Marian, a periodic reader, sends me a link to this William Deresiewicz article in the American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. It was almost exactly a year ago that I responded to another Deresiewicz American Scholar article in this post.
As with his essay on consensual faculty-student relationships, Deresiewicz in his current piece on academic elitism takes a good idea and promptly takes it just one step too far. His basic thesis this time around: an Ivy-league education makes you incapable of connecting with ordinary folks. His first bit of evidence? His own inability to connect with a plumber standing in his kitchen.
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like 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 few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this.
I know I’m often accused of making universal applications out of my own experience, but I don’t think even I have done something quite so risible as what Deresiewicz does here. The idea that a first-rate education somehow renders the recipient of that education clueless about the real world is a classic American slur; anti-intellectualism is a potent force in American politics, and has been at least since the Andrew Jackson Administration. It’s disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that some academics who ought to know better find themselves joining the chorus of those who decry the “useless” nature of top-notch higher education.
It’s all too easy to offer counter-anecdotes. Barack Obama went to Harvard Law, for heaven’s sake. There are many criticisms that might be made of him, but an inability to connect with those who were not similarly well-educated is not one of them. And though I’ve never sent a transfer student to Harvard undergrad, I have had former students of mine go on to graduate school at that most famous of American universities. I’ve had exceptional students here at Pasadena City College who have transferred to other Ivies, such as Cornell, Penn, and Columbia. I’ve seen first-generation students from working-class Mexican-American families go “back East” and come home to put the education they received to work within their communities. Most of my colleagues could say the same.
The cluelessness that Deresiewicz derides in himself and in others is less connected to an Ivy education and more to class. He’s on far firmer ground when he points out just how extraordinarily entitled many young college-aged men and women from upper-middle class families can be. Deresiewicz notes that grade inflation is much more common at the Ivies than at less prestigious public institutions; students from more modest backgrounds, he suggests, are less likely to pressure their professors for As. Those students who went to private secondary schools were taught, often from early on, that if they work hard and say the right things in the right way (and avail themselves of the army of counselors and advisers at their disposal) they will turn out just fine. The affluent are surely beset by anxiety, but their anxieties are calibrated differently than those of first-generation college students who have not yet learned how to “game” the system.
Deresiewicz gets a bit muddled, too, when he confuses the anxious upward mobility of very bright middle-class students with the more relaxed attitude of the WASPy upper-middle class. In an earlier era, men of a certain background could earn a “gentleman’s C” at university, in the confidence that they would be hired into a prestigious firm based on family connections. Today, some privileged young folks earn what I’m choosing to call the “OKOP* A-”. No one gets Cs at Harvard anymore; an A-, as Deresiewicz correctly points out, signals only satisfactory effort. Real privilege lies in knowing, after all, that one’s success does not hinge in any significant way on one’s own merits. The exhausted, hyper, frequently anxiety-ridden young Harvard frosh, with their 4.6 GPAs and their 30 hours a week of extracurricular activities, are hardly privileged in that classic sense.
Deresiewicz is at his best in this sterling paragraph, musing on the people-pleasing, failure-fearing, over-achievers he sees so often:
Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.
That rings true, and it’s another reminder of why it is that I love teaching at a community college rather than at an ostensibly more “prestigious” institution. After all, I was never a straight A student myself. I excelled in the subjects I cared about, such as English, History, German, and Drama; I barely passed my science and math classes. My math and verbal SAT scores were separated by some 250 points. I preferred day-dreaming or walking on the beach every afternoon to studying for subjects I didn’t enjoy. I graduated from high school with a 3.4 GPA, and that was with “AP” weighting (something that had only just begun in the early 1980s.) I only applied to two colleges (Berkeley and Vassar), and chose the former largely because they accepted me first and I wanted the certainty of being able to say where it was that I was going. In other words, I was a smart kid, a thoughtful kid, an intellectually curious kid, but not necessarily the sort filled with conventional driving ambition. I met many like me at Cal. I might have met fewer at Harvard, and perhaps would meet fewer still today.
There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like 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 few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
So…..Deresiewicz doesn’t follow the Red Sox, and thus is compelled to think of the plumber as “someone like him”?
Speaking of stereotyping, I’m having a real hard time believing that someone with the last name “Deresiewicz” doesn’t have relatives in the building trades (the police force, the fire department, the military, in factories, in a garage, waiting tables, running the grill, doing dishes, shuffling pallets in a warehouse, whatever). I mean, that’s not exactly a to-the-manor-born name here in the U.S. Methinks he’s protesting too much; trying to take on the attitude of the Boston Brahmin, or something—despite a last name that ends in “cz”.
What the hell does he talk about when he visits his family?
I’ve got two Ivy League degrees, but I’m fairly confident I’d be able to have more of a conversation with the plumber than with someone like Deresiewicz.
