public sphere, a true education, like a true religion, enables you to stand apart, and if necessary, against, the claims that others make upon you. The self is a separate space, a private space—exactly that inner space that Madeline Levine has found to be lacking in so many of her adolescent patients now. It is a space of strength, security, autonomy, creativity, play. You can live without a soul, D. H. Lawrence said, on ego and will alone—you can "go on, keep on, and rush on"—but you won't have very much inside you. People who behave like that, E. M. Forster has a character remark, are incapable of saying I. They cannot even say I want, "because 'I want' must lead to the question 'Who am I?' " So they only say want, without the I: "want money," "want mansion," "want Harvard."

In Higher Education?, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus remark that the purpose of college is to make you a more interesting person—a nice formulation, as long as we stipulate that the person to whom it is most important to be interesting is yourself, if only since that is the one with whom you have to spend the rest your life. But being interesting is very different from credentialed self-actualization, as David Brooks would call it. Being a quadruple major does not make you interesting. Editing the college newspaper while singing in an a cappella group, starting a nonprofit, and learning how to cook exotic grains—this does not make you interesting. Interesting is not accomplished. Interesting is not "impressive." What makes you interesting is reading, thinking, slowing down, having long conversations, and creating a rich inner life for yourself. The purpose of college, to put all this another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning—the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons—then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again. "I might as well get an education," Margaret Atwood has a character say. "That's how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing you got, like a dress." It should be obvious by now that the most problematic part of that idea is the word "you." "You" don't get an education. "You" is the variable in that expression. "You" is what an education operates upon. "Education's what's left over," goes the common jeer, "after you've forgotten everything you've learned." But the person who first formulated that idea was James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, and he did not mean it as a slur. Most of what you come across in college will inevitably fade from memory. What's left over, precisely, is you.

Six Inventing Your Life I: Direction Now self-knowledge is all well and good, but you still have to find a career, don't you? Of course you do, but that is half the reason that you need to know yourself. What are you good at? What do you care about? What do you believe in? Lara Galinsky, the author of Work on Purpose, speaks of the importance of asking such questions at "points of inflection," the junctures in life when you're making a choice about what to do next. The so-called pragmatism that seeks to rush young people past them, says William Damon in The Path to Purpose, is ultimately self-defeating, because you can't be happy if you don't know what you're working for. Self-knowledge is the most practical thing in the world, because it helps you find your way to a career that's right for you. "What is the meaning of life?" may be the stereotypical philosophical question, supposedly abstract and pointless, but it bares its teeth when you phrase it like this: "What is the meaning of my life?" That is not a question that you want to wake up asking when you're forty. Vocation is Latin for calling: it means the thing you're called to do. It isn't something that you choose, in other words; it chooses you. It is the thing you can't not do. It makes more sense to you than you do—makes more sense of you. But the summons doesn't happen by itself. You have

to do the work to make yourself receptive to it. To find yourself, you first must free yourself. You won't be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you've been taught to care about. And we already know, in the case of today's young high achievers, what those are. I heard from a senior at Harvard who was writing her thesis on Harvard itself, how good it is at instilling self-efficacy, the sense that you can go out into the world and do whatever you want. There are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because it was easy," and there are other kids who say, "I got it because I'm smart." Although that sounded more to me like self-esteem, her point was that Harvard excels at producing the second kind of kid. I'd go even further, I replied: the kind of kid who goes to Harvard, or any selective college, is someone who already believes that about themselves. But there's another option, I continued. True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognizing, despite all you've been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being. It means deciding for yourself what constitutes success. She also claimed that Harvard students take their sense of self- efficacy out into the world and use it to be "innovative." But when I asked her what she meant by that, the example she produced was "being CEO of a Fortune 500." That isn't innovative, I said, that's just successful, and successful, again, according to a very narrow definition of the term. "Innovation" is all the rage these days, as a panacea for what ails us, but we need to innovate in our idea of innovation. You can invent a device or a drug or an app, but you can also invent your life. Instead of following a path, you can make your own path. There is artistic imagination, and scientific imagination, but there is also such a thing as moral imagination—"moral" meaning, not right or wrong per se, but having to do with the making of choices in the broadest sense. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new alternatives for how to live. When you walk into a Starbucks, you are given a choice between a latte and a Frappuccino and a few other things, but you also have another option. You can turn around and leave; maybe what you really want is not there at all. When you walk into an elite college, you are offered a choice between medicine, finance, consulting, and maybe a few

other things, but you do not have to order from that menu, either. You can even turn around and leave and think it over for a while. Moral imagination is hard, and it is hard in a completely different way than the hard things that elite students are used to doing. You can't study for it. You can't compete for it. The qualities it calls upon are those of character, not intellect. It's never easy, and not only that, it's never enough. You also need courage, moral courage, the bravery to act on your imagination in the face of what your family and friends are going to say to try to stop you. Because they're not going to like it. The morally courageous person tends to make the individuals around him very uncomfortable. He doesn't fit with their ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and he makes them insecure about the choices they themselves have made—or failed to make. Physical courage is admirable, but in social terms it's usually quite easy. You have your comrades there beside you, your community to cheer you on. Moral courage can be lonely indeed. People don't mind being trapped, as long as no one else is free. But stage a break, and everybody else begins to panic. I was speaking of these matters to a class at Stanford. They happened to be reading Middlemarch, which is pretty much the ideal text with which to think them through. ("Middlemarch," Virginia Woolf remarked, "the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.") The novel's heroine is Dorothea Brooke, an ardent and idealistic young lady who wants to make her life significant. But the story is set in the 1830s in the English countryside, a time and place that offered little room for spiritual yearnings, especially on the part of young women. The best that she can do is try to realize her aspirations through her personal life. So instead of marrying the man that she's expected to, the handsome, bland Sir James (who ends up with her little cupcake of a sister, Celia), she horrifies her family and neighbors by opting for a rather formidable alternative, the Reverend Edward Casaubon. Casaubon is austere, dignified, learned, aged—a great mind, she thinks, whom it would be a privilege to assist in his intellectual labors.

He is also, as she soon discovers, sickly, petty, and emotionally frigid. She has made, it turns out, an enormous mistake. Life with Casaubon is lonely and bleak. When you don't play it safe, you really aren't playing it safe. But should she have married Sir James instead, and become a little wifey like her sister? Whatever one may think, there is little doubt what her creator, George Eliot, did. Dorothea is her hero, her great soul—the one person, of all the many figures in this teeming epic, who possesses both the imagination to conceive a different life and the courage to attempt to live it. So when she gets a second chance, a second choice, she doesn't play it any safer. This time she marries an idealistic young reformer, a man of no position whom her family finds even more objectionable. She will have to surrender her comfortable life—her lifestyle, as we'd say today—and go off to the city, as her sister puts it, to "live in a street." It is literally, for Celia, unimaginable. "How will you live?" she asks, as relatives always do. "You will go away among queer people. And I shall never see you. . . . And you will be so poor." Though Dorothea finally gets the life she wants, Eliot does not allow us to believe that it arrives without a cost. Middlemarch is indeed a novel for grown- up people. But there's an even better instance of moral imagination and moral courage: George Eliot herself. In writing Dorothea's story, she underplayed, if anything, the drama of her own. She grew up in a place like the one she portrays in the novel, with nothing of her heroine's material advantages but every bit of her spiritual hunger and then some. She read intensely; she spent time with people who could teach her things; she thought for herself. When she announced that she had lost her religious faith, her father threatened to expel her from the house, but she refused to recant. Later on she moved to London, plunging into its literary life and daring to mix among men as an equal, behavior that was virtually unheard-of for a single woman. And then she did something that was even more scandalous: she took up with a married man. Adultery was hardly as uncommon in Victorian England as we like to imagine. Her lover was already living in an open marriage, and his wife had children by another man. What Eliot did that was so outrageous was refuse to conceal it. She believed that love was more important than a legal contract, and she was determined to live

openly with the man she insisted on calling her husband, even to the point of taking his name. And she suffered for it. She was shunned by society. Her older brother, whom she idolized, refused to talk to her. But she persevered. This was the life that she was going to live, and she wasn't going to apologize for it. Eventually, through sheer strength of will and genius—Middlemarch was immediately acclaimed as one of the greatest novels in the language—she forced the world to accept her on her own terms. But it took more than twenty-five years, and there were no guarantees that it was ever going to happen. It's no surprise that when she came to write her masterpiece, she built it from these very themes: self and society, choice and consequence, cowardice and courage and convention and rebellion. Dorothea is not the novel's only character who means to "shape their own deeds and alter the world a little." The second-most important figure is a gifted young doctor named Lydgate, who plans to make a name in science. But Lydgate gets married too soon, to a vain and shallow beauty who insists on being pampered, and finally comes instead "to be shapen after the average"—an outwardly successful man who regards himself as a failure. For him, there is no happy ending. Lydgate has the imagination but lacks the courage, is finally too addicted to comfort and approval. Yet that may be a little harsh. Lydgate must contend against the constraining effects of circumstance, as does everybody else within the novel. This is Eliot's highest theme, one she strikes before we meet a single character, in a meditation on the story of St. Theresa, the great religious reformer, with which the book begins. There are many potential Theresas, gifted souls, she says, but few can overcome the adverse conditions that surround them. Dorothea could have done better herself, if things around her had been different. "Tangled circumstance," Eliot calls it: a "web," to use the book's most famous image, that we weave and interweave for one another. Some decades later, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce made use of a similar metaphor. "When the soul of a man is born in this country," the protagonist Stephen Dedalus says about Ireland, "there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets." Today we have other nets. "What are you going to do with that?" is a

