PART 4 Society
Eleven Welcome to the Club I've been speaking so far about what our system of elite education does to the people who go through it. Now we need to talk about what it's doing to the country as a whole. What it's doing, simply put, is reproducing the class system, just as it did in the bad old days of the Big Three a century ago. It is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is as isolated from the society that it's supposed to lead—and even more smug about its right to its position—as the WASP aristocracy itself. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of students at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. By 2006 (albeit in a somewhat smaller sample), it was 67 percent. Only 15 percent came from bottom half that year; a slightly older study put the share of the bottom quarter at all of 3 percent. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal is its student body apt to be; Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, writes Jerome Karabel, "are still among the least economically diverse of the nation's major research universities." Public institutions, though, are not much better than the privates. As of 2004, 40 percent of students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes over $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier. In the words of yet another study from the same year, "American higher education is more
socioeconomically stratified today than at any time during the past three decades." The decade since, it's safe to say, has only made the situation worse. The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Tutors, test prep, and other ways of rigging the system are only the end of the process. Wealthy families, by pouring resources into their educational development, start buying their children's way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel ("enrichment" programs, to use the all-too- perfect word)—most important, of course, private school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude; what it actually measures is parental income, with which it tracks quite closely, and even more, parental wealth, with which it tracks more closely still. The gap in academic skills between high- and low-income students has increased by about 40 percent over the last thirty years. The gap in college completion has grown even more—about 50 percent since the late 1980s. Less than half of high-scoring students from low-income families even enroll at four-year schools. (Stop and think about that for a minute.) As Paul Krugman put it, "smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree." The latter, said a former student—she was talking about the kids at her fancy private high school, every one of whom, even the biggest druggies and fuckups, are now doing fine—are "too rich to fail." It is no coincidence that income inequality is higher than it's been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is now lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Colleges are not primarily to blame, but their policies do little to counteract these trends and a very great deal to make them worse. It's true that elite schools, especially the richest, have reached out more in recent years to low- and middle-income students. In 2007, Harvard made tuition free for families earning less than $60,000 and capped it at 10 percent of income for those earning up to $180,000 (which gives you an idea of
what the middle class looks like from Cambridge). The percentage of kids on financial aid has gone up at a lot of the most selective schools, as has the portion of expenses covered by the average grant. Still, 40 percent of kids at Harvard, and even more at comparable schools, are continuing to pay full fare. An income of $180,000 puts you in the 94th percentile of households, which means that more than 40 percent of Harvard students come from the top 6 percent—maybe quite a bit more, since financial aid awards are not confined to those below the $180,000 threshold. Economic inequality leads to educational inequality, which leads to an applicant pool that is heavily skewed toward the rich. But it isn't simply that there aren't more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students' economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can't afford to, and it's not even clear that they'd want to. They need a critical mass of full payers, they need to tend to their donor base, and they need to serve their primary constituency, which is not the nation so much as the nation's—and increasingly, the world's—upper and upper middle classes: the classes from which their alumni come, to which their administrators belong, and for which their graduates are destined. One study found that a hundred high schools—about 0.3 percent of the nationwide total—account for 22 percent of students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Of those hundred, all but six are private. The "feeder" system is alive and well. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, selective schools give no admissions advantage to lower-income students, but they do give quite an advantage to other groups, most of whom are drawn disproportionately from the upper end of the income scale. In The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges (a book I cannot read without wanting to vomit continuously), Daniel Golden describes these categories in detail: the children of donors, potential donors, and celebrities; faculty brats; and by far the largest, athletes and legacies, each of whom account for 10–25 percent of the typical student body at selective schools. Legacies enjoy an average admissions advantage of 24 percent—
which means that all other things being equal, their chances of getting in are that much greater—athletes, an advantage of 48 percent. The former category is a way of reproducing privilege more or less by definition, but one should not imagine that the latter is a way of counteracting it. Elite colleges typically field teams in more than two dozen sports; football and basketball are swamped, in the aggregate, by upper-class pursuits like squash, fencing, golf, crew, sailing, skiing, tennis, and polo. Title IX, Golden says, which mandates gender parity in college athletics, has basically become an affirmative action program for rich girls. "At least one-third of the students at elite universities, and at least half at liberal arts colleges," he writes, "are flagged for preferential treatment in the admissions process." And that, don't forget, is on top of the enormous academic advantages that affluent children already enjoy. It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, places where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich, and to make sure that they stay rich— boarding schools, basically, for the 18–22-year-old set. Don't we all already know this? They aren't called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all. Doesn't everybody have an equal chance? The sign of the system's alleged fairness, its break from the exclusionary past, is the set of policies that travel under the banner of "diversity." And that diversity does indeed represent nothing less than a social revolution. Princeton, which didn't even admit its first woman graduate student until 1961—a year in which a grand total of one (no doubt very lonely) African-American matriculated at its college—is now half female and only half white. But diversity of sex and race has become a cover, even an alibi, for increasing economic resegregation. Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the 1960s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy. The truth is that the meritocracy was never more than partial. Remember that Kingman Brewster's reforms at Yale were immediately challenged by the school's alumni,
who forced him to give way with respect, precisely, to athletes and legacies. (That the children of major donors would retain the largest advantage of all was never in question.) But now, even the essential meritocratic virtue of academic promise, as signified by the SAT and other criteria, has become a vehicle for the reproduction of privilege. Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary, and the education system is that way. That is largely what "diversity" amounts to now. Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri, another one from Pakistan, or one plays the cello and the other one lacrosse— never mind that all of them have parents who are bankers or doctors. They aren't meeting "all kinds of people," as they like to say. They're meeting the same kind of people; they just happen to come from all kinds of places. They are "aware of themselves as an academic elite," as a former student wrote, "but not as a social (or economic) one." That doesn't mean there aren't a few exceptions—partly since these schools are mindful of the need to justify their tax exemptions, partly since elites are always looking to refresh themselves with a little bit of new blood—but that is all they are. In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies (even more than Asians, who seem to be suffering a quota system that is similar to the one imposed on Jews a century ago) are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all. The only way to think these places are diverse is if that's all you've ever seen. Our educational system, it's been suggested, is what Americans developed in lieu of a European-style social welfare state to mitigate inequality. Instead of "handouts," opportunity. And once upon a time, it worked as advertised. Both the unprecedented expansion of public higher education and the equally unprecedented opening of access to the private sort were instrumental in creating a mass middle class, and a new upper and upper middle class, in the decades after World War II.
