During your summer months you have, no doubt, seen various postings and re-postings of the near-ubiquitous William Deresiewicz article in the New Republic, “Don’t send your kids to the Ivy League.” And you — as an Ivy League student yourself — almost certainly read it. And if you are like me, you were probably a little struck by what he had to say.
For the uninitiated, Deresiewicz offers a thesis that boils down to one simple fact: College admission is a categorically flawed system that inherently favors the admittance and creation of uninspired upper-class zombies. To him, the notion that a college education serves as an equalizing, uplifting or even educating force is lost somewhere in the translation from ideal to reality.
With that being said, Deresiewicz’s singling out of the Ivy League kind of misses the point. The issue, in its most abstract form, has nothing to do with where you are educated and everything to do with how or what you choose to think. The issue is one of an innate sort of selfishness that is part of the fabric of what it means to be human and orient your world about yourself. And I’d like to say that that reality doesn’t mean we — here at Brown or at any college, really — are all completely pernicious and mindless, only mostly. But, I’d dare say, so is most of the world.
This evilness, this increased push for a pre-professional attitude toward education is not restricted to the Ivy League. The Ivy League does not hold exclusive dominion over the daunting prospects of our futures. The sobering realities of the world beyond the confines of a college campus are universal; we all have to fear the weak economy, increasing costs of living and rising costs of higher education. These truths make financial security at the end of college — especially after four years of an expensive private university — that much more necessary. Ultimately external factors, not the structure of elite schools, push people into fields they don’t really care about.
In an ideal world we wouldn’t have to worry about jobs after our time here. But that isn’t our reality. And to me, Deresiewicz’s critique seems to deal entirely in the theoretical while eschewing reality. He seems like Holden Caulfield, willing to call everyone a phony and a fraud but unwilling to even begin to reconcile his ideals with reality. And of course the grand irony of Deresiewicz’s popularity is that his message very clearly benefits from the system of entitlement and intellectualism he is trying to denounce; we listen because he went to Yale and he is smart and learned in the one-dimensional way he needs to be to earn our attention.
Arguably, that is part of the point he is trying to make. He is trying to illustrate that our consumption of his word as canon is idiotic. Perhaps he is trying to say that he is not any more wise or insightful because his diploma says “Yale.” Or because he got a diploma at all. He was just someone who happened to be good at jumping through hoops. But I also think that is something most here would be more than willing to admit. I’d even wager that most people who head off to college — public or private, Ivy League or not — after high school would also say the same.
That sense of self-awareness and the appreciation that some arbitrary — sometimes disturbingly so — set of rules propelled us to our place in college illustrate that maybe our education system isn’t as broken as Deresiewicz claims. If, ideally, our education should serve to remind us of our finiteness and our tiny place in the universe, then maybe it is succeeding. If, ideally, our education should serve to make us realize, much like David Foster Wallace did, that “the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see (life). … You get to decide what to worship,” then maybe it isn’t entirely broken. If, ideally, our education should show us the serendipity layered into so much of what happens to us through the short course of our time here — in college or life as a whole — as I feel Deresiewicz would claim, then maybe we are learning something of substance somewhere between the lines.
Ultimately, the reality is not as stark as Deresiewicz claims. Yes, there are definite flaws with higher education, and these flaws tend to favor money over merit. And yes, there are ways of improving the system of higher education to make it more of a true meritocracy. But to place the blame for nationwide issues squarely on the shoulders of Ivy League institutions is to blatantly engage in the sort of selfish mindlessness our college educations are supposed to combat.
William Deresiewicz, author of the book "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite," will speak at the McCormack Family Theater Monday, Sept. 15 at 6 p.m.
Sean Blake ’17 is a self-confessed entitled snob and trying to be less of one every day. He can be reached at sean_blake@brown.edu.
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