net. "Instead of finding yourself, how about finding a job?"—that's a net. So is a term that I have heard again and again as I have talked with students about these things: "self-indulgent." "Am I being self-indulgent if I major in philosophy instead of something more practical?" "Isn't it self-indulgent to try to live the life of the mind when there are so many other things I could be doing with my degree?" "I want to travel for a while after I graduate, but wouldn't that be self-indulgent?" These are the kinds of questions that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little different—even worse, the kinds that they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves. Look at what we have come to. We like to think of ourselves as a wealthy country, but it is one of the great testaments to the intellectual— and moral, and spiritual—poverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel that they are being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity. You're told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn't selfish at all. "We think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems," the critic Dwight Macdonald said some years ago, "but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies." I've had to talk a gifted young musician into acknowledging that music can make a difference in people's lives. It's considered glamorous now to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. Everyone pays lip service to the notion of "making a difference" or "giving back," but altruism isn't given much support unless it is pursued prestigiously, and if possible, lucratively. Students are expected to demonstrate creativity and perform service in order to get into college, but no one thinks they should be dumb enough to take them seriously as vocational goals. Along with "self-indulgent" comes "sitting

under a tree and writing poetry," an oddly specific stereotype that suggests that creative or intellectual work is invariably dreamy, solipsistic, irrelevant, useless, and maybe vaguely feminine and adolescent—as well as insisting, of course, that it isn't really work at all. The pressure comes from all directions. A South Korean student told me that a passport agent dressed her down, right there at the airport as she was coming back for the summer, for wanting to study philosophy. "Now," a young woman who had gone to Harvard wrote me, having graduated and found gainful employment at an independent bookstore, I'm encountering exactly the phenomenon you describe: the confusion and even indignation, among others, when I tell them I'm working at a bookstore, don't have immediate plans to go to grad school or law school, and don't aspire to be a lawyer or politician. Just last night, I had the same old fight with my dad: wasting a Harvard degree by learning to farm, cultivating real community, or giving myself time to think and heal emotionally after years of severe compartmentalizing and backward socialization is worse than selling out—it's selfishness and laziness. It's easy for us to identify with the injured party here, the free spirit victimized by conventional attitudes, but we are far more likely to find ourselves on the other side of the argument. I know that I have been there, especially back in college and my early twenties, when friends began to go in directions that made me feel threatened because they represented values that I didn't understand. We are the ones, in other words, who are weaving the nets. "We insignificant people with our daily words and acts," says Eliot, "are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas." So how do you find your vocation—or as people like to say today, your passion? That can be the hardest question that young people face, especially after being trained to think exclusively in terms of the next immediate goal. There are no easy answers, but here are a few

suggestions. Do for work what you do spontaneously—or did spontaneously, back when you were younger, before all the spontaneity got beaten out of you. Do what you would choose to do anyway, even if you didn't get rewarded for it. Do the thing that you can immerse yourself inside for hours at a time. You know the thing you wish you could do, instead of what you're doing now? Just do that thing. Do what you love to do the most: no, not that—not what you think you love, or think you ought to love, but what you really do love. There is by now a robust literature on the nature of happiness, and it converges on a pair of observations. Beyond a moderate level of material comfort, happiness consists of two things: feeling connected to others and engaging in meaningful work. These are hardly new ideas. Aristotle, who said that man is a social animal, also said that happiness derives from exercising one's particular capacities. Doing strenuously, in other words, what you do well. Summoning that sense of joy and freedom that arises from your belly when you're doing work that calls upon your favorite powers. I was talking to an intro philosophy class at Claremont McKenna, an extremely practical place where half the students major in economics or government. Why were they taking the course? Because it fulfills a requirement, a lot of them said. Okay, but is it fun? Yes, they almost all agreed, it was. So what does that mean? I asked. "Well," said one, "it's not what people usually mean by 'fun.' It lets me think about the things I want to think about." Another said, "I can lose myself in the material for hours." Exactly, I said. Some people will have that experience with philosophy, some people will have it with math, but "fun" is what all your classes should be, or as many of them as possible, and it's also what your work should be, if you can manage it. The point is eminently practical. Not everyone's equipped for the kinds of quantitative fields that college students are typically urged to enter. There's no use going into engineering if you aren't very good at it. You'll learn more, do better, try harder, and be more successful if you study something that you're interested in. "From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six," George Orwell wrote, "I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the

consciousness that I was outraging my true nature." You don't want to outrage your true nature. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a nurse who works in end-of-life care reports that the single most common regret her patients express is that "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." You can endlessly delay gratification, doing work you hate because of the promise of future reward, or you can find your way to work that is its own reward. Lara Galinsky warns against placing too much emphasis on "passion," in talking to young people, because the word can be intimidating. A lot of them will say, as I have often heard myself, that they aren't really sure that they do have a particular passion. Galinsky prefers "purpose," and I certainly have no quarrel there. In fact, it is probably best not to fetishize any particular word. I have also used "vocation" here, and I recognize that that can be intimidating, too. Not everybody hears a call, or maybe you feel called in several different ways and are having trouble sorting out which one to pursue. "Purpose," William Damon says, has the virtue of uniting the inner with the outer, the self with the world: what you want to do with what you see as needing to be done. "What moves you?" Galinsky likes to ask. "What do you feel connected to?" Becoming a lawyer isn't a purpose. Becoming a lawyer to defend the rights of workers, or to prosecute criminals, is. Purpose means doing something, not "being" something. Purposeful work is spread out all along the income distribution. According to a study Damon cites, "Bus drivers, nurses, clerks, and waitresses were just as likely to find meaning in their work as people in 'elite' professions such as law and medicine." One thing is certain, he stresses: money and status are not enough for a sustaining purpose, and neither is the so-called realist's goal of "just earning a living"—the problem being exactly with that "just." Next time someone tells you that you should forget about finding a sense of meaning or doing what you love and just worry about earning a living, ask yourself if that's what they did. Chances are it's not, and if it is, ask yourself if they seem like a happy person.

David Brooks has criticized the "expressive individualism" that counsels graduates to "find yourself" or "follow your dreams" as nothing more than "baby-boomer theology." It is a great deal more than that. However often it is cheapened, sentimentalized, or reduced to a cliché or a marketing device, it is a basic idea, perhaps the basic idea, both of modern life and of that quintessentially modern country, the United States. It is Emerson's self-reliance and Thoreau's injunction to step to the beat of your own drummer. It is the theme of the lion's share of classic novels: the drama of coming of age, of developing a self and finding a place in the world. It is also an inevitable response to the modern condition. In traditional society—where the meaning of your life was determined by external structures of belief, where your place in the world was within your community, and where you simply did the kind of work that your father or mother had done—there was no need to think about those things and no opportunity to change them. Now we have the gift and burden of freedom: the chance to figure them out for ourselves. We can surrender that chance and let other people tell us what to do—freedom is often scary and confusing—but we shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist. The problem is not that we believe in finding yourself and following your dreams; the problem is that we aren't equipping our children to do it, and that maybe we're not sure we want them to. But Brooks is still at least half right. "Most people don't form a self and then lead a life," he says. "They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling." The first part is certainly true. You don't sit in your dorm room and create a self. College is only the start of the process, and the capacity for introspection that college should develop is only one of the things that you'll need. But I do find Brooks's notion of a "problem" problematic. It happens that way sometimes, as seems especially the case for some of the more adventurous young people today, the kind who are attracted to social entrepreneurship. Municipal governments need to become more efficient, so you write an app that connects people to local services. Poor communities have trouble getting healthy food, so you create a service program that helps to bring fresh produce into schools. But what about other kinds of entrepreneurship? If you make a

computer game, or start a design business, or set up shop as a baker, are you solving a problem or taking advantage of an opportunity? What about the professions: teaching, nursing, social work, academia, the clergy, as well as law or medicine? People are often drawn to them as much for the intrinsic nature of the work they involve (I like little kids; I'm obsessed with archeology; I feel close to God) as for their larger ends. What about creative work? Writing a song is not a response to a problem or even, really, to an opportunity; it arises from an inner compulsion, a need to express and communicate. Brooks himself is a journalist, political commentator, and social critic. I don't know how he would describe the impulses that have driven his career, but I would guess that they involve a combination of intellectual curiosity, philosophical beliefs, and moral passions, not the desire to solve a problem. I'd bet he even found himself and followed his dreams. One word, oddly, that is never used in this connection is "ideals." Justice, beauty, goodness, truth—the old moral lodestars. We seem to find the word forbidding now, preferring the squishier "values." But ideals have enormous power. They give you the strength to resist the seductions of status and wealth and success. An ideal is something that is more important to you than anything the world can give you. It functions the way that religious belief once commonly did, and in fact I've found that religious students are often the ones who possess the greatest degree of moral autonomy, are most indifferent to outside approval. "Ideals are psychological goals," the critic Alfred Kazin wrote, "necessary to the health of the mind." And although you are expected to discard them at the college gates the day you graduate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote to his old headmaster forty years later, during the darkest days of World War II, to thank him for urging him to hold fast to his youthful ideals in later life. I've spoken with a lot of recent graduates over the last few years, young people who are making their way through their twenties, coming to realizations that they wish they'd had in college but persevering in