But now instead of fighting inequality, the system has been captured by it. The college admissions process, "complicated, publicly palatable, and elaborately costly," writes Mitchell L. Stevens in Creating a Class, is "the preponderant means of laundering privilege in contemporary American society." (The book, whose title alone should win a prize, is an in-depth account of the admissions process at a selective liberal arts college.) Despite the oceans of anxiety it generates, he adds, the ordeal endured by upper-middle-class seventeen-year-olds is "essentially ceremonial." What matters isn't how you do, but that you've been permitted to participate at all. The winners go to Brown; the losers go to Brandeis; the vast majority of kids, who never had a chance to play, go to Underfunded State University, or Budget Gulch Community College, or nowhere at all. As for programs like affirmative action or scholarship support, writes Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble with Diversity, their actual purpose is to legitimate the system for those to whom they don't apply. "The function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just buy your way into Harvard." American colleges and universities, he writes, are "propaganda machines" for the class structure. If I were asked to give the freshman convocation speech at an elite college or university, those are the kinds of things I would say. You may be smart, I'd tell the students, you may be hardworking, but what you mainly are is very lucky. You outcompeted the kid who sat next to you at Stuyvesant or Harvard-Westlake, but 90 percent of your peers were excluded from the race before it even started. What actually gets said on such occasions is exactly the reverse. Today's incoming freshmen, writes Andrew Delbanco, are invariably welcomed by the college president "with some version of the standard accolade: 'You are the most extraordinary class ever to walk through our gates.' " That is no exaggeration. A former student put it this way in an essay several years ago:
I would wager that most students in Yale's class of 2012 could give this year's admissions rate within a percentage point. . . . They certainly have no excuse for not knowing. I recall that everyone from President Levin to the freshman counselors mentioned my class's acceptance rate during orientation week—9.9%, a record- breaker at the time. The implication of the statistic was clear: of all classes ever admitted to Yale, yours is the worthiest. Nor is that kind of language confined to undergraduate institutions, or to the United States. I've heard similar reports from people at the Kennedy School, Wharton, Princeton, the University of Toronto (one of the top-ranked schools in Canada), and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (one of the top-ranked schools in Latin America). An undergraduate wrote this in the Harvard Crimson: Even before students uncap their pens for their first lecture; they are force-fed more praise than they know what to do with. . . . Depressingly, this type of proverbial back-patting makes it past ceremonious occasions like Commencement, filtering into the daily life of the classroom. . . . Just this week [less than a month into the semester], a professor told everyone in a fairly large class that we are already in the 99.9th percentile of people in the world who understand our specific area of content. It wasn't always thus. In the age of the WASP aristocracy, students heard a very different message. A former senior colleague wrote me as follows: What was good about the bad old days was Yale's skeptical attitude towards its students. In the first weeks of September 1957, during some assembly or other, I remember the Dean of Yale College telling us that the pool of applicants from which we had been drawn was so large and so good that Yale could have recruited a class every bit as qualified as ours without offering admission to a single one of us. He went on to say that it was the duty of each of us over the next four years to prove that Yale had made the right choice by picking
us instead of giving our place to someone else. I returned to Yale as a faculty member in 1969, and by then the change had already taken place. By then deans were telling each entering class that they were the most wonderful set of human beings who had ever entered Yale, and how wonderful it was for Yale that they had decided to attend. What had happened, of course, was the shift to meritocracy. Schools have lots of reasons for stroking their students' egos. It makes for happy customers. It primes the donation pump. Along with all the ceremonies of belonging—the convocations and initiations and commencements, the branded swag of sweatshirts and window stickers, the "great [your school's name here] traditions," the tribal bonding of athletic rivalry, the whole cultus of alma materism—it helps to build the loyalty the institutions will be milking for the balance of their students' lives. But mainly they do it because they believe it. The flattery in question is essentially reflexive: you're great because we're great. (One of my students has written of "Yale's boundless appetite for self-celebration.") Administrators and professors, after all, are products of the meritocracy themselves, and their presence at an elite institution is a never-ending source of self-delight. Their sense of identity—of the world, of society, of justice—is built upon the same equation as their students': you're here because you earned it, and you earned it because you're the best. Such thinking, of course, is the essence of the elite mentality, the "hot shit" part of the dynamic. It's the pact that you sign up for when you learn to see yourself in terms of scores and grades. The problem isn't that those measures are imperfect (though they are). The problem is that students are incessantly encouraged to believe that academic excellence is excellence, full stop, that better at school means simply better—better morally, better metaphysically, higher on some absolute scale of human value. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in your intellect or achievement. There is something wrong with the smugness and self- congratulations that elite schools connive at from the moment that the fat envelopes arrive in the mail. The message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every article in the student paper, every one of
those old-school traditions. The message is, you have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: you deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people. When I wrote my original article about the disadvantages of an elite education, I started with a story about my plumber. I was thirty-five; it was the first time I had called a tradesman as a homeowner. What I discovered that day, as he stood there in the kitchen preparing to get down to work, was that I had no idea how to speak to him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn't succeed in engaging him in a couple of minutes of small talk. Fourteen years of higher education, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I didn't know what to say to the man who was standing in my own house. A lot of readers objected to the story as a portrait of the elite predicament—to the idea, as I said, that one disadvantage of an elite education is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren't exactly like you, for the simple reason that you never meet any. They don't have trouble talking to their plumbers, they insisted. Well, maybe not; maybe I was unusually handicapped in that respect. I not only grew up in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood; I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community and attended parochial schools for most of my childhood. But I also know that people do not often see themselves too clearly when it comes to things like this—to their class position and how it's cut them off from those around them. You may not be quite as down with the regular folks as you like to believe. I know as well that the way I was raised, religion aside, is, if anything, increasingly common. Bill Bishop has written about "the big sort": our
ongoing process of self-segregation by mind-set and lifestyle—which really means, by economic status. The stalling of social mobility and migration of the affluent to upscale enclaves, and of their children to private schools or might-as-well-be-private public ones, ensure that the isolation of the upper classes starts not in college, but at birth. The kind of narrow, sheltered upbringing I experienced is now, for the kids who make it to the most selective institutions, pretty much the norm. They aren't meeting any "plumbers," either. But the problem isn't only isolation. The logic of "better" is perfectly clear. An elite education doesn't simply fail to teach you how to talk to people who are genuinely different than you; it tells you that you shouldn't even bother. Forget about class. The message is that anyone who didn't go to a prestigious school is not worth wasting time with, regardless of their class. You are "the best and the brightest," as these places love to say, and everybody else is, well, something else: less good, less bright, and in any case, beneath you. "One friend of mine recalled taking the T into Boston," a Harvard student wrote me, "and, while looking at the other passengers, feeling that these people, who could never hope to be her intellectual equals, simply didn't exist in the way that a member of the Harvard community did." None of this is inconsistent either with the notion of service or with the crippling insecurity that also comes with the elite mentality. In fact, it is perfectly consistent with both. The whole idea of "service," as embodied in organizations like Teach For America and among the elite in general, is inherently condescending. You do for others—those poor, unfortunate others—what you don't think they can do for themselves. You swoop down and rescue them with your awesome wisdom and virtue. You do acknowledge their existence, but in a fashion that maintains your sense of superiority—indeed, that reinforces it. As for insecurity, it is just the other half, the piece-of-shit component, of the elite dynamic. Contempt, says Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child (in a section called "The Loneliness of the Contemptuous"), is a defense against feelings of inadequacy: As long as we despise the other person and overvalue our own achievements ("he can't do what I can do"), we do not have to
mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement. Nevertheless, if we avoid this mourning it means that we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, and clever. Remember Amy Chua, how necessary "losers" were to her psychic equilibrium. "Losers" embody the rejected parts of the self, the fate that you secretly dread. Their presence—if only their imaginative presence— is a constant salve, a mental resource you can always draw upon to restore those fragile, precious feelings of hot-shitness. That is why the entitlement of meritocrats is so distant from the genuine self-confidence of the old aristocracy. Entitlement is always anxious, always selfish, always shadowed by the fear of failure. Some years ago, the social scientist Jean Anyon published an article titled "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." Surveying five New Jersey elementary schools, she concluded that the ways in which students are taught, even more than what they are taught, prepare them to occupy their respective class positions. Working-class kids are heavily disciplined and instructed by rote; the sons and daughters of professionals get creativity and self-expression; the children of the business class are taught authority, mastery, and self-control. College isn't any different. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper reaches of society; it trains you for the life that you'll be leading once you get there. "When Yale offers free fellowships to study in China or subsidizes a trip to New York to catch a Broadway show," a former student wrote, "it bills these luxuries as instruction in how to be broad-minded and cultured. The truth is that they are, more than anything else, instruction in how to be wealthy." I didn't grasp this principle until I began to compare my experience, and even more, my students' experience, with that of a friend who went to Cleveland State. My friend had once received a D for the semester— she'd been running an A in the class—because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand her final paper in an hour late. That
may be an extreme example, but it's one that is unthinkable at schools like Yale. There are due dates and attendance requirements at elite colleges, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. Kids at prestigious schools, in other words, receive an endless string of second chances. Just as unthinkably, my friend had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State are not supported by a platoon of advisors and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, or pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy, not handed them in gift-wrapped packages by smiling clerks. They have little opportunity for the kinds of contacts that I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the sorts of special funds that prestigious schools dispense in such profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my old department gives out literally dozens of cash prizes for everything from senior theses down to freshman essays. In 2009, those prizes came to well over one hundred thousand dollars—in one department alone. Students at schools like Cleveland State also don't get A-minuses just for doing the work. The most egregious thing about grade inflation is how uneven it has been. As of the 1950s, the average GPA was comparable at public and private institutions, about a 2.5. Then the numbers began to diverge. By 2007, the average grade had risen to a 3.01 at public schools, but at private schools it had risen to a 3.30, and at highly selective private schools, a 3.43. Only in the Ivy League and places like it does the A-minus constitute a sort of default setting, the point from which one either rises or sinks. It's not a grade so much as a metaphor, the emblem of entitled mediocrity. It means, don't worry, we'll take care of you. Students at places like Cleveland State—and I've confirmed these observations with people who have worked at comparable schools—are being trained to occupy positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or other. They're being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little
support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. For students at prestigious schools, it is exactly the reverse: connections, freebies, privileges, access. And one more thing: impunity. Not only is the meritocracy imperfect to begin with; it only functions up to a point. Getting through the door is very difficult, but once you're in, there's almost nothing you can do to get yourself kicked out. Not the worst academic failure, not the most egregious act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I have heard of all three—is sufficient to get you expelled. Once you've been admitted to the club, the feeling seems to be, you've got a God-given right to stay in the club. This isn't just the self-protection of the old boys' network, updated to include the other sex. It is actually much worse. Here is my former colleague again, the one who got to Yale in 1957: The attitude of the administration towards us was backed by an uncorrupted grading system. If you screwed up in a course, you got the equivalent of an F, and if you got very many of them, you were out. Roughly 10–15% of every class in that era left Yale without a degree. It was not quite "look at the man to the left of you and look at the man to your right, in four years only two of you will still be here," but it had that flavor. In short, we lived in a world where privilege was accompanied by responsibility. I would submit that Yale was right to challenge us this way, and that no 18-year-old should ever be encouraged to think that he or she has already got it made. But that was then. That Harvard student who was studying self- efficacy also spoke to me about the "yes culture" she experienced at college. The sense that Harvard instilled that you were capable of doing anything, she said, was rooted in the fact that the school said "yes" to whatever you wanted. If you hoped to study, say, in China for a year, the money was there; all you had to do was raise your hand. I didn't mention that there might be some connection there to grade inflation, but I did let her know that what she had said was more or less the definition of entitlement. We're not entitled, she said; we work hard.
Yes, I said, but working hard is not enough. Reward should go to achievement, not simply effort or desire. She countered that she had a friend who applied for the Rhodes despite the fact that you're supposed to need at least a 3.9 and he had only had a 3.6, and she thought that that was great. I said, a kid who has a 3.6 doesn't deserve to get a Rhodes. She thought that was elitist: someone with a 3.6 should have a shot at the Rhodes, if they wanted it badly enough. In other words, no limits ever. We're not entitled, we work hard—that's the rationale one often hears. And you may indeed have worked much harder than the kids around you, but what about the ones you couldn't see? Do you really think that none of them worked hard? What about the kid at the public school a couple of towns over, who put in just as many hours every week, only twenty-five of them were at a Denny's? The way things go at this point, being treated fairly is itself a form of privilege. Most Americans work hard without receiving the rewards they've earned. That, in fact, is pretty much what social inequality involves today. A former community college student and Marine combat veteran, later a student at Stanford, had this to say about the bubble that surrounds the bulk of kids who end up at prestigious schools: It's useful to think of Stanford students (and their peers around the country and world) as flowers in a garden. Many tend them— parents, counselors, test prep specialists, teachers, professors, friends—and they generally bloom in response to such careful cultivation. These flowers, while beautiful, are young and fragile and must be sheltered from the elements. Thank goodness for the constant gardening. I am a weed in their garden, masquerading as a flower. I can't be told stories about the world outside the garden by the gardeners because I've been further and seen more than any of them. I am calloused and don't respond to the regimen of organic diet, self- congratulatory volunteer work, and politically correct pillow talk that grows so many other young leaders of the free world. I grew my roots slowly, painfully, in the dry rocky soil of the real world.
