The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
Exhortation - Summer 2008 Print Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers By William Deresiewicz June 1, 2008 It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. But it isn’t just a matter of class. I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge.
Faux Friendship - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
By William Deresiewicz William Deresiewicz discusses the shaky future of friendship on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth Wednesday, December 16 at 12:40 p.m. Listen to the episode here. "…[a] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant. …"—War and Peace "Families are gone, and friends are going the same way." We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? How did we come to this pass? The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau. Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality and inter-involvement.
The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review
What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. I speak from experience.
Generational Conflict
Article Print By William Deresiewicz I really stepped in it the other month. I had published an essay called “Generation Sell” that argued that the culture of today’s youth (the so-called “Millennials”) revolves around the idea of entrepreneurship, and that, unlike previous youth cultures, it is devoid of rebellion or dissent. I’ll address the last objection in a later post. Still, that doesn’t quite settle the matter. But there’s a more important issue. More next week. William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic.
The Tattoo
The tattoo started as a mark of obedience. The Navy and the Federal penitentiary weren’t what you were hoping for out of life. But you had this odd satisfaction: You let someone cut and ink your skin with institutional signs, to identify your body with a fate that you couldn’t escape anyway. Tattoos belonged to institutions. And accompanying them were all the contradictory feelings that go with having your will ground down under the weight of an institution. There was fear, hatred, adoration, and identification. Did tattoos individuate people? For a long time, the tattoo retained its double meaning. Soldiers got tattoos. It was bikers who extended the rebellious aspect of the tattoo (formerly subordinate), while they diminished the need for any cruel fate to make rebellion make sense (formerly predominant). I’m not against tattoos. When you undertake an act of conformism, you should understand what you’re conforming to, and be able to say why you’re doing it.