figuring out who they are and what they want to do. Here are a couple of their stories: Eunice is an Asian-American woman in her late twenties whom I met at a Yale alumni event to which I'd been invited. She grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, majored in economics, and went to work for Morgan Stanley after graduation. She got a lot of academic mentorship at college, she said, but no career mentorship. "When you're graduating," she told me later in a follow-up interview, "you only have certain options unless you're willing to do it yourself, because career services doesn't help." Most of her friends went into law, medicine, or business. Everyone seems to be doing the same thing, she said, and the least happy are the ones who went to law school. Very few are doing something "amazing," something that she looks at and says, "I want to be doing that." Eunice left Morgan after three years, the first time she had ever quit anything. "I was afraid if I stayed in and I was happy with the money, I would never leave." She went to work in Shanghai, where she found a hodgepodge of people among the young Americans there. Not all of them had gone to elite schools, but all were enjoying their lives a lot more than the people she had graduated with. The common factor was a willingness to accept risk. They ran restaurants, worked as writers, were entrepreneurs: a young woman who had started a production company, an event planner, someone running a cupcake business. It was the first time she had ventured out of "the Ivy League bubble," encountering people who hadn't gone to those kinds of schools but were still successful. After two years in Shanghai, Eunice returned to Seattle, where she was taking a year off to catch her breath and think things over. She was training as a yoga teacher just for fun, volunteering in areas that interested her, and planning to start an MBA in the fall. She knew that business school could be as narrowly directed an experience as college, but now she was ready to be proactive about finding a nontraditional path. Looking back, she wishes she had majored in something more interesting instead of defaulting to economics. "College is not about getting a job," she had discovered, "it's about getting an education." But the whole process as it currently exists, she added, does not allow you to

be "inward-turning"—"to think about what you really want instead of what you think you want." She had more perspective now on other things, as well. "When you graduate from Yale, you feel the pressure to have another blue-chip name on the resume," she said. "But really, who's looking?" Now she cares a lot less about what people think. Material possessions are less important, too, "sanity" a lot more. She had been working twelve-hour days at Morgan, but "it doesn't make sense to be in the rat race if your heart is not in it," she said. "You need to be happy when you go home." There's a difference between the things you desire, she told me, and the things you need to live what she beautifully called "a sustainable life." Now a second story, this time in the person's own words. Margaret wrote me after reading one of my essays: I think I fell into the exact traps you outlined: without wanting to be, Columbia made me competitive, made me feel self-indulgent for wanting to travel/volunteer my way through the end of my savings after graduation. So though that had been my plan (and dream) all throughout college, I ended up feeling guilty when all my peers were actively job seeking. In the end, I "compromised" with myself —settling for a prestigious fellowship at a globally renowned research institute, as a visiting researcher on climate change and agriculture. At least, I told myself, it was located abroad, in somewhat "exotic" tropical Brazil. But during my time here, seeing senior researchers battle for directorship roles, talking smack about people who "only" have two Masters degrees (rather than a proper PhD), and feeling trapped in an office writing about issues in faraway lands I've never even set foot in, I've continually thought about your article. And I've realized: I'm pretending. I'm pretending to be a climate scientist (in reality, I studied international relations, which itself was an excuse to be abroad as much as possible while still graduating in four years). And I'm pretending to care about this job that I know hundreds would kill for. (A few months ago, I received a request from an African PhD candidate to be my intern. . . .) But most of all, I'm pretending to care about this version of "success." Because in

reality, what Ivy League–caliber schools like Yale or Columbia teach their students is how to pretend, and how to do it well. And I do it damn well. I've been promoted here and offered raises; I've been published in scientific journals and given the keynote address at an international research conference. I'm good at what I do, but ultimately, it's just what I do, not what I love. And so I've done some soul-searching to really think about the kinds of "smart" I'd like to be, and the kinds of skills I really have (and don't just pretend to have). And I've realized that I don't want to climb the ladder of "success"; in reality, maybe all I want is to have a small non-profit restaurant that never really exceeds a capacity of 30. And it's a crazy idea; I'm 22 and have limited capital, and I'd like to do it in South America. But together with another disillusioned Ivy League graduate (Cornell '11), we're going to try it. And in the process of working out the kinks, we're realizing all the things a $55,000/year education didn't teach us—like how the hell you properly prime a wall, or build a wooden table from cheap wood, or balance a restaurant budget. And if we fail epically, at least we had the "moral courage" to give it a shot. Eunice is a pragmatist who wants to do something more interesting with her life. Margaret is a dreamer who is willing to take a big chance. Eunice is moving in the direction of greater service to society. Margaret probably sounds like she is moving in the opposite direction, and there may be many who would question her choice (as well as her willingness to throw away such a seemingly great opportunity). What they have in common is a desire to do what they feel they want to do, not what they're "supposed to do" in any sense, whether that means making a lot of money or saving the world. And now a final story: mine. My path was long to recognizing my vocation, much longer than it had to be. My father was a professor of engineering; my older siblings were health professionals already, or well on the way, by the time I started college. Science was the horizon of

possibility in my family; nothing else counted or even existed. Add to that the expectation of professional success that came with being the child of Jewish immigrants, and no matter how much I loved to read and write, it literally never occurred to me to major in anything else. I had also loved biology in high school, thanks to two terrific teachers, and had long been curious about psychology, so when I saw in the catalogue orientation week that Columbia offered a joint major in the two fields, I chose it on the spot. No wait-and-see, no exploration of the new worlds of thought whose names the catalogue whispered (anthropology, history, classics), no investigation of what the major even entailed, beyond a list of courses. The feeling, other than excitement, was one of relief. I couldn't bear the uncertainty that college represented. Instead of opening options up, I needed to shut them down. And shut them down I did. Between the major, which was more like a major and a half, and Columbia's core curriculum and other requirements, I had locked up three-quarters of my courses for the next four years, and I hadn't even gone to a single class. There was no one there to stop and make me think, no one there to save me from myself. My freshman composition teacher, whose class I loved and who might have provided a modicum of mentorship, did not bother to suggest that I ought to consider pursuing my passion for language. I don't know when exactly things began to go wrong with my chosen course of study, or why. Perhaps there was simply a natural limit to my interest, or perhaps it had to do with the way that all the science classes were taught, in large lectures with no discussion sections, or perhaps my vision of what I was going to do with it all, why I was slogging through what turned out to be a lot of dry material, was too vague to sustain me. I would mope in the back of those lectures, reading a novel behind my notebook, oblivious to the fact that I was trying to tell myself something. By the time I realized that I should have been an English major, it was too late to make the switch. But what was I going to do with my life? Like a lot of people then, I bolted for the safety of law school. I went to Stanley Kaplan's, took the LSATs, applied to a bunch of schools—but stopped myself from going after it occurred to me to wonder, surprisingly late in the game, whether I actually wanted to be a lawyer.

Instead, I went to school for journalism, a field in which I'd done some extracurricular dabbling, but only because it gave me a place to park myself for a year, and after all—another attitude that I'd unconsciously absorbed—what else was there to do after college, if not go to some kind of grad school? But that was predictably miserable, too; I didn't want to be a journalist, either, and afterward the only place that even interviewed me was a tiny, dying nonprofit. So there I was, a couple of years after college, bitter from the fact that I had thrown away the chance to get an education, working a job that meant nothing to me, my career essentially dead in the water, my self-belief in ruins, with no idea what I wanted to do or where I should go next. And then I happened to be visiting a friend in architecture school. She wasn't happy, either; her program was way too pretentious and theoretical. We were walking along—I can practically point to the spot where it happened—and she said, "I have to get out of graduate school." And I immediately thought—it was a totally irrational response, of course—"I have to go to graduate school." Meaning, I'll never be happy until I give myself the chance to study English after all. Meaning, goddam it, it's not too late—I'm not going to let it be too late. That was it: that was the lightning bolt. Everything was suddenly clear and calm. I understood what I needed to do, because I'd let myself become aware of what I'd always known. It wasn't easy getting in at that point. I was rejected by something like nine of the eleven programs I applied to, and the ones that did admit me were going to make me fight to keep my place by cutting half the class at the end of the initial year. But for the first time in a very long while, I performed at the top of my ability, and for the first time ever, I loved being in school. I'd study for seventy, eighty hours a week, reading until 4 A.M. in my crummy little room in graduate student housing, and I had never been happier. I had finally learned to listen to my gut, or in more sophisticated terms, had come to recognize the moral significance of desire. I had found out that I could do what I wanted, and that I could do it just because I wanted to. II: Risk