I don't mean to romanticize such a life, only say that the hardier plants grow to be much stronger than is possible in the garden. But why leave the vibrant colors, constant distractions, and beautifully simple garden for a morally ambiguous (even dangerous) outside world? Here the patterns of life are essentially known: you do A, you get B. But what if the world didn't help ensure B followed from A? What would our poor flower do then? Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don't have a satisfying answer, short of telling you to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of "service," and not in the spirit of "making an effort," either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff, say, and offering to buy them a cup of coffee, as somebody suggested in rebuttal to my article, so you can "get to know them." The only way to treat somebody as an equal is to realize that that's exactly what they are. Instead of service, how about service work? That'll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables yourself, so you can see how hard it is, not only physically but mentally? You really aren't as smart as everyone's been telling you; you're only smarter in a certain way, and only than your peers in the propertied class. There are smart people who do not go to a prestigious college, or to any college, and often precisely for reasons of class. There are smart people who are not "smart." You've heard that there are different forms of intelligence? Now go and find it out through actual experience. A former student who got a job at a community college after graduation had this to report about the people who went there: "The students are incredibly diverse in all possible ways, some of them very obviously in need of help and others who make me feel young, coarse, and just plain stupid." The "best" are the brightest only in a narrow sense. I know it's hard to hear these things as a privileged young person. It was very hard for me to hear them, when the knowledge started to be thrust upon me. It's not your fault you grew up affluent and sheltered.
But now you need to take responsibility for it. You can start by recognizing that you aren't, in fact, more valuable than other people, no matter what you've always heard. Your pain does not hurt more. Your soul does not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say that God does not love you more. And the social implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an earlier elite, grabbing everything you can isn't any more virtuous when you do it with the power of your brains than it is when you do it with the power of your fists. "Work must always be," he said, "and captains of work must always be," but "there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it." Yet that is exactly what's happening now, to an extent we haven't seen in more than eighty years: our "leaders," the elite, who are supposed to work for the greater good, enrich themselves at everyone else's expense and justify their actions with the notion that they're "better." Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal, but the real problem is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else. The real problem, once again, is the system itself. How, at last, to change it is the subject of my final chapter.
Twelve The Self-Overcoming of the Hereditary Meritocracy "The best and the brightest": what a perfect irony that hoary old cliché entails. Nobody apparently remembers that the phrase originated as the rancidly sarcastic title of a book about the architects of the Vietnam War —the so-called "whiz kids" whose arrogance and overconfidence enmeshed us in a quagmire. The best and the brightest, indeed: Has there ever been a leadership class more pleased with itself than our own? Has there ever been another one whose failure is more obvious? The contemporary meritocracy, which in all its glory is presiding over an era of unprecedented national decline, is an exact reflection of the educational system that is charged with reproducing it. The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to begin to plot our exit to another form of leadership, another kind of society, altogether. The meritocracy purports, like every ruling class, to act for the good of all. Its ethos is in fact, by definition, one of self-advancement: not duty or responsibility, not character or even leadership, but individual aggrandizement, a single-minded focus on the self and its success. And yet the meritocracy believes, again by definition, in its own superior virtue. That's what "merit" means, after all. The word has moral connotations that are absent from the ones we might imagine in its place
—"intelligence" or "aptitude," even "excellence" or "achievement." The spiritual overtones it carried in the Middle Ages echo in our use of it today. "Meritocracy": we are ruled by a kind of elect. Every leadership class evolves an ideology that justifies its own position. The WASPs had social Darwinism, the idea that the Nordic races governed the world by virtue of having prevailed in the struggle for survival. Now we have people like Charles Murray, in The Bell Curve, telling us about the "cognitive elite" and the heritability of intelligence. And if some reject what seems like social Darwinism in a new guise, they silently substitute effort for aptitude, diligence for genetic endowment. Like my Harvard student, they tell themselves that they deserve their status because they (unlike everybody else, apparently) work hard. Either way, the poor are poor because they are inferior. The affluent and powerful have "merit." Our most recent presidential race afforded an extended lesson in the elite mentality in the person of the Republican nominee. I don't mean only his infamous remark about the 47 percent. Equally revealing was the candidate's suggestion about the unemployment crisis: that recent graduates should borrow money from their parents to start a business. "In the old days," the novelist Julian Barnes has a character reflect, "there had been tribes wandering around who believed they were the only tribe on earth, and whose belief was not shaken by the appearance of other tribes. People who were called successes reminded Gregory of these tribes." For those like Mitt Romney, on some emotional level, those who are not like Mitt Romney, as that other Harvard student felt about the people on the T, simply don't exist. They know they're out there, but they can't imagine what their lives are like, and despite the fact that they're allowed to make decisions that affect them deeply, they aren't much interested in trying. They suffer, yes, from Plumber's Syndrome, as we might refer to it, or in a friend's unfortunate but pungent phrase, Ivy Retardation. And if Romney seems like an extreme example of our out-of-touch elite, consider the two Democratic nominees who preceded our current president, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly unable to communicate with the larger electorate. In fact, consider our current president—a graduate of Honolulu's prestigious Punahou School as well as of Columbia and
Harvard Law—who despite his race, his oratorical skills, and his years as a community organizer, is equally incapable of making an emotional connection with the people he calls "folks." As for his predecessor, that apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, he is another perfect product of the system we've evolved to train our leaders. Entitled mediocrity was indeed the operating principle of his entire administration, but as the last dozen years or more have demonstrated on a daily basis, it is now the operating principle of our leadership class as a whole. Not only are our institutions comprehensively failing (George Packer has written about the Iraq War as a stress test that revealed the weakness of "the executive and legislative branches, the military, the intelligence world, the for-profits, the nonprofits, the media"; in Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes refers to the last ten years more broadly as the "fail decade"), but no one, as we know, is being held responsible. For the elite, there is always another extension: a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab. The fat salaries awarded to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-minus. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which the head of Enron, Kenneth Lay, received the notion that he should be punished for his crimes will understand the sense of impunity under which our leaders now conduct themselves. But you don't need to remember Kenneth Lay, because the whole tragic farce has been playing out again, in massive, Technicolor detail, on Wall Street. George W. Bush, however, did get one thing right: his diagnosis of his own predecessor and, if only inadvertently, of the type to which he belongs. "Our current president," said Bush of Bill Clinton in his first convention speech, "embodied the potential of a generation. So many talents. So much charm. Such great skill. But, in the end, to what end? So much promise, to no great purpose." "Purpose" is a word we've seen before. If Bush was feckless privilege personified, Clinton epitomized the unfocused ambition that the system cultivates so well. Every presidential candidate—everyone who rises high in any field—will be enormously ambitious of necessity. In Clinton's case, as in so many others', it was painfully clear that that is all he was. He knew what he wanted, but he had no idea why. I also think of the kind of figures with which the last several
