Out of touch
In William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” a senior professor at Yale who also attended the school decades ago as an undergraduate recalls that when the dean welcomed new students in 1957, he told them 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.” Thus “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.”
It’s nearly impossible to imagine today’s freshly minted Yalies being greeted with a speech like that. By the time the highest-achieving kids make it to the Ivy League or Stanford or the other top-tier schools that Deresiewicz targets in his biting critique of higher education, they’ve been preparing to occupy their spots since grade school: excelling in academics and sports, acing their SATs and racking up a dizzying number of extracurriculars. Others as qualified as they are? Please. They’re the best and the brightest!
Deresiewicz has plenty of experience with the Ivy League, as an undergrad and graduate student at Columbia and later an English professor at Yale. He acknowledges that today’s college admissions process identifies smart and talented students, but he contends that more than ever, the top students are “also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.” Upon leaving Yale in 2008, he published an essay in the American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” lambasting our most prestigious schools for perpetuating class inequality.
“Excellent Sheep” is based in part on that essay, which went viral, and the book includes some of the responses he received to the original piece. Many are jarring, like the e-mail from a Cornell student who wrote, “I hate all my activities, I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.”
In provocative language, Deresiewicz says it doesn’t have to be so. Our system of elite education can be overhauled or, barring that, young adults can choose to opt out of it. He laments that at America’s leading universities, undergraduate education is focused on career prep, teaching has taken a backseat to research, and the entire academic enterprise has adopted a customer-service mentality. It’s hard to get in, but once in, students are treated like entitled consumers, offered amenities like fancy gyms and dorms and rewarded with high grades regardless of the quality of their work.
Deresiewicz also takes on achievement-obsessed parents like Amy Chua’s villainous Tiger Mother. She might be an easy target, but in a frenzied admissions process where “the main thing that’s driving the madness is simply the madness itself,” he argues that the people at the extremes end up setting the standards for the vast middle.
When Deresiewicz turns to the students themselves, his confrontational tone softens as he goes all Dead Poets Society on us, attempting to inspire readers in the same boat as that miserable Cornell student. His view of a liberal arts education is decidedly romantic, nostalgic and idealistic. Liberal education should feel “like being broken open — like giving birth to yourself”; the relationship between students and their favorite professors is “almost sacred.” To benefit from it — and to really grow up — the author urges young people to put a stop to incessant parent-pleasing. You should speak to Mom and Dad only once a week, “or even better, once a month,” and refuse to tell them what classes you’re planning to take or what kinds of grades you’re getting.
Deresiewicz claims that since he began writing on these issues, many young people have asked him, “Is there anything that I can do ... to avoid becoming an outof-touch, entitled little s—?” Shutting out the parents covering the insanely expensive tuition costs strikes me as, well, pretty entitled. His other advice to students includes taking time off from school, renting “a lousy apartment ... and [supporting] yourself with a part-time job.” I’d bet that anyone following his advice would make that monthly call home upon realizing that a part-time job doesn’t pay the bills.
This is a book that begs to be argued with, and the author occasionally comes off as arrogant and defensive. (In one strange passage, he says that when students at campus events challenge him by asking how his claims apply to lower-income students at elite schools, “the question almost always comes from someone who appears as if he’d never had to worry about money in his life.”)
Still, I found myself agreeing more than I disagreed, especially with the potent class critique at the book’s heart, in which Deresiewicz posits that quality higher education should be a political right. To those who’ve asked the author how to avoid becoming out of touch and entitled, his answers include transferring to a public university and working in the service industry. Reading “Excellent Sheep” ought to help, too. But I suspect that the kids who would approach Deresiewicz with that question in the first place are already on the right track.