Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/ross_douthat_explores_harvard_the_iviest_of_the_ivy_league.php
Friday, April 8, 2005
In Late Antique Christendom, pilgrims lowered scraps of cloth through a small hatch into the tomb of St. Peter. Upon retrieval, these rags were no longer just rags: they were holy objects, and, wherever they went, they carried Peter's power. Diplomats could use them to curry favor. They were assets to be possessed, traded, and occasionally given— all because they had spent a period of time in a certain place, the greatest of places. Today, Americans pay a fortune so their son or daughter can spend four years in Cambridge, Durham, Providence, Ithaca, Palo Alto, or Hanover. Afterward, we are told, these former children can go into the world, carrying with them a fragment of destiny that, if not catapulting them into the heights of prestige, success and fame, will at least provide them a safety net stationed, in the context of history, inordinately high.
But not all such destinations are created equal. Harvard is without a doubt the Iviest of the Ivies. Proud and famous Yalie William F. Buckley, Jr. noted that seventy percent of applicants accepted to both Harvard and Yale choose the former. It exemplifies that room-shaking brand name that Buzzflood acolytes lust after. You must know of it, unless you somehow missed the films Love Story, Legally Blonde, Stealing Harvard and How High. Dartmouth quickly reminds visitors to its website that it is a member of a distinguished organization called the Ivy League. Harvard does not. That would demean it. One afternoon, a family acquaintance asked me where I planned on going to college. Hearing my answer, she replied, "Oh. But I thought you were going to go to someplace like Harvard?" She omitted the obvious: only Harvard is a place like Harvard. If it serves as today's relics of St. Peter, then Dartmouth is the body of St. Mark: important, historically independent, wildly popular among its devotees, unique but not nearly as holy.
So, a depiction the meritocratic elite in their undergraduate nascence will necessarily touch on or perhaps be obsessed with Harvard. Ross Gregory Douthat, a member of Harvard's class of 2002, engages in the latter, dissecting Harvard the idea and Harvard the place, blending research and social observation with personal experience. Privilege, as the title suggests, arrives at the glum conclusion that despite having ostensibly shed the system of schools as means to beget the next generation of WASP aristocrats, Harvard still nurtures a world of more subtle privilege that may in some ways be worse. It is "an incubator for an American ruling class that is smug, stratified, self-congratulatory, and intellectually adrift." The association of merit with privilege, he argues, is what makes this group so different and potentially harmful. They know that they deserve the opportunities before them. Previous ruling classes were based on birth; thence came guilt and the idea of noblesse oblige. On this main point, Douthat is convincing. Nobles of the past were at least noble. Today's system of equal opportunity but unequal achievement can breed jerks.
On my tour of Harvard, which consisted of a frenetic throng of question-posing parents and their slightly embarrassed offspring/investments desperately trailing an unfazed guide, a woman tripped on the Cambridge curb and fell flat on her face. Dozens of determined adults, brows furrowed and notepads handy, streamed by her with nary a glance. She remained in that position until my father lent her a hand. I suppose, in those educational tourists' minds, this woman had unfortunately failed. It was pitiable, her tumble, but this was a meritocracy, for Christ's sake, and, if they didn't stand in the aura of that tour guide, occasionally interjecting to demonstrate their college admissions savvy, well, that could cost Junior his acceptance to the World's Greatest University. From then on, it's straight to the gutter—that is, those pretender schools that promise, like all colleges, an education but cannot provide what truly matters: a first-class ticket to The Top, that great parlor room in the sky. It was an absurd little incident, but it lingered in my mind as the definition of Harvard: an institution so important that it rendered common decency a hindrance.
Naked ambition has not always so pervaded American culture. In particular, one can recall the ideal of Cincinnatus, embodied by Washington, the Roman general who gave up his farming to serve the Republic, crushed its enemies, and stepped down afterwards, fulfilling his obligations but refusing to claim achievement. Today, such suppression of ambition and political abnegation exists only rhetorically. There's Howard Dean listing the states where "we" will go before erupting into a revealingly primal yell . It's as Christopher Lasch says in the book's epigraph: "Meritocracy is a parody of democracy." They're at odds but pretend not to be. Merit depends on the losers; you can grow up to be president, but, realistically speaking, you won't.
Douthat attempts to illustrate such a society. The result is a sprawling account of various aspects of the school, each chapter built around a personal experience and dealing with a particular theme. Several times, the combination is perfect, straddling history and anecdote, remarkably marrying the general and the particular. At the other times, I sense that Douthat wanted to include a particular story for no other reason than he found it amusing, the kind of incident that probably belongs in some sort of book. Other, entire chapters seem to have little to do with privilege.