Looking at the man’s curriculum vitae, what jumps out is that Deresiewicz seems to have been a student at Columbia from approximately 1981 to 1998, picking up five degrees along the way, and then immediately going over to Yale to teach. That’s not your typical Ivy League experience - at some point, most of us *leave*.
Here’s an interesting take on it from some current Harvard students. I think some of them have chips on their shoulders (as a lot of folks from working-class and middle-class backgrounds do) about the folks who can treat these colleges like social clubs, but they’re spot on with the idea that this is about class and not about education.
I could have gone to an ivy league, very easily, barring tuition concerns. I chose a state school instead because high school had burned me out on the honors kids. Among my classmates in my AP and honors classes, it was a race to see who could take the most weighted classes (ie - an A is a 5.0) and audit the unweighted ones in order to be valedictorian. Extra cirriculars weren’t for enjoyment, but rather for the college application. People missed the point of being in school - learning. It made me want to puke, especially when people ridiculed me for taking art classes instead of AP Bio and AP Chem when I already had all the science credits I needed for college. It was the only chance I’ve ever had to take art classes, and I don’t regret it one bit!
So I went to a state school, nothing fancy, nothing impressive, and I had more fun than I’ve ever had. And I learned a lot, too, by taking classes that were interesting. Sometimes I look back and wonder what my life would be like now if I’d gone to a fancier school, but in the end, I liked my university, a lot. And I really miss it.
I’d encourage kids today to relax on the whole college thing. You get out of it what you put into it, and when it seems like having a Bachelor’s today doesn’t do for you what it did 20 years ago, you have to be able to take other things from your time there, as well.
I’m glad to see this here, and I’m glad that my school is second-tier.
Barack Obama went to Harvard Law, for heaven’s sake. There are many criticisms that might be made of him, but an inability to connect with those who were not similarly well-educated is not one of them.
You clearly haven’t been paying attention to the criticisms being made of Obama. It may not be a *valid* criticism, but especially after the “clinging to guns” comment it’s been a common and effective one.
It sounds as if the author might have problems making small talk with anyone he meets! He’s got multiple degrees, but he’s never learned the skill of simply making a quick comment about the weather (normally a safe topic of conversation) or gas prices and then moving to the business of having the plumber fix his pipes and getting out of the plumbers way. That’s not Ivy retardation, that’s just a plain lack of social skills. The author may ponder this: “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 few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.” I doubt very much the plumber needed to know the author’s values and experiences to fix the pipes, and probably wasn’t interested either–but the plumber probably had a few social skills to make some small talk with a client.
By the way, in Hugo’s OKOP and WASPy world (where I freely admit I live, albiet in another country) we were taught by our parents to be polite and respectful to all tradespeople and make general chitchat with people. Not in a condescending manner, but in a polite way that told them that you appreciated what they did. Probably because it was considered ‘vulgar’ to talk about money (something I still find awkward). And yes, perhaps being polite and engaged, even with someone you have nothing in common with is probably an evil social construct that covers up class divisions/sexism/racism etc. However, maybe you might start out being polite and then finding out you have more in common with your plumber than you could have imagined, and that his/her values aren’t that far from your own. The plumber might even find the author an interesting person instead of a pompous ass…
“That’s not Ivy retardation, that’s just a plain lack of social skills.”
amen to that.
this is just silly. i come from a terribly WASPy background, was raised in the gated ‘burbs, went to prep school, elite grad school, the whole nine yards and i have little trouble making small talk with the woman who cleans my office or the man who fixes my pipes. assuming someone in a different social class than you has nothing in common with you is both snobby and moronic. this seems like it has a lot more to do with deresiewicz’s own class issues and lack of social skills than his ivy degrees.
Hidden in all of that bullshit is a somewhat valid point.
I’m going to a state school, (because Ivy league was priced WAY out of my league). I know how to make small talk with tradespeople, but mainly because I’ve done those jobs.
But, when it gets beyond small talk, I have a problem. Working with people who are not in college, or college-tracked, tends to be difficult (as is talking to my family). I assume they know a whole lot more than they actually do, and this gets me in trouble, with accusations of pretentiousness. The last time my dad came by, he actually said to me “You don’t have to use such big words, I believe that you are smart”. He thought I was trying to speak above him, not realizing that this was truly how I communicated.
It can be a little upsetting, and not more than a little disquieting (these are the people who believe the “secret Muslim” meme about Obama). How do I learn to comfortably communicate with people when I’m not actually sure what they know?
But, when it gets beyond small talk, I have a problem. Working with people who are not in college, or college-tracked, tends to be difficult (as is talking to my family).
