It's pretty clear that elite colleges are openly reverting back to the clubby model that they tried to break away from (or at least tried to create the image of breaking away from) during the second half of the 20th century. But now, instead of being exclusive finishing schools for the sons of well-to-do white New England families, they …
It's pretty clear that elite colleges are openly reverting back to the clubby model that they tried to break away from (or at least tried to create the image of breaking away from) during the second half of the 20th century. But now, instead of being exclusive finishing schools for the sons of well-to-do white New England families, they are remodeled to be such schools for the children of a new so-called diverse elite.
The thing is that a lot of minorities hate this diverse elite that supposedly represent us. For example, a lot of Asian Americans loathe the Ivy-educated Asian Americans who, after having gotten their prestigious degrees and secured their place among the diverse elite, scold the rest of Asian America (much of it poorer and more racially isolated than your typical Ivy-educated Asian American who gets promoted to spokesperson by outsiders) for trying to rise up in society the main way that's available to them. Social climbing for me, but not for thee. I also have black friends that hate the type of Ivy black people that elite progressives love to elevate, because those black people, despite their purported love and pride in their communities, often end up looking down on the majority of black Americans and behave in ways that make it clear that what they truly want is to be accepted and loved by their elite diverse peers.
Chris, thank you for the comment and very nice to find your writing! Seems like we're interested in very similar themes.
Totally agreed with the analysis of the Ivies. Jerome Karabel's The Chosen has a lot of this story. There seem to be these waves with the elite schools where they either just trust in a meritocratic admissions process (which usually means leaning into tests) or they try to rig admissions criteria (so-called 'holistic admissions criteria') to get a class that they feel more aligns with their values. Usually, there's a very racial component to holistic criteria. When a version of it was set up in the '20s - with the emphasis on 'character' and a photo as part of the application process - it was explicitly to keep the schools from being so "Hebrewized." Much of the current holistic criteria is explicitly racist - as the Supreme Court found - and is designed to keep incoming classes from being overwhelmingly Asian-American, as would happen if schools just trusted in tests and grades.
It's a bit tricky because the Ivies have always had this idea that they're creating "leaders," but it's a tautology - people become leaders largely because they have passed through the Ivies. William Deresiewicz's "excellent sheep" critique is that today's conformists have learned to game the system so that they stock up on extra-curriculars and look like leaders without ever actually achieving real intellectual independence. If, on the other hand, the universities got out of the business of rigging their own admissions and just trusted "aptitude," they would end up with a lot of very smart and possibly very strange people - and it would be fascinating, actually, to see where that led.
I liked how the UC system *used* to do it. Half of the admittees were from scores, the other half were from "holistic". I was in the last class (starting in 1997) under that system. Of course, once the State of California got rid of Affirmative Action, the UC system changed out to a fully holistic approach. I wonder why?
Yeah, glad I found your Substack too. I read Excellent Sheep back when it first came out. Honestly, it was half-baked. Deresiewicz advocated for students to pursue learning for its own sake, but when it came to answering the question of how anyone who's not wealthy can justify doing so at tens upon tens of thousands of dollars a year, he just shrugged and said liberal arts grads are very employable! It wasn't well thought-out, though I sympathized with his core point.
I think it was in his book where he laid out the tension between the English model of the university as elite finishing schools and the German model of the big research university, and how American universities were trying to do the impossible of reconciling the two. Thus we get the hilariously self-contradictory simultaneous pursuit of both egalitarianism and exclusivity, which then gets hideously mutated into egalitarianism THROUGH exclusivity.
It's all a big mess and the sooner these elite universities lose their luster and become recognized as the equivalent of fancy prep boarding schools, the better.
I haven't read Excellent Sheep, just the original article it was based on. Deresiewicz was a professor of mine and I heard him develop that argument, which put its finger on something that I couldn't articulate at the time.
There really was this belief at the time that the modern university represented the best of all possible worlds, and it's been interesting to see how dramatically that's unraveled, with (for me) the 'excellent sheep' critique representing a sort of core criticism. I think your argument is a bit different for me, but for me the core issue is this idea of pursuing two very different goals (on the one hand, the pure meritocracy; on the other, some idea of modeling a better society) and the compromise that was in effect in the 2000s turns out to not really work.