In order to invent your life, you need to overcome that thing the system is so good at inculcating: fear of failure. Damon repeatedly stresses the importance, not of avoiding failure, but of learning to cope with it as a normal and valuable part of development. The best reason to fail is to learn that failure isn't the end of the world. "The first time I blew a test," I sometimes say to campus groups, "I walked out feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier." The statement never fails to elicit a round of cathartic laughter. Students are relieved to discover that it's possible to blow a test or two and still survive to adulthood. When Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, was asked to name a book that she wished that all her incoming freshmen would read, she cited Kathryn Schulz's Being Wrong, which "advocates doubt as a skill and praises error as the foundation of wisdom." Never to have failed is a sign not of merit but fragility; it means your fears have kept you from doing or becoming what you might have. "Fail better," Samuel Beckett famously wrote. If your standards are as high as they should be, you will fail again and again. That is the difference between mere success—getting the A, measuring up to some generic benchmark that may not actually be very high at all—and true excellence. But there is also failure in a larger sense, and you need to be prepared for that, as well. I mean the kind that Dorothea suffers in Middlemarch: big mistakes, existential mistakes. "I am not afraid to make a mistake," Stephen says in Portrait of the Artist, "even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too." Those are powerful and moving words, and they have long inspired me, but we need to take them at their full weight. The wager paid off for Joyce (though we don't know if it did for Stephen), but that doesn't mean it will for you. For every person who takes the risk of going their own way and ends up accomplishing remarkable things—for every George Eliot or Steve Jobs —there are very many who fall short. The reason to try, the reason to invent your life—whether you aim at remarkable things or only at your own thing—is so that it will be your life, your choice, your mistakes. As a colleague of mine once said, if kids got off the treadmill that takes them to Wall Street, they would still make mistakes, but at least they wouldn't

all make the same mistake. Of course you'll make mistakes, and some will be hard to endure. But life is finally a long process of learning how you ought to have lived in the first place. Or it is if you do it right. In mentoring young social entrepreneurs in her role as senior vice president of Echoing Green (a leading funder of social start-ups, the organization has provided seed money to Teach For America, City Year, and hundreds of others), Lara Galinsky talks about the importance of "willful naïveté." You kind of have to close your eyes to the feeling that you're trying to do the impossible. Imagination means, by definition, that you're bringing something new into the world. It only feels impossible because nobody's ever done it before—or at least, you never have. You must, in other words, face down your fears. Fear, a high school teacher said to me not long ago, is an agent of control, something that authorities instill to make you tractable. And the biggest boogeyman whose name is whispered to our future high achievers is "the gutter." It's either Harvard or the gutter—that all-or-nothing mentality again. "I hope you're happy being a plumber," they used to say when we were kids, if you showed the slightest sign of weakening resolve. To hear some of my young correspondents talk, the only alternatives are writing novels in a basement (that is, the life of the mind) or trading derivatives in a glass tower (the life of prudent practicality). It's a ridiculous notion, of course, and once you press on it a bit, once you push back against the fear instead of going into a defensive crouch, the argument collapses. Galinsky quotes her mother, who was definitely not the kind of parent who tries to scare her kids away from risk. "Fear means go," she would say: some fears are legitimate, but the ones that are born from insecurity are signals telling you to march resolutely toward them. Parents tend to forget what it's like to be young, what youth can endure and achieve. How often have I heard of people telling their children not to take exactly the same kinds of risks—whether personal or professional, about work or sex or whatever—that they not only survived just fine themselves, but that made them who they are.

The dull predictability of prescribed elite career paths is, if nothing else, repugnant as a moral spectacle. Never to have tasted the pleasures; always to have played it safe. Never to have thrown your life upon the scales; always to have been sober and orderly. Never to have followed an ideal; always to have been sure of yourself. Who wants to live like that? Far better to resist the temptation to security. Emerson quotes Oliver Cromwell: "A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." The desire to eliminate uncertainty eliminates life. I think of Meryl Streep, who has talked about awakening to feminism during her years at Vassar in the early 1970s. ("It was an emergence, which is what you hope for for a kid when they go off to college.") I think of the acclaimed lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, how her friends turned her on to Adrienne Rich, who wasn't yet on any syllabus. I think of Patti Smith, taking fire at her first encounter with the French poet Rimbaud, whose work and life have been an inspiration for so many young seekers. ("He possessed an irreverent intelligence that ignited me.") I wonder how often this sort of thing still happens. How often can it happen? Do young people still have the chance, do they still give themselves the chance, to experience the power that ideas have to knock you sideways, into a different life? How likely are they to surrender to the kind of serendipity that Jobs talked about as having been essential to his own development? Is there still an underground of secret knowledge among the young, the blueprints for a project of self-reconstruction? Or are they more likely to remain under the supervision of what the writer Rick Perlstein has called "the bureaucracy that schedules students' self-exploration"? I was speaking with a student who was planning to become a judge. (She was also thinking about taking a year off before law school, but only one, and only if she could do something "productive.") She was an intellectually serious young woman, but only within limits. "Each book I read," she reminisced about her first couple of years at school, "totally changed my world-view." But not, I ventured to note, her life plan. She was taken aback—it had apparently never occurred to her that their ought to be a relationship between the two— then explained that she had "just known" what she had wanted to do since ninth grade. It is certainly true that some people are blessed enough to be able to

recognize their vocation at an early age (a phenomenon that seems to be more common in creative fields). But there are differences between someone like Orwell, for example, and my junior justice. Orwell had already had some tangible experience of what the work of writing involves: "I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and . . . I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts." Being a writer is not the kind of "summit" occupation people tend to covet for its status (though the glamour that surrounds it ought to be a reason to think twice). Above all, as we saw, he reconsidered the idea during, precisely, his years of young adulthood. He went and lived for a while, and when he circled back to his original conviction, it was with the judgment and self-knowledge of an incomparably maturer person. Another colleague has remarked that today's young people belong to a "post-emotional" generation—that they prefer to avoid feelings that are too chaotic and powerful. I don't know if that is true, but I do believe that it's essential not to shy away from the challenging parts of the self— not to deny the impulses and doubts that threaten to knock you from your charted path. The archetypal wanderer in Western literature is Odysseus; indeed the title of his poem has become synonymous with the life-changing, soul-making journey. Odysseus roams for a decade, experiencing a world of gods and monsters that lies beyond his imagination and being tested to the limits of his strength and ingenuity. He is rescued, at last, by Athena, his protector. But the figure who had sent the storm that blew him off course to begin with, all those many years before, was no one other than Athena herself. She saves him, eventually, but she also knows that the best thing she can do is push him into the sea in the first place—into the turbulence, into the tracklessness —to force him to improvise and change direction and discover what the world contains, and what he does. I cannot emphasize enough that inventing your life does not come without potential costs. People say "find your passion," but they don't say "be prepared to suffer" (if only by surrendering the status that you might have had). They say "follow your dreams," but they don't say "the hell

with credentials." I don't mean credentials per se, which are obviously often necessary, but credentialism, that lust for prestige that more or less defines the elite mentality and makes it impossible to find your passion or follow your dreams. How absurd it is—how disgusting, really—for commencement speakers to get up and mouth those exhortations at the very schools that do so much to preclude their fulfillment. Status is a funny thing. Money gets you stuff, at least. Status doesn't get you much except the knowledge that you have it. And while money may not make you happy, it is easy to imagine someone who decides they have enough. With status, you can never have enough. It is comparative, and competitive, by its very nature. It doesn't just not make you happy: it actively makes you unhappy. You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare. And so it goes in every field. I can tell you right now where you're going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where? People get to places like Yale and think that they've "arrived," only to discover that there are still other places to arrive at, and other places after that, and so on and so forth in an infinite recession, like the vista in a double mirror. As for why we cling to status in the first place, the answer seems to lie very deep in our psyches, down there with honor and shame and pollution, with ego, self- image, and self-esteem. Even money finally seems to matter mainly as a way of getting it. I was talking to an audience at Stanford. Following your passion means, by definition, giving something up, I said, and what you might have to give up is Stanford: getting in, or if you're already there, getting in to "Stanford" at the next level. The idea, needless to say, did not go over very well. I have heard from many high-achieving students who have asked me whether it wasn't possible to be invested both in learning for its own sake and in being at the top. No, I've said, it isn't possible. Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you're doing it, because learning is what matters. Wanting to be at the top involves a rather different set of motivations, and you need to look that in the face. Can you get there anyway, simply as an

accidental outgrowth of your efforts? Maybe, but do you really mean accidental, or are you trying to sneak behind your own back? I would be the last person to suggest that overcoming the need for status, for success in the eyes of the world, is an easy thing to do. It's an addiction, which means you never really do get over it. The best that you can do is learn to manage it. I often think, in this regard, of Alcoholics Anonymous, how you're supposed to go to meetings every day, because you need to remember what you're up against, and gather the strength to fight it, every day. You may never completely eradicate the need for status, but you do not have to act on it. And the more that you resist it, the weaker it becomes. Instead of success, make the work itself the goal. That's what I always come back to. When I start to care too much about rewards, I remember to return to the work—to the never-ending effort to perfect it. Just put your head down and forget about everything else: happiness has come to me when I have done that, misery and false directions otherwise. "Everything undertaken for its own sake is worthwhile," the writer Geoff Dyer has put it, "irrespective of the outcome." And the best part is, it's in your hands. Whether you get the recognition you think you deserve is out of your control, but the task itself is not. Aim high, to be sure, but do it for the love of the work. The work and the love—that's all that's going to be there in the end in any case. The only real grade is this: how well you've lived your life. I am painfully aware that much of what I've been saying has long been reduced to cliché—and worse than cliché, advertising fodder. "Be yourself," "Do your own thing," "You only live once": such sentiments are next to meaningless by now. Everything is "edgy" today; everyone's creative or an innovator or an innovative creator who thinks outside the box. Thomas Frank and others have been telling us for years about commodified dissent and the rebel consumer. Slacks, sneakers, soft drinks, songs—all are packaged with the promise that they'll make you stand out from the herd, along with everybody else who buys them. We're told to "Change the Script," "Chart Your Own Course," and, of

course, "Think Different." The great exponents of American individualism have been exhumed, as in a kind of voodoo, for the purpose of selling us pants: Levi's has given us Whitman ("Pioneers! O Pioneers!"); Gap has told us that Kerouac wore khakis. The timid practicality that is the major message that our kids absorb today is alibied—and camouflaged, and soothed—with a hollow commercialized rebellion. You need to avoid that kind of crap. Putting a sticker on your MacBook that says "I'm an individual" (in whatever paraphrase) does not make you an individual. Getting a piercing, growing a mustache, moving to Austin—these do not make you an individual. You can't accessorize your way to moral courage. The choices it involves are not consumer ones. Cool furniture and hip music are perfectly nice, but they are utterly beside the point. Facebook also doesn't count; you don't become an independent thinker by posting quotes from independent thinkers. Here's a rule of thumb: if you aren't giving anything up, it isn't moral and it isn't courage. Stumbles, sacrifices, inner struggle, false starts and wrong turns, conflict with parents and peers—these are some of the signs of the genuine article. The way you know it's real is if it hurts. Don't fake it. I knew somebody who'd been unconventional in college and was still living off the fumes of it a decade later, still posing as a rebel, as she flung herself into the most numbing conformity. It's important to maintain your ideals in college, but they probably won't be tested until later, sometimes quite a few years later, when and if you start to act on them in ways that go beyond words and gestures and really force you to put things on the line. Don't do it to be cool, either. That only means you've substituted the approval of your peers, or some of your peers, or an imaginary audience of peers, for that of adults. Don't do it to feed your ego, to tell yourself you're morally superior. Do it— invent your life, in whatever form that ends up taking, which need not be very cool or glamorous or countercultural at all—for your own sake alone.