I’m not an Ivy League privilege boy like Senator Obama, but I can pretty much talk with anyone. I agree with Hugo that the problems Mr. Deresiewicz is mentioning relate more to class than education. I attended a second- or even third-tier school and earned my bachelor’s and doctoral degrees there, but I will confidently match my education with anything from any Ivy League school. My undergraduate program was well rounded in the liberal arts as well as in my chosen major field, so I don’t feel I have received anything less, at least not in substance. Others’ perceptions of things differ, of course, but I can’t control those perceptions.
If you have trouble talking with your family, it could be a lot of things. I hope you will be able to resolve those issues soon.
One thing I have learned about conversation is that it helps to be a good listener. Most people are flattered when someone takes a genuine interest in what they have to say. If I am in a situation where I am unsure about what to say, I ask a lot of questions. That helps me learn what the person considers important.
To Mark-
I do like to listen, actually: I find people endlessly fascinating. But for whatever reason, people seem suspicious when I’m interested in them, and I ask them questions about themselves.
Or, with my family in particular, they seem to think even the questions are “hoitey-toitey”.
Deresiewicz is really making a backdoor insult at the plumber he talked to. Oh my, this simple tradesman is so far beneath me; how can I ever connect from my lofty perch? He sounds like an explorer who, on finding a new and isolated tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, rues that he was too busy taking macroeconomics to have bothered studying Primitive Languages 101.
Anyone with their head not firmly wedged up their ass is aware that you can generally get a conversation going by asking people about themselves. The guy’s wearing a Red Sox cap, fercryingoutloud, think maybe you could ask him about how the Red Sox are doing this year?
Well said Mythago! I did find his tone insulting and condescending. I don’t believe that we are meant to or able to connect with everyone deeply–however, as you said, he could have asked how the Sox are doing, and left it at that. (Unless he’s one of those twits who lives in a city and don’t recognize the logo of a national level sports team because ‘I’m just not into sports…’)
Antigone:
Maybe I’m reaching, but it sounds as if your family has a bit of insecurity about dealing with you, and now you’re projecting this to onto others. If you like who you are, and where you are, and what you are working to become, this won’t matter in the end. Yes they are family, but you might need to get your intellectual nourishment and true companionship from other people, who see the world your way.
If you cannot talk to every one of your fellow human beings - the occasional psychopathically unsociable person aside - then there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Not your education, your heart. We’re all human beings, and the majority of our daily experience is in common. We all love, hate, fear, rejoice, mourn, laugh - all of this we have in common. The author is in love with his own preciousness and specialness, and unwilling to engage with his fellow because he thinks it will bring him down. He’s just a stuck-up ass, not an exemplar of some Deep and Meaningful Cultural Divide.
Class in this country today seems more tied to education, or at least culture, than anything else I can determine save maybe family. What else determines it? Money? A lucky and successful real-estate developer or small business person today without a college degree can have as much or more money than many people in the upper or professional classes, live in a gated community, have a half-dozen cars, and still would be regarded in a different class than, say, an Ivy league alum sweating out high five-figures in Manhattan publishing. If I were to identify what likely determines class in this country, the three biggest variables would be family, education, and familiarity, current or past, with working trades.
The ability to communicate across class of this sort comes from experience. Those students in the public universities, most transfer students, ones from less-advantaged backgrounds, and so forth have had more exposure, either through family or through their own experience, to different lifestyles. I saw something of this divide at Cal. Older students with workplace experience, transfer students, veterans, and minority students often had a sort of inter-cultural fluency that 18-to-22 year old white kids right out of good high schools lacked. If those latter students then went on to grad school and a professorship at an elite school, or maybe into a cushy sinecure obtained through good family or other connections, and never had a day’s experience really sweating out a paycheck, it would be pretty conceivable that, ten years later, they might realize that they’ve never learned to relate to a plumber or anyone else who works with their hands, and would write similar articles themselves.
Tom -
Every one of those kids has interacted on a near-daily basis with people who work with their hands. Janitors, clerks, sales people, mechanics, food servers, meter maids - it is not possible to reach maturity in Western civilization without having substantial interaction with people from different social classes.
It is possible, if you’re a hopeless elitist, to bypass all of those conversations and interactions and pretend that all these services are being provided by invisible robots. But they aren’t. Everyone is perfectly capable of engaging with “the workers”.
Robert, I’m not denying that. I am suggesting that there is a big difference between “interacting” with people and “engaging” with them. Much of that engagement only comes through more intimate experience.
In the same vein, not every out-of-touch elitist fails to engage with and see working people clearly by discounting them. Indeed, many artificially distort and mythologize the experiences of everyday people, usually arising from oversubscribing to either academic or pop-culture perspectives about “how the other half lives”.
As a person who comes from the working class and has educated herself with a liberal arts college education, I can see both sides of the issue. I grew up in Texas, and have traveled substantially. I am also about to move over to Europe to marry and live there hopefully for the rest of my life.
