[T]here are no grounds for the sweeping pronouncements about the virtues of non-Ivy students (“more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive”) that [William] Deresiewicz prestidigitates out of thin air. It’s these schools, after all, that are famous for their jocks, stoners, Bluto Blutarskys, gut-course-hunters, term-paper-downloaders, and majors in such intellectually challenging fields as communications, marketing, and sports management.
September 9th, 2014 at 10:29AM
Yes, SOS, they are good sentences, but wouldn’t the first one be stronger if it ended with “prestidigitates”?
September 9th, 2014 at 10:55AM
Dennis: Interesting – I disliked only “prestidigitates” in Pinker’s sentences! So I would have chosen a different word altogether. But yes – you’re right – out of thin air is totally unnecessary.
September 9th, 2014 at 11:56AM
In a sentence meant to be entirely serious, “conjures” would be better. But I think the author, for humor’s sake, invokes the image of a bafoon-magician.
On the merits — not the SOSM point I know — there is a lot to recommend serious students at state schools. My wife’s experience on the Hill over thirty years favored these students over those from the Ivies, though, of course, not in every case. And this is not a matter of her prefering own profile. Obviously this is anecdotal and there are lot’s of statistical-selection explanations other than that such students are superior across the board.
September 9th, 2014 at 12:31PM
I attended a near-Ivy for college, an Ivy professional school, and a large branch of a good state school for graduate work, and taught in a decent R1 state school for decades. A diligent student can get an excellent education at almost any type of school by seeking out the best professors in the most demanding subjects, but that’s much easier to do in a better school: there are more excellent professors and demanding subjects and there’s less room to hide. Much the same is true of fellow students: there are some excellent ones everywhere but they’re plentiful at elite schools and scarce at weak ones.
As to hiring, I wouldn’t hire anyone without knowing much more about the individual than about the school, but if one were to play the odds, the chances of finding a brilliant student with proven self-discipline are certainly greater at elite schools. Deresiewicz’s anti-Ivy rant is over the top and remarkably evidence-free. He could have made his good points without resorting to rhetorical overdrive, but then he wouldn’t have gotten as much attention.
September 9th, 2014 at 12:58PM
You can have OUR Sports Management major when you pry it out of the cold, stiff fingers of the scholarship athletes who are overwhelmingly its customers and the faculty and administrative jock-sniffers who created it for them.
September 9th, 2014 at 2:21PM
But the **raw number** of “interesting, curious, open, etc” students at non-Ivies is surely much greater than the number of such students at Ivies, just given the distribution of total attendance. And excessive focus on Ivy degrees, across a wide range of professions, surely leads to a waste of human potential on a considerable scale.
I may have quoted this before at this site, but here’s something Peter Drucker wrote back in 1969:
“That so much of American education before Sputnik (and still today, I am afraid) was content with mediocrity and rather smug about it, is a real weakness of our knowledge base. By contrast, one strength of American education is the resistance to any elite monopoly. To be sure, we have institutions that enjoy (deservedly or not) high standing and prestige. But we do not, fortunately, discriminate against the men who receive their training elsewhere. The engineer whose degree is from North Idaho A and M does not regard himself as “inferior” or as “not really an engineer”…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim.”
and
“It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A and M is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility that Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap…the European who knows himself competent because he is not accepted as such–because he is not an “Oxbridge” man or because he did not graduate from one of the Grandes Ecoles and become an Inspecteur de Finance in the government service–will continue to emigrate where he will be used according to what he can do rather than according to what he has not done.”
The acceptance of Harvard Law School (for example) as Grande Ecole with a lock on preferential positions for its graduates has progressed far beyond what was the case when Drucker wrote the above.
September 9th, 2014 at 3:25PM
Oops. Please read “buffoon” (or if you must “bassoon” or bar room), for “bafoon” in my post above.
The post hoc fallacy suggests my proofreading is even worse after a root canal.
September 9th, 2014 at 4:10PM
tp (above) is dead on.
September 9th, 2014 at 7:42PM
Scanned Pinker; have yet to read Deresiewicz. Thanks to all for your comments.
Around 2001 I attended my first state of the university address at my local Podunk Tech. I had little idea what to expect, but something like Pinker on the “goals of university education” and “habits of rationality” would, I guess, have fit the bill.
Nope, that didn’t happen. What I heard was stuff about pumping up enrollment with high-tuition foreign students, sop talk about diversity and stakeholders, etc.
September 10th, 2014 at 6:33AM
Wasn’t Senator Blutarski a Dartmouth alum?
September 10th, 2014 at 6:42AM
Michael: I believe you’re right.