administrations, as well as our institutions in general, have been so abundantly stocked: people like Condoleezza Rice, that perfect bureaucratic cipher, or Elena Kagan, who made it all the way to the Supreme Court without depositing a paper trail—resume jockeys devoid of discernible passion carefully maneuvering their way to the top. Is it any wonder that our country has itself appeared to lose all sense of purpose, when our leaders have none of their own? Once, we dreamed of eradicating poverty, winning the Cold War, reaching the moon, ensuring racial justice, creating a more equitable society. Now—what? What large national project are we pursuing, or even talking of pursuing? So much freedom. So much wealth and power. Such technological sophistication. But in the end, to what end? Brilliant, gifted, energetic, yes, but also anxious, greedy, bland, and risk-averse, with no courage and no vision—that is our elite today. The meritocracy is also a technocracy. It can solve the problems that you put in front of it, but it cannot tell you whether they're the right ones to be working on. It is trained to operate within the system, never to imagine that we might create a better one. It is oblivious to beliefs, values, and principles—the things the humanities teach you to think about—because it takes them so much for granted that it ceases to remember they exist. It is bereft of intellectual resources more nutritious than today's op-ed or yesterday's position paper. It is the rule of experts, or in the words of Saul Bellow, "high-IQ morons"—people lacking in "a wider thoughtfulness." We do need experts, to be sure, but we also need them not to be in charge. And here I fear I have to quote another Bush, the elder one. His 1988 opponent, Michael Dukakis (Swarthmore, Harvard Law), the first of the meritocratic major-party presidential nominees, had famously announced, in his own convention address, that "this election isn't about ideology; it's about competence"—the technocrat's creed in a nutshell. To which the first George Bush replied: "Competence makes the trains run on time but doesn't know where they're going." What the election should be about, he added—what every one should be about—is, precisely, beliefs, values, and principles. The great exemplar of the technocrat, however, is not the hapless Dukakis, a high-IQ moron if there ever was one, but our current
president himself. His book was called The Audacity of Hope, but only his ambition is audacious. A centrist, a pragmatist, a seeker of consensus: he plays it safe, like every other product of the system. He seeks to wear the mantle of the visionary, but his vision is technocracy itself—those "common sense" solutions that he always likes to talk about. If politics is the art of the possible, Obama's failure as a leader is precisely his conception of what is possible, his meek acceptance of the limits of the status quo. Like a student who's afraid to take a course he might do poorly in, he dodges the difficult fights. If that analogy seems strained, consider that he actually maintains a list of his achievements (yes, really), and that he gave himself a 70 for his first two years in office (that is, he thinks that he accomplished 70 percent of what he had hoped to achieve). He's grading himself, in other words, and on a rather generous curve—almost too perfect a metaphor for the meritocratic mind-set. The electorate, that year of 2010, was less impressed, though the outcome came to him, apparently, as quite a shock. Incapable of comprehending the developing disaster, which has crippled the rest of his presidency, he seemed to think he'd ace the midterms (the confluence of terminology is sweet) if he only got the answers right. He also couldn't understand why people might object to some of his appointments—figures like Timothy Geithner or Larry Summers, both of whom were central to creating the conditions that led to the financial crisis. They're "the best," after all; whom else would you choose to run the economy? Obama's arrogance and that of his advisors, as ill- concealed as it has proved to be unearned, is that of the double-800 crowd. It's as if he can't believe that anybody might reject those commonsense solutions once he has explained them carefully enough— as if he has no conception of competing values, interests, or perspectives, no idea that society is more than just equations. With his racial identity and relatively humble background, his election has been called the triumph of the meritocracy. The sad thing is that that's exactly what it was.
I've been considering our recent presidential candidates as examples of the failures of the meritocracy, but the most remarkable fact is that so many have been products of the system in the first place. There have been ten major-party presidential nominees since 1988. All but two, Bob Dole and John McCain, attended elite private colleges, and seven of the remaining eight went on to elite professional schools. All eight—both Bushes, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Romney—attended Harvard or Yale at some point in their education. Compare this to the fourteen nominees from 1948 to 1984, the heyday of the public university. Only three went to elite private colleges, and only two were associated with Harvard or Yale at any point (a third went to Princeton). Eight, more than half, attended state schools, as compared to only one from 1988 to 2012. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Lyndon Johnson went to Southwest Texas State Teachers College. Barry Goldwater didn't finish college. Harry Truman didn't go to college. It is also striking what a large proportion of our recent nominees are legacies. From 1948 to 1984, only two were. Since then, fully six of ten have been: both Bushes, Gore, Kerry, McCain, and Romney—sons of senators, a president, a governor, an admiral, and in Kerry's case, a foreign service officer who went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard (as well as a mother whose last name was Forbes). Over the last four cycles, the proportion has been even higher—five of six. (Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush or Rand Paul in 2016 would make it seven of eight.) This is not an anomaly, as the previous chapter made clear; this is how the system works. What we see in the presidency we see throughout today's elite. Eight of nine Supreme Court justices received their law degrees from Harvard or Yale, an unprecedented number, and six of nine received their undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton. As of 2011, just a single member of the cabinet had gone to college at a public institution. According to the 2002 edition of Who's Running America, 54 percent of leaders in the corporate world and 42 percent of those in government have degrees from one or more of only twelve universities. Elite graduate programs are heavily biased toward a relatively small number of colleges, and private firms increasingly recruit from only a
handful or two. A recent study found that the most prestigious law firms, investment banks, and consultancies will scarcely look at you unless you went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, possibly Stanford, or if you have an MBA, the Wharton School. Even places like MIT, Columbia, and Dartmouth are considered second-rate. Given the profusion of excellent colleges, as well as the increasing pool of gifted students who are shut out of the HYPSters or the Golden Dozen, what accounts for this demented exclusivity? The same mentality that drives the system as a whole. People who attended top-ranked institutions simply don't believe that those who didn't might be valuable enough to hire or admit. The study I just mentioned speaks of "a culture that's insanely obsessed with pedigree." Hiring someone from Harvard or Princeton is also safe. If they prove to be a dud, you can't be blamed for having selected them. No one has the fortitude to play a hunch or take a chance. In view of the fact that the system churns out an endless procession of more or less uniform human specimens, you'd think that places might prefer to have some different minds around—or more to the point, some different personalities. If the elite got any more inbred, they'd start to grow tails. No wonder the people who run our institutions, despite their fabulous credentials, have all been making the same mistakes, and making them over and over. The result, in any case, is that the country as a whole is effectively "tracked" from grade school on—or really, from the womb. But the meritocracy is not just self-enclosed and self-perpetuating; it is also self-dealing. Everywhere we look, we witness people in authority abusing their positions to the detriment of those they're pledged to serve. Doctors take money from drug companies to puff and push their products even when safer and cheaper alternatives are available. College presidents permit themselves enormous salaries at a time of ballooning tuitions and straitened budgets. Politicians give up office to line their pockets as lobbyists; regulators leave to take positions with the firms they used to oversee. Executives loot their companies; investment banks conspire against their clients; accounting firms and credit rating agencies cook the books. Our leadership class, in short, has turned its back upon the rest of us. It is no coincidence that the age of the
