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Friday, January 21, 2005
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WALTER KIRN ON PRINCETON Hokay, UD’s husband ran out this evening to the local Borders and elsewhere to stock up on stuff before the big winter storm (well, six inches or so are predicted) that’s about to hit DC. The lines were too long at the movie rental place, so he gave up on that. But he brought back from Borders the latest Atlantic magazine for UD, because she wanted to read “Lost in the Meritocracy,” by Walter Kirn, about which a lot of academic bloggers are blogging (scroll down to January 13). There are lines in Kirn’s essay which echo almost perfectly lines in an earlier essay on a similar subject by Gregg Easterbrook. For instance (as UD quoted in an earlier entry titled "Being Bland," and dated 1/12/05), Easterbrook argues that The college admissions process has become almost entirely a test of your ability to please adults — or specifically the sorts of adults who are college admissions officers. There's nothing wrong with pleasing such people. But once you get out into the world, where there are no rules and things are not structured and your own initiative is more important than your ability to please, then everything changes. I do think we've seen that the top schools increasingly are producing extremely conventional people. Not that there's anything wrong with producing conventional people, but you might think that graduates from Yale or Wellesley or Amherst would be the ones to go on to be really artistic and creative or become great engineers or inventors and make important discoveries. You're seeing instead that the important discoveries and the artistic creativity are coming from people out of places like Colby and Colorado College — because they haven't gone through this process of sacrificing their lives to conventionality. Similarly, Kirn describes chatting with a friend from his ordinary Midwestern town one summer between Princeton semesters, a friend who, despite his modest education, has been reading Emerson with seriousness and is eager to talk about him with Kirn -- a person he assumes (Kirn’s a Princeton English major, after all) to be just as eager and more knowledgeable: I didn’t know how to tell him [that] I couldn’t quote the Transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone. I’d honed more-marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some ‘classic’ work of ‘literature,’ for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed. … If my schooling had taught me anything, it was how to mold myself - my words, my range of references, my body language - into whatever shape the day required … Unfortunately, Kirn’s essay ends up arguing for something that I don’t think Kirn intended to argue for. One reasonable conclusion to draw from “Lost in the Meritocracy” is that only extremely rich people should go to schools like Princeton. Kirn describes a college culture in which the vast majority of the students -- rolling-in-dough Percodan-snorters -- are happy and well-adjusted, and the tiny minority of middle-class students like Kirn are miserable and alienated. Why wouldn’t they be miserable? Kirn describes the rich majority as unceasingly sadistic toward the middle-class minority on campus. Kirn’s eagerness to be truly educated at Princeton, for instance, marks him as a serf who deserves to be spat upon. It bothers Kirn that he feels like a fraud in his literature classes, whereas the rich students take to intellectual fakery with the insouciance they have brought to the many other forms of fakery in their lives. Their affectless irony, honed over two decades of school and domestic existence, allows them to sail through the poses and hypocrisies of the classroom setting, but Kirn has trouble adopting their ways. In a kind of Nick Carraway -- Tom Buchanan dynamic, his earnest Midwestern ambition keeps making a fool of him. Kirn says he only began to be educated, intellectually as well as morally, when he left the feudal world of Princeton behind. To which more than one reader, reflecting upon Kirn's essay, might say: What a waste. An extremely rich student could have taken Kirn’s place and gotten all sorts of wonderful things out of the experience. |