It's pretty clear that elite colleges are openly reverting back to the clubby model that they tried to break away from (or at least tried to create the image of breaking away from) during the second half of the 20th century. But now, instead of being exclusive finishing schools for the sons of well-to-do white New England families, they are remodeled to be such schools for the children of a new so-called diverse elite.
The thing is that a lot of minorities hate this diverse elite that supposedly represent us. For example, a lot of Asian Americans loathe the Ivy-educated Asian Americans who, after having gotten their prestigious degrees and secured their place among the diverse elite, scold the rest of Asian America (much of it poorer and more racially isolated than your typical Ivy-educated Asian American who gets promoted to spokesperson by outsiders) for trying to rise up in society the main way that's available to them. Social climbing for me, but not for thee. I also have black friends that hate the type of Ivy black people that elite progressives love to elevate, because those black people, despite their purported love and pride in their communities, often end up looking down on the majority of black Americans and behave in ways that make it clear that what they truly want is to be accepted and loved by their elite diverse peers.
Chris, thank you for the comment and very nice to find your writing! Seems like we're interested in very similar themes.
Totally agreed with the analysis of the Ivies. Jerome Karabel's The Chosen has a lot of this story. There seem to be these waves with the elite schools where they either just trust in a meritocratic admissions process (which usually means leaning into tests) or they try to rig admissions criteria (so-called 'holistic admissions criteria') to get a class that they feel more aligns with their values. Usually, there's a very racial component to holistic criteria. When a version of it was set up in the '20s - with the emphasis on 'character' and a photo as part of the application process - it was explicitly to keep the schools from being so "Hebrewized." Much of the current holistic criteria is explicitly racist - as the Supreme Court found - and is designed to keep incoming classes from being overwhelmingly Asian-American, as would happen if schools just trusted in tests and grades.
It's a bit tricky because the Ivies have always had this idea that they're creating "leaders," but it's a tautology - people become leaders largely because they have passed through the Ivies. William Deresiewicz's "excellent sheep" critique is that today's conformists have learned to game the system so that they stock up on extra-curriculars and look like leaders without ever actually achieving real intellectual independence. If, on the other hand, the universities got out of the business of rigging their own admissions and just trusted "aptitude," they would end up with a lot of very smart and possibly very strange people - and it would be fascinating, actually, to see where that led.
I liked how the UC system *used* to do it. Half of the admittees were from scores, the other half were from "holistic". I was in the last class (starting in 1997) under that system. Of course, once the State of California got rid of Affirmative Action, the UC system changed out to a fully holistic approach. I wonder why?
Yeah, glad I found your Substack too. I read Excellent Sheep back when it first came out. Honestly, it was half-baked. Deresiewicz advocated for students to pursue learning for its own sake, but when it came to answering the question of how anyone who's not wealthy can justify doing so at tens upon tens of thousands of dollars a year, he just shrugged and said liberal arts grads are very employable! It wasn't well thought-out, though I sympathized with his core point.
I think it was in his book where he laid out the tension between the English model of the university as elite finishing schools and the German model of the big research university, and how American universities were trying to do the impossible of reconciling the two. Thus we get the hilariously self-contradictory simultaneous pursuit of both egalitarianism and exclusivity, which then gets hideously mutated into egalitarianism THROUGH exclusivity.
It's all a big mess and the sooner these elite universities lose their luster and become recognized as the equivalent of fancy prep boarding schools, the better.
I haven't read Excellent Sheep, just the original article it was based on. Deresiewicz was a professor of mine and I heard him develop that argument, which put its finger on something that I couldn't articulate at the time.
There really was this belief at the time that the modern university represented the best of all possible worlds, and it's been interesting to see how dramatically that's unraveled, with (for me) the 'excellent sheep' critique representing a sort of core criticism. I think your argument is a bit different for me, but for me the core issue is this idea of pursuing two very different goals (on the one hand, the pure meritocracy; on the other, some idea of modeling a better society) and the compromise that was in effect in the 2000s turns out to not really work.