To everything that I've been saying—about the purpose of college, the need to build a self, the value of moral independence, the virtue of confronting risk with a bold spirit—there attaches, of course, a very large qualification. You are not free to ignore reality, and the heaviest reality is money. You need to eat, and you will also need to pay for other things that college students tend to be too young to think about, especially if they've grown up in affluent families: a mortgage, if owning a house is going to be important to you (and rent, if it is not); the costs of raising children, if you plan to have them, and to send them to college in turn; a decent retirement. The Bible doesn't say that money is the root of all evil; it says that love of money is. The economic slump, of course, has only made things harder. Jobs are scarcer, even for graduates of prestigious schools. Kids have been moving home in record numbers. The future threatens a greater degree of financial insecurity than we have had to cope with for a very long time. And then there is the ever-worsening problem of student debt. It's a lot more difficult to put aside vocational considerations and think of college as an opportunity for personal development when you know you're going to graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in loans. As one professor said to me, a family's relationship to college is going to be very different when the price is fifty thousand dollars a year than it was when it was five thousand dollars a year. If people are more apt to talk about higher education in terms of return on investment today, that's because the investment keeps on getting so much bigger. Still, we shouldn't panic. The financial cloud is already lifting, however sluggishly, and prospects aren't likely to be as bad going forward as they've been for the last six years. Our economic mood tends to fluctuate more wildly than underlying circumstances warrant. When times are good, as anybody who recalls the pre-crash years will know, we think the party's never going to stop. When things are dark, we imagine that we'll never see the light again. There are bubbles in pessimism, too. Besides, we shouldn't kid ourselves: the utilitarian attitude that dominates our ideas about higher education, as well as the careerism that we see among elite students, did not arise as a result of the financial crash. But we need to be brutally honest. Finding your purpose or

embracing your vocation or whatever you want to call it is going to be easier for some kids than for others. If you're lucky enough to graduate without a lot of debt, or your parents are supportive, psychologically as well as financially, you'll have a lot more room to maneuver. The fact might shape your choice of where to go to college. Lower cost and/or less debt might be more important, may give you more options, than a shinier name—though it's also true that net tuition can be cheaper (can be, not necessarily is) at a wealthier and more prestigious school. It isn't only about money, though. I met a student at Cornell—he was graduating debt-free—who wanted to be a writer, but, he told me bitterly, he wasn't even going to give it a shot, because unlike the kids at Yale, he didn't have the necessary contacts. Never mind the blazing misconceptions there; the point is that a sense of inner freedom is essential. How much uncertainty you can stand (as well as how much money you can manage on, whether in your twenties or in later life) will depend on who you are—and although I believe that college is an opportunity not only to discover but to reshape who you are, there are limits to the extent to which you can do that. Ideas can expand, values can change, but our personalities are a great deal less elastic. Some of us are simply born with sanguine dispositions; for others, the glass is always half empty. But if we're going to be brutally honest, then we need to say this as well: all these issues are a lot easier for the kinds of kids who attend elite schools. If you go to Johns Hopkins or Bowdoin, or even Emory or Bates, you are already very fortunate. People will hire you more readily; graduate schools will admit you more easily. You've been socialized into the elite, if you didn't grow up there already, and you have indeed made contacts that can help to lubricate your way in the world. And for all the problems with elite admissions and the way they measure merit, you are also likely to be talented and smart, and certainly energetic and driven. Even if you don't go to the most prestigious college, or as prestigious a one as you could have or wanted to—even if you only might have gone to a prestigious school but opted to go elsewhere—you'll probably be just fine, no matter what you choose to do. We're still a very wealthy country by any reasonable standard, which means that you've been presented with a rare and remarkable chance, one that's far more precious than the

opportunity to be rich: the opportunity not to be. To find your purpose and embrace your vocation, and still to live a decent life. The world is not fair, even though it should be. The genetic lottery is not fair and never will be. Having the freedom to invent your life is a privilege. Being able to follow your passion might be the ultimate form of entitlement. But decrying these facts does not eliminate them. I recognize that what I'm saying does not apply to every student or prospective student at an elite school, still less to those at other schools. The question is, does it apply to you? If so, the fact that others are less fortunate does not let you off the hook. Quite the contrary. Whenever I am asked about these issues at campus events—"What about kids from lower-income families?" or some variation thereof—the question almost always comes from someone who appears as if he'd never had to worry about money in his life. But if you aren't financially constrained, if you didn't graduate with debt, then what is your excuse? The psychic dodge that seems to be at work is similar to what we saw with "self- indulgence." Using your privilege to pursue your dreams is spiritually suspect, but using it to enrich yourself still further is somehow authentic. If you've been blessed by Mammon, the feeling appears to be, it would be disloyal not to worship him. As for kids who really are from lower-income families, of course the tensions are much greater, the margin for error incomparably smaller. And there are other factors, too. To be the first to go to college at all, perhaps, much less to a prestigious one; to have the chance to be the one through whom your family rises into the middle class or beyond; to be able to give your parents a comfortable retirement—such considerations put an entirely different kind of pressure on your choices. I will say only this, as others have before me: don't sell your options short. Mark Edmundson tells the following story about his father, who had barely graduated from high school: One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen . . . hatching plans about the rest of my life. I was about to go off to

college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. "I think I might want to be pre-law," I told my father. . . . "Do you want to be a lawyer?" he asked. . . . "I'm not really sure," I told him, "but lawyers make pretty good money, right?" My father detonated. . . . He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) I will simply add one other thought, based on my observation of friends and students from across the economic spectrum. If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom. Other pressures exist in immigrant families, even families, as I know first hand, that have already made it to the upper middle class. Immigrants tend to be practical people, with little patience for talk of ideals. Status matters for an extra reason: just as lower-income parents want to see their children get a toehold in the middle class, immigrants look to their offspring to solidify their family's place in America. East Asian students in particular, the "new Jews," are products, like the old ones, of a tradition that exalts academic accomplishment. Confucian culture also places special emphasis on filial piety, and immigrants tend to "live through their children" in any case. But immigrant parents, less acculturated than their kids, have a more restricted view not only of what's out there in America—the possibilities an affluent, dynamic society affords—but even of what constitutes success in the terms they already embrace. Nothing but the Ivy League existed in my family, and much the same has been said about Asian communities today. Even schools like Williams and Amherst are off the map. I think in this connection of the story of the Exodus. The "generation of the wilderness," the ones who had escaped from slavery, were made by God to wander in the desert for the balance of their lives, barred from entrance to the Promised Land. Only their children, born into freedom, were fully equipped to make use of it.

And yet there are parents who understand what they can really give their kids. Marco Rubio, nobody's idea of a hippie, has had this to say about his mother and father: "Early on my parents drove it into us that a job is what you do to make a living; a career is when you get paid to do something that you love. They had jobs so I could have a career." The value of parental support, moral even more than financial, cannot be overstated. "Don't worry, you're young, you have your entire life," a student told me that her father said to her. "Of course you have a future. Everyone has a future. You just don't know what it's going to be yet." But there is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult. A child who never rebels remains a child forever. Generational conflict was not invented in the 1960s. It is a normal part of growing up, an integral feature of human society. What isn't normal is the situation that we have today: the helicopter parents and their children who call them from college after every class—that insidious alignment of perspectives and identification of interests. What isn't normal is the notion that parents and children, first and foremost, should be "friends." Disloyalty, says the great child psychologist D. W. Winnicott—he means disloyalty within the family—is "an essential feature of living," for "it is disloyal to everything that is not oneself if one is to be oneself. The most aggressive and therefore the most dangerous words in the languages of the world are to be found in the assertion I AM." But now it seems that families have signed a pact: never to separate, never to be disloyal. I won't grow up, and you won't make me. You won't grow up, and I won't have to face the grief of losing you. Moving back in with your parents after graduation, we need to remember, was already common before the financial collapse. If children don't rebel today, is that because they do not feel the need to—after all, we're friends!—or because they sense that it would not be safe to? Rebellion doesn't happen all at once. You need some room to test the boundaries. But if any move away is seen as a threat, the process will never begin. Better the tyrannical