meritocracy, for all the liberal pretensions of so many of its members, has also been the age of Reaganism. Their logic is the same: every man for himself. No one appears to grasp that leadership involves responsibility as well as opportunity. No one seems to realize that it isn't all about their fabulous lifestyles. Lewis Lapham speaks of "a managerial elite loyal to nothing other than its own ambition." Its poster child is Tony Hayward, erstwhile CEO of BP, best remembered for whining, in the middle of one of the greatest environmental disasters in history, that he wanted his life back. His company was despoiling an entire region, and the only person he was capable of feeling sorry for was Tony Hayward. We have been here before. "History," said E. Digby Baltzell in The Protestant Establishment, "is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privilege to leadership." His classic study of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, which put the term "WASP" into general circulation, was published in 1964, the very year that Yale was revolutionizing its admissions practices, Year One of the meritocracy. The owl of Minerva, as the saying goes, was spreading its wings at dusk: a historical phenomenon was receiving its definitive articulation at the very moment of its passage from the scene. But the end had been coming for decades. The WASP ascendancy had reached its peak in the 1920s, which Baltzell calls "the Anglo-Saxon decade." The period was also, as we know, an age of frenzied excess, the last time inequality attained the proportions it has once again assumed today. The end of World War I had functioned in something of the way that the collapse of the Soviet empire later would. Global leadership had passed to the United States—which means, to the WASPs. We also know what happened next. "The destinies of the world were handed them on a plate in 1920," Baltzell quotes a member of that class as having said. "Their piglike rush for immense profits knocked over the whole feast in nine years." When James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, began the move to meritocracy in the early 1930s, the depths of the Depression, the ruling
class was dealing with the need, not only to enfranchise rising groups and mobilize the nation's talent, but also to face its own catastrophic failure. The Crash of 1929 had represented a crisis of legitimacy, the moment that the aristocracy was seen to have outlived its usefulness. The end was long in coming, but the WASPs, to their everlasting credit, did do one thing right before they left the stage—or at least, enough of them did. However slowly and reluctantly, out of whatever mixture of motives, they prepared the ground for their own supersession. They overcame themselves. They put the interests of the nation as a whole above their own, for they had come to recognize the two were not the same. They saw, at least eventually, that a new and very different ruling class would have to take their place. The parallels today are striking. The aristocracy and meritocracy each persisted for about the same amount of time before the smash: the former from the 1880s to 1929, the latter from the 1960s to 2008. But other things are different. No one, it seems—no one in authority, at least —has learned the lesson of the recent crisis. The lesson is not about financial regulation or legal accountability. The lesson is, it's time to move along. It's time for the hereditary meritocracy—not just the 1 percent, the plutocracy, but the 10–15 percent, the elite as a whole, professionals as well as bankers, liberals as well as conservatives, the upper middle and the upper classes both—to start to undertake its own self-overcoming. The system isn't working anymore, no matter how just or good or inevitable it seems to those it flatters and benefits. It has lost its authority. It has lost its legitimacy. It is time to imagine what a different society would look like, and to gather the courage to get there. The new dispensation must ensure—this is the essential thing—that privilege cannot be handed down. The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, as it did in the middle decades of the twentieth century, not reproduce it. We can certainly begin with the admissions process, just as they did in the 1930s. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been calling for for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT
scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors—a plan that was developed (and needless to say, rejected) in 1990. Colleges should put an end to resume-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school (and that high achievers almost never do). They should refuse to be impressed by any experience or opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth. Of course, they have to stop cooperating with U.S. News. More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they're going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote and how to select for them. Once admissions criteria change, the whole educational system will change. We want kids with resilience, self-reliance, independence of spirit, genuine curiosity and creativity, and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes. A student who worked in the admissions office at Pomona told me that her favorite applicants to interview were the interesting ones who had failed a little in high school—but no, she said, they never got in. Some have suggested that applicants be asked to submit a "failure resume" along with their list of accomplishments. David Brooks has remarked, apropos of the groupthink that grips the establishment, that our institutions don't reward "cantankerous intellectual bomb-throwers." Well, that's exactly who we need to start rewarding. Colleges should remember that selecting students by GPA more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind. The same goes for quantity as opposed to quality—of APs, extracurriculars, and so forth. Excellence requires single-mindedness as well as the freedom to follow one's intuition, not a willingness to fill in every box. Helen Vendler, the Harvard professor and dean of American poetry critics, has tried to remind her institution that great artists are not likely to be "leaders" or the kinds of people who are good at everything (or want to be), and I would say the same about great scientists, great thinkers, and great just about everything else. When Yale set out to reform its admissions in the 1960s, it sought to get away from the bland, predictable prep school types and find instead some "brilliant and restless minds." But by now
we have evolved a different kind of blandness. Who would describe the typical Ivy League student today as intellectually restless? Who would even say that more than a few are brilliant—an altogether different thing than being very bright. Forget about the A-minuses; even the A's are boring now. We desperately need some A-pluses, and if that means taking some admissions chances, and making some mistakes, so be it. The meritocracy developed in a very different world, and its educational system was designed for a very different economy. The postwar age was one of large bureaucratic institutions staffed by cadres of scientific and social-scientific experts. It was the age of the Ford Motor Company and the Ford Foundation, of NASA and the Pentagon and Bell Labs, and it looked like it would last forever. The notion of sorting everybody on the basis of a single test and training them to occupy a slot in the social machine made a terrifying kind of sense. The postwar years were also the age of the Cold War, a static global system that placed a premium on managing the status quo, and one that likewise looked to be eternal. But now we face a world of economic fluidity, political instability, and unpredictable dangers and opportunities. We need a different kind of brain. The changes must go deeper, though, than just reforming the admissions process at selective schools. That might address the problem of mediocrity, but it won't address the greater one of inequality. Private colleges and universities will only ever go so far in opening their gates to the poor and middle class, for the simple reason that they cannot afford to do otherwise. We need instead to overhaul the entire way we organize our higher education system. The problem isn't this or that admissions practice; the problem is the Ivy League itself—the position it and other schools have been allowed to occupy. The problem is that we have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act, or think they're acting, for the common good, they will always place their interests first. They will always be the creatures of the rich. The arrangement is great for the schools, whose wealth and influence continue to increase, but is
