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Monday, May 29, 2006
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Finishing Schools Finished Two little stories that didn’t go anywhere begin this post. Various observers have been scandalized that Tony Blair‘s son Euan and George Bush’s protegee Blake Gottesman recently got admitted to various programs at Yale and Harvard, even though Euan’s a so-so student and Gottesman’s a college dropout (from an excellent college - he left to work in the White House). But Yale and Harvard have always been places where people likely to hold high office are sent to acquire a certain civic ethos, to inhale an air of seriousness about high-level statecraft. Does this make Harvard and Yale finishing schools? Yes. George Bush and John Kerry, both of whom graduated with way shitty GPAs, were at Yale because of the high likelihood - given family histories and social connections - that they were headed for governorships, senatorships, and presidentships. The institutions took them not because their SATs rocked but because they were likely to hold high government positions, and it was therefore important that they be exposed to the best thought about government the country could offer. UD sees nothing wrong with this as long as these universities continue offering seriousness about statecraft. As her friend Jim Sleeper notes in his review of Excellence Without a Soul, “before the old colleges morphed into international career factories and cultural gallerias for a global ruling class, they set civic standards for American democratic leaders such as Harvard's Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy, and Al Gore.” Yet now, says Sleeper (he‘s quoting Harry Lewis, author of Excellence, throughout here), this sort of finishing school has become tone-deaf to the American Republic, whose liberties it relies on yet whose virtues it no longer nurtures. It has forsaken such pedagogical heavy lifting for market come-ons and a falsely compensatory moralism about sexism, racism, and “jock culture" -- ‘proxies for misgivings about deeper values.’ The college no longer turns freshmen into adults who can recognize and take responsibility for hard moral choices: ‘The Enlightenment ideal of human liberty and the philosophy embodied in American democracy barely exist in the current Harvard curriculum.’… It would be better to impose serious core curricular requirements on students than to offer ‘what they myopically claim to want,’ Lewis writes, admitting that more teaching takes time from scholarship, but the faculty needs to ‘develop a shared sense of educational responsibility for its undergraduates.’…Harvard's assumption that ‘students are free agents and . . . should study what they wish’ drains its ‘long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they actually serve,’ he writes. Even administrators with ‘perspective on deep and enduring problems’ have left or been forced out of ‘the new retail-store university.’ Things are made worse by what Sleeper calls “the arrogant consumer sovereignty of success-obsessed Harvard parents,” a sovereignty creating more Kaavya Viswanathans by the day. “Today's Harvard,” Sleeper observes, “is no more likely to help [a student] find an inner moral compass than Tiffany & Co. is to improve its customers' morality. Students contemplate with self-recognition [KV’s] fall from what one, in the Harvard Crimson, called “the same rickety tower of meritocracy that so many of us built on our way to our Harvard admission." Yale and Harvard, in other words, continue to admit roughly two sorts of students: 1.) The sons and daughters of the national and international political elite, who are rarely there because of intellectual merit, but who might as well be there because they need whatever exposure we can give them to liberal democratic ideas and practices lest they become corrupt fools or mindless despots; and 2.) the carefully (sometimes corruptly) nurtured brainpan babies of the entitled upper middle class of America, who are there because they’re probably authentically smart, but whose passive cynical disposition (courtesy of their hebephrenically managerial parents) needs to be transformed by the institution into moral seriousness. (I said “roughly.” I know there are lots of exceptions.) When Harvard and Yale, as Sleeper and Harry Lewis suggest, themselves become epiphenomena of a cynical culture, their campuses cease to represent sites where this complex moral and intellectual development can take place. |