He addresses diversity, perhaps the cardinal virtue of higher education today. Diversity means the representation ethnic or racial groups within the class. The shared rationale was articulated most famously by Justice Lewis Powell in University of California Regents v. Bakke (1978), in which he contended that because education is "a special concern of the First Amendment" and a diverse student body enhances education, affirmative action could be justified. Presumably, there were several educational benefits of ethnic diversity. First, the good ol' boy who wandered onto campus from Dixie would realize that the ethnic groups he once deemed categorically worthless were, in fact, not. Second, different ethnicities have different experiences, and because, the refrain goes, the best learning occurs outside the classroom, talking to your fellow classmates can educate you. You can learn more from bathing in a richer stew of experiences. That refrain is certainly wrong: consider how much knowledge you have gained from gabbing with that girl on your floor compared to what you have gathered from lectures, labs, papers and other forms of book learning. It's hardly a contest.
But Douthat exposes the more damning flaw of the diversity doctrine. The suite across from his, he noticed, was a microcosm of ethnic diversity: a black guy from the South, two children of immigrants, and a WASP schooled at Groton. Eventually though, the suite would fragment. Damian felt alienated from the rest because he was black, but more importantly, because he came from the South and, compared to the Groton kids, was poor. A strange episode that's exciting enough not to reveal here eventually brought matters to a head, and Damian fled to the affinity groups, which allow students to interact, if they choose, only with people of their ethnicity. From this, one might gather that racial groups have such diverging worldviews that they cannot possibly interact normally. Not so, for Ross's own suite was nearly as 'diverse,' yet they shared key commonalities: relative affluence, education at prep schools, and former residence in what is called 'blue America.' You can't gauge diversity of experience by diversity of skin color. Thus, for Douthat, Harvard's version of diversity did not educate, but nor did it divide; it did nothing but solidify pre-existing values and provide some wicked brochure photo-ops. Harvard, he says, "is a place filled with haute bourgeois students from the professional and creative classes"—Bobos, perhaps—who are asked to mingle with a few truly different people, underprivileged students who are asked to serve as "seasoning in the rice." How delectable.
It's significant, though, that Douthat challenges diversity doctrine on its own terms. It is bad, he contends, not because it fails to meet some outdated conservative value standard, but because it establishes its own goal and clearly fails to meet it. This is a common pattern in Privilege. Douthat calls himself a conservative, but he often arrives at conclusions that the capitalistic right might find unpalatable. After all, this is a critique of today's class stratification. Nevertheless, many reviews of this book note early on that Douthat is a young conservative. How juicy, how revealing, what a skeleton key, what a useful prism though which the unsympathetic reader can continually justify his scorn. There's nothing wrong with hating those who use conservatism as a crutch, of course, but Douthat does not. He shows disdain for the technocapitalistic nineties as a time of unbridled exuberance. His most liberal feature is his class anxiety, a nervous gaze downward, which manifests itself as guilt but, tellingly, never as action.
The living wage movement particularly affected his moral conscience. The Progressive Student Labor Movement organized a 21-day sit-in in the President's office demanding that the University pay its employees at least $10.25 per hour. At this point came the revelation. There were two kinds of campus conservatives. There were the lifelong Republicans who seek careers in politics and care about elections. The other type tends to write for the conservative campus newspaper, engaging in the war of ideas but feeling alienated from his own GOP roots as befits a college student. Douthat, as the eventual editor of the Harvard Salient, fell into the latter camp; he wanted "something nobler than the Heritage Foundation, more ancient than FOX News." He compares his admiration for the past, "stripped of its squalor and brutality, with only the finer, higher things remaining," which he acknowledged probably never existed, to leftist fascination with Revolution, the spark of progress.
From that position, he surveyed the left; they, too, were divided. On the one hand were parlor liberals who believed in certain decidedly liberal things but remained "creatures of their class." These are those whom some conservatives call 'liberal elites,' who, legend has it, write op-eds decrying tax cuts while searching with their tongue for lingering morsels of foie gras lodged between their front incisors. In contrast, street liberals, the heirs of the late sixties, stage protests, sign petitions, build houses in Nicaragua, Teach for America. They, unlike the parlorites, escaped the black hole of Boboism. "While the parlor liberals basked in the rising Dow and the wiring of the world," he explained, "the street liberals pointed to the misery of migrant workers and sweatshop slaves..." The street people, he realized, were strident, nutty and unfocused in their argumentation, but at least they were honest, at least they weren't merely posturing for a chance to ride the next big thing. They were true believers.
He came to agree with the street liberals on the living wage issue, for he felt that meritocracy was "something that had to do with greed and ambition and corruption, with the lavish spreads that awaited us at McKinsey and Bain recruiting sessions and the hollow-eyed weariness of the immigrant women who cleaned up the mess afterward." The framework seemed just but the everyday experiences, the act of being waited upon, serviced and furnished, seemed too much to bear.
