I guess Walter Kirn wasn’t exaggerating. Get a load of Deeb Salem.
I mean, if you still have any questions about why some middle class smart people might not want to attend a school like Princeton.
I guess Walter Kirn wasn’t exaggerating. Get a load of Deeb Salem.
I mean, if you still have any questions about why some middle class smart people might not want to attend a school like Princeton.
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June 20th, 2014 at 7:33PM
Deeb Salem had so much self-esteem,
That his only option was to scream
When Goldman Sachs stiffed him –
The low bonus miffed him –
Eight mill ain’t the American dream.
June 21st, 2014 at 5:04AM
I read Walter Kirn’s essay. I won’t doubt his negative experiences at elite Princeton. Plus, who, a new student just in from the boonies, would want a sort of proto-Deeb as roommate?
But–I dunno–Princeton and other selective colleges don’t have a monopoly on ignoble students. Although not a prof, I’ve seen two Podunk Tech students the last decade who were obviously academically energetic. My imperfect impression was that they were still shadowboxing with ideas and people they knew only from books, cultivating some serious loathing for the institution that was way too easy-peasy for them, and piling up some serious Angst about whether their academic skills actually meant anything. (Yeah, I’m reading in quite a bit, although I did ask one, “Why Podunk?” The answer was: family, familiar turf, etc.)
Two buddies of mine. Gary, a real person, went to an area selective college, then on to Middlebury. Twenty years as a corporate guy. Then, massive, arse-kicking life reversals. Now, while working as a low-paid bookkeeper for a local restaurant chain, he participates in civic affairs and does some tutoring, also. Although Gary’s in bad shape, he’s maintained a sort of educated man’s engagement with the world.
Tim is a composite. He has a routine job that pays middling well. Longnecks, NASCAR, opinions about things that are pretty obviously derivative and aphoristic. Although a graduate of our local Podunk Tech, he gives no sign of higher education that’s lived, or that he’d gone to college at all.
I’m not sure I’m getting at anything here, but I wanted to vent the idea that “bad Princeton” may still offer something that “good Podunk” can’t.
June 21st, 2014 at 6:50AM
Jack/OH: You are indeed getting at something very important here. First of all, it might be a cliche and some people might not believe it, but college is for many people a watershed, a turning point, maybe even the definitive, shaping experience of one’s life. It happens at a crucially transformative time in your life, after the ignorance and lack of autonomy of childhood, and before the constraints of adulthood (job, marriage, children). It can mean the difference between your developing into … nothing much, and your developing into a person with curiosity, spirit, irony… a person with a sort of nervy inner freedom that allows you to accomplish many things, not all of them obviously worldly (money, power)… Things having to do with what people tend to mean by a word like enlightenment. It can really mean the difference between conducting your life half asleep or – in the ways that matter – awake.
I don’t want to oversell it. Life is often difficult and confusing and dispiriting for everyone. But a good, challenging four years at a college can put precisely those facts of life into a perspective for you that will in significant ways help you bear and even transcend them.
June 21st, 2014 at 10:58AM
“I don’t want to oversell it. Life is often difficult and confusing and dispiriting for everyone. But a good, challenging four years at a college can put precisely those facts of life into a perspective for you that will in significant ways help you bear and even transcend them.”
UD,in what class would one actually foreground such lived/1st-person experiences and learn the skills that would allow one to handle/transcend them?
June 21st, 2014 at 12:40PM
dmf: In no one class. I have in mind the entire sweep – intellectual, emotional, social – of a serious four years at a serious college. This is one of the reasons, by the way, a coherent curriculum is important. A liberal arts education – as opposed to a vocational, or, say, purely technical – education, should retain a large, philosophical sense of what it’s about, what values and insights and attitudes and histories it means to convey in its entire curriculum.
Nor do I mean that a college education is in some crude way therapeutic. I doubt it will make you happier; it might indeed make you sadder. What it will not do, I think, is tend to make you a sleepwalker through your life.
June 21st, 2014 at 4:46PM
While there’s no doubt Walter Kirn is an outstanding wordsmith, as an investigative reporter, he is far less than average. He authored the book, “Blood Will out,” which chronicled his relationship with a Rockefeller imposter. The guy was convicted of killing a young man in the mid 80’s, in San Marino, CA, one of the toniest neighborhoods in America.
Kirn says that his work was a mechanism to come to terms with how he could have been so guileless, that he was taken in by a charlatan, who he met in 1998. He wrote the book during the 2009 murder trial of Clark Rockefeller, nee, Christian Gerhartsreiter, a German with an expired visa. Kirn was hired by The Atlantic, if memory serves, to chronicle the proceedings.
If a supposedly penniless trickster is to have legal representation, that’s the concern of a public defender. But not in this case, this guy has the resources to retain some of the most high powered legal pros on the East Coast. So how does Kirn handle that paradox? By almost ignoring it, acknowledging that it is strange, but no one knows how that came to be. Wait a minute, you’re hired by one of the few investigative journals left in this country, to get some background on this crook, and the best you can come up with is that no one knows how some putative no name creep got a Big Law PC to take his case? Pure bullshit, of course someone knows, but Kirn can’t be bothered to do the digging, he’s too busy being prosaic and matching metaphors. Sorry, that dog don’t hunt….
June 21st, 2014 at 7:59PM
I understand the ideal (parents and wife academics and I have been an adjunct) but I don’t see the evidence by and large, seems to me along along the lines of the difference between knowing about and knowing how, and also the skills for dealing with texts and other materials are different from dealing with people. Part of why I think that teaching ethics classes isn’t helpful except to give legal cover to professional groups and institutions.
June 21st, 2014 at 8:45PM
dmf, I’ll guess popular and academic biographies, memoirs, and letters of selected historical and contemporary figures, including, possibly, true crime accounts, may be roughly what you’re looking for. There ought to be some sort of “anatomy of corruption” literature, if that’s what you’re getting at.
June 22nd, 2014 at 5:13AM
Deeb Salem exemplifies that ancient Presbyterian virtue, chutzpah. Oy gevolt, as Woodrow Wilson would not have said (but Edmund Wilson might have).