patriarchs of yesteryear, toward whom one openly declared one's enmity, than to have such friends as these. "One for me, one for my parents," students will explain when you ask them why they're double-majoring in things like Spanish and economics or history and computer science. But why not simply one for me? Aren't you the one who's going to have to live your life? What do you owe your parents? Love, and when they need it later, care, but not submission. Not your life. What do you owe your parents? Nothing. The family is not a business deal. You don't "owe" your parents; you have a relationship with them. When you are still a child, that relationship ought to involve obedience. Once you're an adult, it has to involve independence. Negotiating the perilous passage from one to the other is what adolescence is about, but if you wait for your parents to make it happen, it probably never will. So here are a few suggestions about the way you ought to conduct yourself when you go off to college. Don't talk to your parents more than once a week, or even better, once a month. Don't tell them your grades on papers or tests, or anything else about how you're doing during the term. Don't ask them for help of any kind. If they try to interfere with course selection or other aspects of your life, ask them politely to back off. If they don't, ask them impolitely. Make it clear to them that this is your experience, not theirs. "My parents would kill me" goes the common phrase: if I majored in music, if I went on that road trip, if I took a leave of absence. So here is an idea: kill them first. No, I don't mean literally. But as Stanford professor Terry Castle put it, in an essay called "The Case for Breaking Up with Your Parents," "to live an 'adult' life, a meaningful life, it is necessary . . . to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning": the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance . . . the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

Of all the questions students ask me, the most common is also the hardest. It is some version of "So what should I do?": where should I go to school? what should I study? which direction should I go in afterward? Of course, these aren't the kinds of questions I or anybody else can answer, though I certainly understand the feeling of wishing that somebody could. The only concrete suggestion I can offer is one that you've already heard: Take time off. Take time off to slow down, to give yourself perspective, to break the cycle of incessant achievement, to get away from constant supervision, to see that there's a world outside of school, to develop skills and explore capacities you haven't had a chance to cultivate. Take time off before you go to college. So-called gap year or bridge year programs are increasingly popular and increasingly encouraged. Harvard, Tufts, and NYU are now among the schools that suggest the option right in their admissions letters. Princeton has started a program of its own. Especially given the problems that more and more students are having adjusting to college, schools want kids who've had a chance to do some maturation. New programs are being started all the time, and there are websites and gap year fairs that can help you sort through them. (There are many shorter options, too, but the last thing you should do is try to cram in lots of little ones—another iteration of the hyper-distractible, resume-stuffing mentality.) Cost, of course, is an issue, but parents should consider that money spent preparing their kids to get the most out of college will help them to avoid wasting the money they're already planning to spend on college. I was prevented from doing the gap year program that all my closest friends were going on because my father was worried that it would "knock me off my path." The result was a failed college experience and a much longer detour later. But you should also consider taking a gap year, without the "program" part. Too much structure is among the things you need to get away from—and so is the notion of being "productive." "Take a year on," a lot of these programs say: that is, keep enriching yourself in approved ways (go abroad and learn a language, etc.), ways that ultimately feed back into the achievement game. How about not enriching yourself for a change? How about doing something that you can't put on your resume (or brag about on Facebook)? How about just wandering, literally or

metaphorically, or holing up and reading somewhere? How about getting a lousy apartment with a bunch of friends (or a bunch of strangers who need another roommate) and supporting yourself with a part-time job? If nothing else, you'll probably meet the kinds of people that you'd have never had a chance to otherwise. How about practicing your moral imagination by dreaming something up that no one else, including me, has thought of? If you've already gotten into school, what exactly do you have to lose? Take time off during college. Take a leave of absence, for a semester or a year, when you hit the wall that Harry R. Lewis, the Harvard dean, described, and you wake up wondering what it's all been for. I can't tell you the number of students I knew who did that and returned to college strikingly different people—fuller, more independent, more present in their lives, and ready to cut through not only the academic but also the social bullshit. And the way things work today, you don't even necessarily need a leave of absence. Just take a summer off, for heaven's sake. Don't do an internship; don't do a fellowship; don't do anything to advance your career. Just go somewhere and breathe. You'll be amazed at what you discover. Yes, you'll be "behind" those other kids, the ones who didn't "waste" their summer, but what's the purpose of being at the right point, if you're on the wrong path? Take time off after college. Though now, of course, it's just called life. You're not taking it "off," because there is no "on" anymore, no thing that you have to return to. Graduation is the moment of maximum possibility as well as of maximum freedom. There are very few opportunities that are open to you then—graduate and professional programs, for instance—that won't be available a couple of years later. I think of the Amish institution of rumspringa—or at least, of the image it's acquired in popular culture, as a period when young people leave their community to taste a different way of life before deciding whether to return. The upper middle class is also a kind of sect, even if the dress code isn't quite as strict, and it will still be there if you feel like going back.

Remember that college is only the start. "Finding yourself" means finding who you are outside of the framework of school. Extracurriculars and even summer jobs and internships are not enough, because they aren't the real thing—the stakes are limited, the conditions artificially restricted, the range of options relatively small. Deciding to invent your life is not the answer; it is the beginning of a long series of questions, ones that you can only answer in the doing. "Passion finds you, you don't find it," a friend who teaches at Lewis & Clark told the incoming freshmen. "And it finds you only after a lot of hard work, most of which you will not be passionate about." Give yourself time. Your twenties, as Dustin Hoffman put it, are the "question-mark decade." While I still regret the time that I wasted in college and after, I've come to see that some form of waste, some form of wandering, was necessary and good. Waste is not waste, just as practicality is not practical, if it takes you somewhere that makes you unhappy. Out of the struggles and confusions of your postcollegiate years, unexpected new directions will arise. As the author Charles Wheelan has put it, "interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives." I recognize that the very plethora of choices available today is part of the difficulty many students feel in finding their direction. It's the "stem cell" problem, in my student's phrase, the idea that you can be anything. I remember that dilemma, too—the desire to remain forever on the threshold of adulthood, the grief at having to surrender your sense of limitless possibility—and I remember how I got past it: by recognizing that it wasn't finally a choice between one thing and everything, but one thing and nothing. If I didn't commit to something, I would never be anything. By the same token, however, you needn't think in terms of choosing once and for all. You do not set an ultimate destination, or if you do, you should be prepared to alter it. You tack a course, moving from point to point in the general direction that you think you should go. You gradually find out, as you work and study and reflect, as you meet new people and discover new places, what the world has to offer (a world that's always changing, too), and what it is that's inside you to give. "It's thinking too far down the road," a high school teacher said to me, "that

gets kids and parents in trouble." You don't need all the answers now; believing that you do, in fact, is part of the problem. The best advice I ever got, the thing that saved me, at the age of twenty-two, from becoming a lawyer, was this: Don't try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You're going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now. Inventing your life is not about becoming an artist or activist or entrepreneur or any other particular thing. It is simply about finding your way to work that's right for you, whatever that may be. Brooklyn can be as much of a salmon run, for a certain kind of kid, as investment banking. Science and engineering have suffered as much from the pre- professional mind-set as the arts and humanities have: gifted kids becoming Wall Street quants instead of physicists or dermatologists instead of geochemists. Work that might seem uninspired to others is perfectly valid as an occupational goal, as long as it is meaningful to you. Doing what your parents want is fine, as long as you have chosen it yourself. Inventing your life is not about believing that you can be whatever you want. That's another myth that kids are fed these days: that if you only work hard enough, there isn't anything you can't become. Yes, there is. I was never going to be a center fielder, a rock star, or a concert pianist, no matter how much I might have wanted to at various times in my life. There's such a thing as talent, too, not to mention athleticism, charisma, good looks, big brains, and everything else that you have to be born with. When Aristotle said that happiness comes from exercising your particular capacities, he meant that we each have some but not others. It's no use trying to become something that you aren't equipped for, and learning who you are means finding out, in part, what you're equipped for. Inventing your life is not about writing your own rules. Very few of us can get away with that, especially when we're young. Work is never perfect, to put it mildly. ("Work," said my friend at Lewis & Clark,