Harvard's desire for alumni donations a sufficient reason to perpetuate the class system? I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. I've come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don't have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education. This is not a new idea. It is the exact commitment that drove the growth of public higher education in the postwar years. When Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and one of the last of the WASP aristocrats, undertook a vast expansion of his state's university system, he did so, he said, because he thought that every citizen deserved an education that was just as good as the one that he'd received at Dartmouth. California created one of the greatest systems in the world, a virtual West Coast Ivy League, on the basis of the same idea. Public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all. Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them (you know, the American dream). Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides. We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a human right. We also need to recognize—as we once did and as many countries still do—that the same is true of higher education. So what became of that commitment? Basically, we decided that we didn't want to have to pay for it anymore. Instead of taxes, student loans. By the time the recession began, higher education spending as a share of state budgets had dropped by about a third since 1980. Since 2008, it has fallen another 18 percent in absolute terms, nearly 30 percent or more in several major states. It is no coincidence that public university tuitions have increased at over 5 percent a year during the past decade, more than twice as fast as at the privates (where real student costs have actually been flat). Since 1989, state expenditure on higher education per dollar of personal income—the part, in other words, that comes from us—has dropped by almost half. During roughly the same period, the share of revenue at public universities that's covered by tuition—the part that comes from students and their families—has more than doubled. If those proportions had remained the same—if we had continued to hold
up our end—tuitions would be less than half of what they are, with all that that implies for student debt. The system isn't unsustainable, as someone recently remarked; it isn't being sustained. Now we're talking about college-by-MOOC and the $10K BA. Public higher education is going the way of so many other public programs: starved of funds, then blamed for failing to deliver. We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments—that is, the sacrifices—to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation. Yet if we're going to create a genuinely fair society, we'll need to do still more than pay for free, first-rate public higher education. For kids to have an equal chance in college, they need to get an equal chance before they get there. Some level of inequality is inevitable; some people are always going to do better than others. The key is to prevent that inequality from being handed down. That doesn't mean that every child must have the same; it simply means that every one must have enough. Above all, it means eliminating inequality in K–12. We know what that would take, the one reform that almost no one in authority wants to see enacted: equalizing funding nationwide. Even better, giving lower- income children more, to balance out inequities at home, as they do in countries with the best educational systems, like Finland, Canada, and Singapore. Either course would entail funding schools out of general revenue rather than primarily through local property taxes. The former is what most developed countries do. The latter, by design, is a way for the affluent to perpetuate their privilege. All this, of course, would take a lot of money. Fortunately, we have a lot of money; we just spend it on the wrong things. "We're broke," you often hear. No, actually, we're not. Even on a per capita basis, we are still, with a few small exceptions, the richest country in the world. We need to tame the $700 billion gorilla of defense, defeat the prison lobby in the states, and raise a lot more money. Corporate taxes as a share of federal revenue are less than half of what they were before the 1980s. If
businesses want workers who are better trained, they're going to have to help the rest of us to pay for them. As for the famous 1 percent, their slice of the national income, which stayed at about 10 percent from 1953 to 1981, has risen to about 23 percent. In a $16 trillion economy, the difference represents a premium of more than $2 trillion a year, about four times the federal deficit. As far as I'm concerned, that money belongs to the rest of us. By manipulating the legislative and legal systems—which is to say, by buying them—the rich have simply stolen it. But taxes aren't the only issue, and the super-wealthy aren't the only ones who've benefited from our ever-growing inequality. The top percentile's share is higher than at almost any time since 1928, but the share that accrues to the top 10 percent has risen to its highest level ever (or at least since 1913, the year that record keeping started), more than 50 percent. The fact is that "the 1 percent," as a concept and slogan, is a very convenient way for the upper middle class, the rest of the elite—the people, by and large, who went to selective colleges and who plan to send their kids in turn—to let themselves off the hook. Starving public education, higher and otherwise, doesn't benefit them only in the form of lower taxes. It also rigs the economic system for their children. Take most of the kids out of line, and yours are going to get a whole lot more. That's the dirty little secret no one in the upper middle class, which has come to display a kind of Victorian engorgement with its own virtue, is willing to talk about. We all believe, or claim to believe, in social mobility, but we also all know, in our heart of hearts, that social mobility is a zero-sum game. For every person who climbs up the income distribution, someone else falls down. The kind of individuals who go to elite colleges, Caitlin Flanagan remarks, are enlightened enough to be politically correct, but not enough to "find the very idea of an elite college objectionable." We preen ourselves on our progressive views on race, gender, and sexuality, but we blind ourselves to the social division that matters the most, that we guard most jealously, that forms the basis of our comfort, our self-respect, and even of our virtue itself: class.
It comes to this: the elite have purchased self-perpetuation at the price of their children's happiness. The more hoops kids have to jump through, the more it costs to get them through them and the fewer families can do it. But the more they have to jump through, the more miserable they are. Everything we looked at in the first part of this book —the panic, the exhaustion, the sense of emptiness and aimlessness, the fearfulness and cynicism—as well as everything we've looked at in the final part—the entitlement, the mediocrity, the cluelessness that comes of social segregation, the spectacular failure of leadership—is the inevitable outcome of the elite's attempt to privilege their children to the detriment of everybody else's. It is a kind of nemesis or tragic retribution. You think you're screwing other people's kids, but you also end up fucking up your own. Self-overcoming is a serious business. It has nothing in common with "service," which may be thought of as the charity you give to people after you've impoverished them. You want to help the less fortunate? Get out of their way. In other words, stop hogging all the resources. Social justice means you give up some of what you have so others can have more. That is finally the issue that confronts us as we think about higher education in this country. Are we going to remain a winner-take-all society? Will we continue to maintain an artificial scarcity of educational resources, then drive our children into terror and despair by making them compete with one another for the spaces that are left? Will we insist on squandering the lion's share of our collective human capital instead of mobilizing everybody's talent for the greater good? Are we devolving from a republic into a society of clans, a world where every family withdraws behind its walls and lets the commons fall to ruin? In Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy wrote the story of a poor, brilliant, hardworking boy who is denied the chance to rise in life when he is blocked from entering an elite university. Years later, another boy appears at his doorstep—perhaps his own, perhaps somebody else's. Will he take him in? This is what he finally decides: The beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think about it, whether a child is yours
by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. If we are to create a decent society, a just society, a wise and prosperous society, a society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work, then that is what we must believe. We don't have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor's children as our own. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it's time to try democracy.