After all the travel and education, I found it hard to go back to Texas. It was not that I could not make small talk - I have waited enough tables in my life to be able to do that with anyone, just that I find it difficult to find common ground to connect with a lot of people from where I come from. I felt like a foreigner in my own hometown.
Small talk is different than talking. You can always talk about the weather, sports, price of gas/food, for a few minutes. But on any substantial level, my feelings on many of the larger issues in life can be very different than the people from where I came from.
This is not something that I have a problem with, but something I accept. It was better when I moved out to the east coast and found loads of people like me. I don’t know if this smacks of elitism or not. I surely don’t consider myself elite as I don’t have a fantastic financial situation.
Socialist, yes, athiest, yes, feminist, yes… if that makes me elite, than so be it.
I also love good cheese. :)
But I don’t think it is necessarily just a product of an ivy league education. It is a combination of class and experience. I guess because I am from working class I can at least attempt to blend in and talk to the plebes. I have never been OKOP, and who knows if marrying European and living that life will make me that. But I don’t think it is something you can become, only something that you are born into. Maybe I’ll always feel like a fraud, but I am pretty happy being the open minded Texan in France.
This is obviously an issue that I have not yet resolved within myself. Someday I would love to write a great essay, but first the inner conflict must be clarified. The struggle between where I came from and where I aspire to be.
The problem with Deresiewicz’s statement is that he seems to be saying that he cannot connect even on the most basic human level. And that is something that everyone should be able to do with everyone. Especially if they are OKOP. All the OKOP that I have met have pretty decent social skills. For example, my current boss is the CEO of an association in DC. I admire her completely because she treats everyone as humans, from the person who waters the plants in our office to the ambassador of France. And that is what a good and decent person should be able to do, in my opinion. So, if she is OKOP, then count me in. That is what I want to be.
All Deresiewicz has revealed is that he suffers from insecurity and has a communication problem. Communication problems are part of the human condition and abound with higher education types and ordinary people. No one is immune and as far as I’m concerned everyone could use a lot of work in this area. Also, plumbers are expensive and I’m pressed for time, so I don’t feel it necessary to engage in lengthy small talk…just a polite hello, statement of the problem, the time involved in fixing the problem and the price.
In regards to academic elitism, I paid for my own schooling and tuition, so I was forced out of practicality and necessity to choose a state school. I didn’t have the luxury of attending an Ivy-league school and never entertained the thought. Instead, I attended two community colleges before transferring to Cal Poly SLO. After I graduated from college I found difficulty obtaining work within my chosen field. Out of necessity (I had to work and earn a living) I was told that a college education didn’t mean anything—a comment usually made by someone interviewing me in personnel or the human resources department. Sadly, I heard this comment all too often. People snooped and intruded into my personal life, asking questions which were none of their business instead of focusing on my talents and abilities. I also observed that they seemed far more preoccupied with my age, marital and especially my reproductive status, which was NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS, yet this was still their focus. I was offered secretarial positions, which didn’t require a college education. I have met many business people who majored in something entirely different from their current career paths or should I say jobs. I have also met a lot of people who switched careers and many who are overqualified, overeducated and underpaid. Unfortunately, I’ve encountered a lot of sexual harassment, which has been tolerated and overlooked in corporate settings and I’ve also encountered many people who’ve had their careers derailed and obstructed by ruthless manipulators competing for jobs, status, money, positions, etc. The more ruthless individuals have derailed hardworking employees simply because they are power hungry and usually because they feel threatened or have or had personal issues with someone (meaning that they didn’t like them) and unfortunately exercised undue influence to get people fired, terminated or just make their work life living hell, which forces them out. I believe connections are far more important in business than actual ability or education and there’s a certain cache to bragging about what college one has attended—at least in some circles. I wish that were not so, but I’ve observed it more than what I would like too. It all comes down to if someone likes you, how insecure they are or if they feel threatened by you. How talented you may simply doesn’t matter if the decision maker is insecure or threatened by your talents.
In reading some of these responses, I agree with Mark, “…that it helps to be a good listener.” Sadly, I have met far more people who are NOT “good listerners”.
I also agree with this gem,”Most people are flattered when someone takes a genuine interest in what they have to say.” Again, and sadly, I’ve met few people who take a “genuine interest,” in what I have to say and are more interested in what they have to say, projecting, and taking every opportunity to talk about themselves and their opinions. Perhaps I’ve met an overabundance of self-absorbed, self-talkers. I’ve never had to make small talk as I’ve met people who can’t stop talking about themselves and don’t stop talking long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise. A lot of people focus on the wrong questions and make broad-sweeping generalizations about other human beings and this is definitely off-putting for any future communication. In fact, it’s a dealbreaker in most situations. I’ve observed communication problems and have been exposed to insufferable insecurities and inappropriate commentaries among highly educated people and trades people alike–it’s part of the human condition.