Seven Leadership The purpose of a college education, as everyone at least pretends to recognize, does not terminate with the individual. "Give back," our students are told. "Make a difference." "Leave the world a better place." But if there is one idea, above all, through which the concept of social responsibility is communicated at our most prestigious schools, it is "leadership." "Harvard is for leaders," goes the Cambridge cliché. When an admissions officer from Stanford visited her high school, a student told me, he explained that they were looking for applicants with "leadership potential." And so forth across the range of elite institutions. To be a high-achieving student now is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a leader among your peers and a future leader of society. "We are preparing young men and women to become leaders and change the world for the better," said the president of Princeton at a recent commencement, as if the two ideas were self-evidently equivalent. Yet what these institutions mean by leadership is very far from anything to do with social good—very far from what they used to mean, and certainly very far from what they ought to mean. What they mean is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm, or running a department at a leading hospital, or becoming a senator or chief executive or college president. Being in charge, in other words: climbing the greasy pole of whatever

hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. Winning an impressive title, so the school can brag about you on its website. I think of the wealthy donors who always seemed to be among the honorary degree recipients at Columbia each year—CEOs, mainly, with nothing in particular to recommend them, but invariably described as "business leaders." Leadership, in this conception, is essentially devoid of content. Students understand this, of course. The need to demonstrate that leadership potential on your college application translates to a scramble to become the head of something, anything—a team, a club, the student government—or better yet, to start something to become the head of. Never mind what you do, or what good it might do—the main thing is to get the title. You want to be a leader, don't you? I heard an anecdote about an interview at Harvard. "Harvard is for leaders," the interviewer said, "so what do you want to be the leader of?" "I don't know," the answer came back. "Something." That pretty much sums up the ethos. If Middlemarch assisted us with moral courage, another book can help us see the problem—in fact, the evil—of defining leadership as getting to the top: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the classic novel that became the model for Apocalypse Now. Captain Marlow (Martin Sheen) is simply Marlow in the book. Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) is Mr. Kurtz. The novel, which was published at the turn of the twentieth century, is not about Vietnam; it is about the Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam. Marlow—not a military officer but a merchant marine, a civilian ship's captain—is sent by the company that runs the country under charter from the Belgian crown to sail upriver, up the Congo River, to retrieve a manager who has gone mad and gone rogue, just as Colonel Kurtz does in the movie. The novel is about imperialism and colonialism and race relations and the darkness that lies in the human heart—that much is readily understood—but it is also about bureaucracy. "The Company," after all (that's how Conrad writes it, with a capital C), is just that: a company, with rules and procedures and ranks, and people in power and people jockeying for power, just like any other bureaucracy. Just like a bank or

museum, just like a school or university, just like Google or the State Department or the Brookings Institution. Just like the environment, in other words, in which today's young high achievers are likely to find themselves. Marlow proceeds upriver by stages. First he gets to the Outer Station. Kurtz is at the Inner Station. In between is the Central Station, where we get our most extensive picture of bureaucracy in action. Here is Marlow's description of the manager there: He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold [. . .] Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it, but I can't explain [. . .] He was a common trader, from his youth up employed in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a . . . a . . . faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. [. . .] He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him—why? [. . .] He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that's all. But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion made one pause. Note the adjectives: "commonplace," "ordinary," "usual," "common." There is nothing distinguished about this person. Around the fifteenth time I read that paragraph, I realized that it was a perfect description of the kind of person who prospers in a bureaucratic environment, because it finally struck me that it was a perfect description of a boss I used to have. She also had a smile—hers was like a shark—and she also had a gift for making you uneasy, as if you had been doing something wrong, only she wasn't going to tell you what it was. And like the manager—like so many people you encounter as you negotiate your way through

bureaucratic institutions—she had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or even for creating order, no particular learning or intelligence, almost no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going, and beyond that, as Marlow says, her position had come to her—why? That is the great question about bureaucracies. Why are the best people so often mired in the middle, while nonentities become the leaders? Because what gets you up the ladder isn't excellence; it is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Being smooth at cocktail parties, playing office politics, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it's time to stab him in the back. Getting along by going along. Not sticking your neck out for the sake of your principles—not having any principles. Neither believing in the system nor thinking to question it. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like Conrad's manager, you have nothing inside you at all. Of course our most prestigious colleges are good at training leaders. The system that they sit atop might just as well as have been designed to cultivate the necessary virtues. "What people usually mean by a leader now," Mark Edmundson remarks in reference to the way the word is thrown around on campuses today, "is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge. Leaders tend to be little adults, little grown-ups who don't challenge the big grown-ups who run the place. . . . When people say 'leaders' now, what they mean is gung ho 'followers.' " A graduate instructor I knew at Yale described the students she encountered there as "entitled mediocrities." When I used the phrase in a talk, a student asked me how the university can "be a place that trains leaders" (and note how automatic that language had become for him) "without also letting in entitled mediocrities to pay the bills?" The point, of course, is that the entitled mediocrities are the leaders, not a small subset of rich legacies. When a published version of the talk began to circulate online, a student later wrote, the phrase was the one "in which we recognized ourselves most immediately." Leadership had meaning once, among America's elite. The old New England prep schools, even the Ivy League of the Gilded Age—which

was also the age of students like the future presidents Roosevelt—were committed to instilling what they broadly referred to as "character." Leadership meant duty, honor, courage, toughness, graciousness, selflessness. These were aristocratic values, and they came with all the reprehensible aristocratic attitudes we're now so good at condescending to, but that doesn't make them any less commendable. Leadership had content, for those fortunate sons of the upper class; the concept made demands. It meant devotion to the benefit of others, not yourself. It called for allegiance to ideals, a commitment to the stewardship of institutions, a code of public service that was something more than a commencement afterthought. The country was being entrusted to their care, and they were expected to hand it on in better shape than they'd received it. Did many fall short? Of course. But the standard was planted, and others did not. I don't think it occurs to the people in charge of today's elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning (or really, any meaning), and if it did, I don't think they would know what to do with the thought. As for "character," the word arises only in connection with issues like cheating or date rape, as if it signified nothing more than not doing bad things. That these institutions are the linchpin of a system that is ceaselessly engaged in forming students' characters in all the ways I talked about in the first part of this book—that is, largely for the worse —is neither noticed nor discussed. Instead of training "leaders," how about training citizens? How about training thinkers—these are colleges, after all—individuals who question those in power rather than competing to become them? Better yet, how about recognizing that the best leaders are thinkers? I don't mean academics. I mean people who are capable of reflecting critically upon the organizations, and the society, to which they belong. Better still, who have the fortitude to try to put their criticisms into practice. People who possess what might be called resistant minds: who can ask questions instead of just answering them; who can figure out not only how to get things done, but whether they're worth doing in the first place; who can

formulate new directions, for a business or an industry or a country— new ways of doing things, new ways of looking at things—instead of simply putting themselves at the front of the herd that's heading toward the cliff. For what goes for inventing your life goes equally for leadership. The crucial elements are courage and imagination. The crucial task is to create a self: something there that, when the world pushes against you, is capable of pushing back. It takes a willingness to be unpopular, however: independent thinking does, and leadership certainly does. Yet kids today are raised not only in an atmosphere of constant affirmation, but also amid the relentless inculcation of prosocial behavior. We urge them to be team players. We teach them to be cheerful, flexible, and conciliatory, to always seek consensus and compromise. So intent have we become on avoiding painful feelings, both within ourselves and among ourselves, so committed to group harmony, so vigilant against offense, exclusion, confrontation, and other aspects of being human, that we've ended up with kids whose edges have been sanded off. This is what you have to fight within yourself. It's not enough to resist accepted ideas; you also have to resist the people who purvey them, which is pretty much everyone: your parents, your teachers, your peers, your friends. Your group, whatever that may mean to you—an identity group, a party, a church. If you're an environmentalist, it means the other environmentalists. If you're a libertarian, it means the other libertarians. Acting with a group does not mean thinking with a group. In every context, there are questions that you aren't supposed ask. The job of a leader, the job of a thinker, is to identify and ask them. This is where courage comes in. People don't like it when you challenge the consensus, especially when it's one that's so pervasive that they do not even realize that it exists. When you question it, you're forcing them to question it as well. You're drawing out the doubts they've worked so hard to keep in check. "The dissident impulse," says Andrew Delbanco, the "impulse to say no," has traditionally been a very powerful one in American culture. But it's hard to see much trace of it today—not even among the young, and certainly not among the young on selective campuses. Students now no longer seem to make the kind of fundamental demand upon society—

that is, for a different world—that would once have been seen as a matter of course. Let me quickly add that "now," in this respect, began about forty years ago, not long before I went off to college myself. The common wisdom goes that the idealism of the 1960s was an artifact of the postwar boom, killed off by the recession of the 1970s. So why has nothing changed since then, not even during the Clinton years, a time of genuine prosperity? I was there for the anti-apartheid protests at Columbia in 1985, near the height of the Reagan recovery. "We'll get B's!" our charismatic leader reassured us (and himself) as we sat outside on our blockade. In other words, don't worry, we'll get down to studying in time for finals, and even if our grades aren't perfect, they'll still be good enough. (Today he'd say, "We'll get A-minuses!") The October Revolution this was not. By 1987, Allan Bloom was remarking that students lacked not only a "discontent with the present," but even an awareness of alternatives. "There are none of the longings, romantic or otherwise, that used to make bourgeois society, or society in general, repugnant to the young." Bloom, a man of the right, was hardly nostalgic for the sixties. He knew, however, that rebellion as the mode of youth began not then but with modernity itself, the age of the Romantics and the American and French revolutions. To question everything, to melt down the world in thought and seek to reforge it anew, was seen, for the better part of two centuries, as the duty and privilege of being young. Great changes came of this, of which the rights revolutions were only the final chapter. The sixties were not the exception; we are. I think of those students at Pomona, the ones who told me that they feel such pressure to be happy. A regime that seeks to stamp out feelings of unhappiness and discontent: the situation sounds dystopian. Not only is unhappiness a normal part of life—and certainly a normal part of being young—it is indispensable for any kind of transformation: of the self, of institutions, of society. Change is driven by the tension between is and ought—a tension that you have to feel inside your soul. But perhaps it's no surprise that students at selective colleges feel so little distance from the system. After all, it's working rather well for them. In his famous essay "The Organization Kid," David Brooks remarked upon "the calm acceptance of established order that prevails among elite students