Acknowledgments This book is truly a collective effort. To thank all those who've helped me with the project, since before it even was a project, I would need to enumerate everyone who has written in response to one of my articles, asked a question at a campus event, or taken a class I visited—not to mention everyone I taught as a professor. I hope this book itself provides a form of thanks. My highest gratitude goes to the many former students who have shared their insights and experiences over the years, especially Laura Zax, Ed Goode, Su Ching Teh, Nikki Greenwood, Alex Milsom, Matt Strother, Joanna Neborsky, Krista Deitemeyer, Aaron Thier, Chiara Scully, Amy Fish, Nicole Allan, Mariangela Crema, Alex Schwartz, Rachel Mannheimer, David Gorin, Curt Ellis, Molly Worthen, Kate Riley, Blake Charlton, Emma Vawter, Adrian Quinlan, Benita Singh, Maria Richardson, Jasper Sherman-Presser, John McEachin, Presca Ahn, David Busis, Jinan Joudeh, Al Kegel, Maria Spiegel, Chrissie Schmidt, Catherine Killingsworth, and Sabrina Silver. Thanks also to Matt, Helen Rittlemeyer, and Ben Orlin for permission to quote from unpublished essays. Fond thanks to the friends and former colleagues with whom I have batted these issues around, especially Blakey Vermeule, Sarah Mahurin, Ravit Reichman, Wes Davis, Pericles Lewis, Barry McCrea, Priscilla Gilman, and Donald Brown. Others who have offered valuable dialogue include Tammy Kim, Rob Reich, Mark Edmundson, Lloyd Thacker, Lara Galinsky, Gloria Kweskin, Becko Copenhaver, Kathy Kirshenbaum,
Amy Whitaker, Caroline Kahn, Jonathan Weiler, Daniel Schwartz, Frances Bronet, William Treseder, Ronald Newburgh, Josipa Roksa, Dan Chazan, Stephen Bergman, Yong Zhao, Herman D'Hooge, and Michael Koehn. For research help, thanks to Terri Lobdell, James Axtell, Roger Geiger, Gurumurthy Neelakantan, D. Parthasarathy, Sean F. Reardon, Dorothe J. Bach, Chris Miller, Gong Szeto, and the ever-gracious Andrew Delbanco. Thanks especially to the people who have made my campus and other appearances possible, including Lily Janiak at Yale's St. Anthony Hall; Lois Beckett and Elsa Kim at the student committee of the Harvard Humanities Center; Jefferson Cowie at Cornell; Colonel Scott Krawczyk, Karin Roffman, and Elizabeth Samet at West Point; Blakey Vermeule and Jennifer Summit at Stanford; Julius Taranto at the Pomona College Student Union; Peter Upham at the Association of Boarding Schools; the students at the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford; George Karnezis at Portland State; Douglass Sullivan-González at the Honors College of the University of Mississippi; Mary Collins at Central Connecticut; David McGlynn and Timothy Spurgin at Lawrence; Logan Spangler at the Business Ethics Society of the University of Virginia; Bryan Garsten at Yale-NUS; Marc DeWitt at the Y Syndicate; David Schiller and Jessica Levenstein at Horace Mann; Saahil Abhijit Desai at the Associated Students of Pomona College; Gayle Greene at Scripps; Larry and Claudia Allums at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture; as well as their peers, colleagues, and support staff. Special thanks to Audrey Bilger and the many others at Claremont McKenna, where I finalized the manuscript, and engaged in much enriching conversation, during a residency last fall. Titanic thanks to Robert Wilson at the American Scholar, who offered shelter to a cranky little essay after it was orphaned by a wealthy publication, and who has continued to publish my thoughts on these matters ever since. Thanks also to John Palattella at the Nation and Evan Goldstein at the Chronicle of Higher Education for additional opportunities to vent my spleen about the state of college in America. Thanks to my editor Alessandra Bastagli, as well as to the staff at Free Press, to Alex Jacobs, Tyler Allen, and the rest of the people at Cheney
Literary, and most of all, to my knight in shining armor and agent extraordinaire, Elyse Cheney, without whom I'd be standing by an I-5 exit ramp, holding a sign that said "Will Profess for $." For her insight, her wisdom, her patience, and her wicked sense of humor, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Aleeza Jill Nussbaum: in conversation and in life, a true partner. Lastly, thanks to everyone who gave permission to quote from emails or spoken remarks on condition of anonymity. A few details have been changed to protect identities. Typographical errors have been silently corrected and material redacted without ellipses, but in no case have meanings been altered. For source notes and suggestions for further reading, go to excellent sheep.com.
About the Author © MARY ANN HALPIN PHOTOGRAPHY William Deresiewicz was a professor of English at Yale for ten years and a graduate instructor at Columbia, where he also went to college, for five. His essay "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" has been viewed more than one million times online. A frequent speaker on college campuses, he is also a prominent cultural critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, and many other publications. He is the author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/William-Deresiewicz
Also by William Deresiewicz A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter
We hope you enjoyed reading this Free Press eBook. Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Free Press and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Portions of this book have appeared in different form in the American Scholar, the Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. FREE PRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2014 by William Deresiewicz All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Free Press hardcover edition August 2014 FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248- 3049 or visit our website at Interior design by Aline Pace Jacket design by Olivia Munday Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deresiewicz, William, 1964– Excellent sheep : the miseducation of the American elite and the way to a meaningful life / William Deresiewicz. pages cm 1. Education, Higher—United States. 2. Universities and colleges—United States. 3. Elite (Social sciences)—Education—United States. 4. Critical thinking—Study and teaching (Higher) —United States. 5. Reasoning—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. 6. Education, Higher—Aims and objectives—United States. 7. Education, Higher—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. LA227.4.D74 2014 378.73—dc23 2014010790 ISBN 978-1-4767-0271-1 ISBN 978-1-4767-0273-5 (ebook)