today." The piece was published in 2001, and while the intervening years may have troubled the calm, they've done nothing that I've seen to disrupt the acceptance. The responses to these criticisms, when I've made them in campus talks, have tended to go like this: What about Teach For America? What about Facebook? What about the Arab Spring, not to mention Occupy? What about the whole generational effort, increasingly conspicuous, to "make a difference," typically through nonprofit or socially responsible for- profit entrepreneurship? To take the final question first: yes, things do seem to be better than they were in the 1980s and '90s. Whether due to 9/11, climate change, the financial collapse, the Internet, or a combination of them all and more, Millennials appear to be more socially engaged than any generation since the heyday of the baby boom, and to be doing some genuine good in the world. More power to them. But that isn't the end of the story. "What about Facebook?" means "Doesn't the invention of Facebook prove that kids today, especially the kind of high achievers who attend elite universities, are changing the world for the better?" The question is symptomatic, for it betrays a confusion about the nature of social change. Facebook is only a tool. Whether it redounds, on the whole, for good or ill, is open to question and probably always will be. New technologies played a role in the Arab Spring (though one that may have been exaggerated by the Western media), but they are also playing a role, as is becoming ever more apparent, in allowing governments and corporations to surveil and control us. Tools are value-neutral. Revolutions in our tools—the kind that have been wrought by Facebook, Apple, Google, and so forth, the kind so many young people dream of making, as they work on their gadgets and apps—do not necessarily alter the structure of society, and certainly not necessarily for the better. But how many, in today's young generation, even think of altering the structure of society, or would want to if they did? "Work within the system" is the ethos. Forget about ideals and ideologies and big ideas, those scourges of the twentieth century. Just pick a problem and go to

work on it. The notion is technocratic, and bespeaks the kind of technocratic education students get today. No holistic thinking is involved, no speculation as to fundamental ends. The world, like a test, consists of a series of discrete problems, and all we need to do is get out there and solve them. Better clean technologies, improved access to drinking water, more effective schools (ace your classes, do your service projects, start a club or two): check, check, check. Tackling such issues is both valuable and admirable. But is it enough? That system that you want to work within: what if it is the problem? Can we fix our schools without addressing inequality? Can we help to lift developing countries out of poverty without reforming global trade? Can we deal with climate change by altering consumer behavior, or is the source of our environmental crisis not consumerism itself? And underneath these questions, what's our vision of the world toward which we're working in the first place? Is it just a slightly better version of the one we have today? What values are we operating from, before we get to the solutions that express them? You can banish talk of ideologies and governing ideas, but not the things themselves. The only question is whether you are conscious of your own. If not, you've probably just adopted those that happen to be fashionable now, and you almost certainly aren't aware of how they shape the way you think and act. The spirit of do-it-yourself social engagement also goes along with a withdrawal from politics, inherently a sphere of conflict as well as of large institutions (another thing Millennials often say they can't abide). A Stanford professor told me about a couple of internships that were available to his students not long ago. One, at a small environmental nonprofit in the East Bay, drew several hundred applications. The other, at the office of the Speaker of the California State Assembly—the second-most-powerful person in the twelfth-largest economy on the planet—drew three. Not three hundred: three. I know that the idea is to begin at the edges and work your way in toward the center, but as long as there are politicians standing at the center with their arms folded, what happens at the edges will stay at the edges. We can start all the organic farms we want, but we couldn't stop Congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable. Local, small-scale change is great, but against the immense power of coordinated wealth—the lobbyists, the super

PACs, the billionaires—the start-up model does not amount to very much. You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Withdrawing from it doesn't make it go away. Millennials did not invent the culture of creative, socially engaged entrepreneurship, which has been around for at least a couple of decades. So think about the way that things have changed over the last twenty years. Think about the way they've changed in terms of technology and food, the areas that that culture cares about the most. Smartphones, iPads, farmers' markets, sustainable agriculture—great, right? (Great for those who can afford them, anyway.) Now think about the way they've changed in terms of politics and economics, the things with which that culture refuses to dirty its hands. The Iraq War, Citizens United, the financial crisis, ever-widening inequality. That doesn't look to me like such a deal. While the "creative class" is busy playing with its toys, the world is circling the drain. The suspicion arises that the small-scale/techie/entrepreneurial model represents the expression not of a social philosophy (especially since Millennials don't like philosophies), but of the desire for a certain kind of lifestyle. Who doesn't want to be autonomous? Who doesn't want to live somewhere cool? Who doesn't want the chance to make it big? But those are some of the things that you might have to surrender for the sake of engaging in genuine change. Politics is an ugly, incremental war, and most of those involved in it are down there in the trenches. Plenty of elite college graduates go to Washington to take up policy positions. The reason that so few attempt elective office, I was told by one of the rarities who has (he is now the mayor of a small midwestern city), is that it means going home, probably somewhere deeply unhip, and working your way up from the bottom. I've noticed something similar when it comes to service. Why is it that people feel the need to go to places like Guatemala to do their projects of rescue or documentation, instead of Milwaukee or Arkansas? Is it because it's fun to visit poor people in other countries, but not so fun at home? When students do stay in the States, why is it that so many of them seem to head for New Orleans? Perhaps it's no surprise, when kids are trained to think of service as something they are ultimately doing for themselves—that is, for their resumes. "Do well by doing good," goes the

slogan. How about just doing good? Why is that an insufficient goal? "Service" is a lot like "leadership," and in fact the two are far too tangled up. Kids want to save the world, a Brown professor told me, but their idea of doing so invariably involves some form of getting to the top. The problem with "service" begins with the concept itself, or at least what it's become. The word is rooted in the Bible. Serve God, the Children of Israel are told, not Pharaoh. Serve God, Christ says, not Caesar. That is who you're supposed to be serving with "service." It's about humility, not condescension. But now we understand the concept in a very different way. "Giving back," "giving to others": this is the language of charity, enforcing ideas of debtorship, disempowerment, hierarchy, and social relations as economic exchange. It is us versus them, rich versus poor, white versus black and brown, the server and the served. It isn't even noblesse oblige, because there's no "oblige," no concept of obligation or social duty. "Service" is a flock of middle-class messiahs, descending in all their virtue, with a great deal of self- satisfaction, every once in a while, when they remember to think about it, upon the miserable and helpless. Like "leadership," it is a form of self- aggrandizement. So what is the alternative? Not charity, but justice. Not "concern," but outrage. Not giving 5 percent, but changing 100 percent. Not "the superficial motions of volunteerism," as the writer and activist Tammy Kim has put it, not the palliation of social violence, but solidarity and mutual identification and working together toward a larger good that embraces us all. No wonder students prefer Guatemala to Milwaukee. Confronting injustice in your own society tends to be a lot more fraught, especially if it forces you to acknowledge the ways that you're complicit in it. So what about Teach For America, or the Arab Spring, or Occupy? Well, what about them? Did you have anything to do with them? This is not about some moral balance sheet—society's, or Millennials', or the Ivy League's. The fact that TFA was founded by a Princeton graduate in 1991 does not let you, or Princeton, off the hook (quite apart from the fact that TFA is a sterling example of service both as resume-building and as ruling-class messianism). The Arab Spring happened on the other side of the world (and petered out, in any case, as the liberal, tech-

savvy young were outmaneuvered by people who knew how to organize, and who were driven by a big idea). As for Occupy (which also doesn't look so great in retrospect), the movement was notably weak on selective campuses, where students tend to find themselves on the bright side of social inequality, and where people believe, as we know, in working within the system. Doing a little service in college, or once a year on Martin Luther King Day, does not acquit you of moral responsibility— and talking about the service that somebody else did certainly does not. I'm not suggesting that students should take to the streets, or that we ought to reenact the sixties. Every person needs to find their own path, when it comes to working for a better world, and so does every generation. I'm suggesting that the first thing that you need to do—the thing that college ought to teach you to do—is think. The critic Lionel Trilling quotes the title of a colleague's essay: "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent." The point is not to have a high IQ. The point is to use it. Intelligence is not an aptitude. It's an activity—and an ethical activity, to boot. We don't need students to be radicals; we only need them to be skeptical. "Skeptical" comes from a word that means "to look." A skeptic is someone who bothers to look. What good does it do if you make it to the top, if by the time you get there you are just another "leader"— another opportunist, another genial conformist, another mediocrity? When I talked about George Eliot's rebellion, I said that she believed that love was more important than a legal contract. That must have sounded pretty unremarkable. Who does not believe that now? But there's a reason that we do, and the reason is George Eliot. Not her alone, of course, but her and a few others like her—a very few, at first. There is technological progress, whose heroes are people like Edison or Jobs, and then there is social progress. The final line of Middlemarch is this: "that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." We are freer and happier (at least in certain ways) because others have come before us and were willing to run the kinds of risks George Eliot did. It is through such acts of imagination and

courage that society makes its moral advances: whether they are public and collective acts, like the civil rights movement—an enormous demonstration both of imagination, the idea that things can be different, and of courage, the will to make them so—or private ones, the kind that seep into the social bloodstream and slowly change its chemistry. Emerson insisted that we each must win our independence by mounting a private revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of existing mental structures. Independence, revolution, tyranny, freedom: concepts that are essential to America's collective history, as well. Emerson took the national act as exemplary for the individual life. America's revolution was also an intellectual one. It also overthrew existing modes of thought, existing ideas about the way the world can look. Franklin, Adams, Paine, Jefferson, Madison: America was founded by intellectuals, by thinkers, by readers—by people who risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in order to build a better society by speaking truth to power. Independence, impoliteness, disagreement, dissent: these values are encoded in our national genetics. We have always seen our nation as a work in progress. We are always striving to create a more perfect union. So college is indeed about more than just you. If you are going to be the leader that your education is supposedly preparing you to become, then you need to question the very terms of that education itself. Instead of worrying so much about building your resume, you need to start working on building your mind.