For answers, Douthat is inclined to follow the money, not unlike a Marxist. In another episode, he describes Suzanne Pomey, a popular campus celeb who threw lavish parties on her own tab. She ran prestigious clubs and an exclusive sorority, but was arrested for embezzling funds from them her senior year. She had sustained her spending habits in this way, and she hailed not from an elite prep school as all had presumed but from rural Kentucky. She was some sort of fascinatingly archetypical combination of Charlotte Simmons and Jay Gatsby. Yet her sheer will to maintain the veneer of affluence almost carried her to the finish line. Douthat could never maintain this veneer despite his New England prep school background. His attempts to join one of Harvard's finals clubs (in effect, fraternities), were foiled by his reticence, his unease among the wealthy. Yet, he observed, as easy as it was to dismiss these Yacht Club spawn and their little organizations, he retained a desperate need to be part of that world. Class is not so easily laughed away.
Douthat also addresses academics. Grade inflation abounded; students, particularly in the humanities, got by with procrastination and a talent for nonsense; and the Core Curriculum could be appeased by taking the most ludicrous of classes. It's a common, legitimate grievance: that Harvard students can sail through four years and ascend onto their meritocratic thrones. More interesting and original, however, is Douthat's opinion of the humanities. He contends that its acceptance of postmodernism, a denial of the ability to know absolute truth, constituted a surrender to science, crowning it the supreme field. Only empiricism and intense specificity, not generalization or consideration, can tell us anything useful. Thus, students write term papers for history classes on the brutally specific, the esoteric, the obscure. Only such myopic observations, they are taught to be lieve, are permissible.
Thus, Douthat posits, the humanities have made themselves irrelevant. "They don't make the effort to translate their particular work—which may be excellent—to the most pressing task of an undergraduate education, which is to provide a general education, a liberal arts education, to future doctors and bankers and lawyers and diplomats." He goes on to quote Allan Bloom, from whom he borrows heavily. These observations are interesting, but they don't deal with privilege as such. Certainly, some cynical future I-bankers take little or nothing from their undergraduate experiences, but, if what Douthat says is true, many intellectuals have also been duped out of an education. This may be a topic for a different book.
Other sections ignore privilege more blatantly. An episode in which he goes sailing with Bill and Pat Buckley sounds like a jolly good time, but it contains little insight compared to other passages. His chapters on love and sex present numerous anecdotes—some hilarious, some painful to read— that don't really add up to any remarkable observations about the meritocratic class. Consider these excerpts: "Rachel looked at me strangely, then suddenly she bent and began sucking—slowly, languorously—on my fingers." "... her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to breathe." "She would come up behind me while I was working at my computer and nibble discreetly at my ears, or brush her lips and tongue across my fingers when I least expected it." God in heaven, make it stop. Of course, I have myself considered cataloguing the panoply of my amours; such a page-turner would guarantee my economic comfort for years to come. It's confounding, though, how others' tales of necking don't interest you as much as your own. More significantly, they don't even enhance your social observation. These chapters read like diary entries mixed with a more flippant and shorter version of I Am Charlotte Simmons. At least David Brooks didn't choose to describe his make out sessions with assorted Bobos.
Speaking of Brooks, to whom the dustcover of Privilege, pays special attention, his Bobos in Paradise, published five years before, provides what is perhaps the most important rebuttal to Douthat's indictment of privilege disguised as justice. "Members of the educated class can never be secure about their children's future. The kids have some domestic and educational advantages—all those tutors and developmental toys—but they still have to work through school and ace the SATs just to achieve the same social rank as their parents." They have advantages, but in the end, bubbles must be penciled in, all-nighters must be pulled, facts must be learned, and admissions officers must be schmoozed with. People rise in status a la Horatio Alger, but students can also fall in one generation. Dynasties persist but are increasingly ephemeral, and they must be continuously remade by the children.
Even if this is not convincing, even if the meritocratic elite begin with privilege, was that privilege not, at least today, earned by previous generations, precisely so they could bequeath it to their descendants? As John Adams wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." Didn't my grandparents and parents immigrate, surmount xenophobia, accrue debt, join the military, climb out of poverty, attend school and work hard precisely so I could comfortably sit here and write self-indulgent, introspective sentences like this one?
But even if Douthat buys these objections, they do not confront his central point. I don't believe he wants a classless society, if his nostalgia for the past is any proof; he objects to the dearth of obligation in this society. In contrast to Cincinnatus, the founders also put forth a model in which ambitious individuals would cancel one another out, serving the common good exactly because it would augment their own glory. Douthat challenges the moral implications of that model, which denies the possibility of conscious civic virtue. In one of Privilege's striking passages, he describes his reaction to the attacks of September 11th, which was initially unmitigated horror but grew into horror tempered with the hope that this event might propel a pampered and self-obsessed generation into action, giving as much as it had received, taking up its charge and living its finest hour. But "there was no call from Washington, no draft, not even an appeal for volunteers; we were told to resume our normal lives, not asked to take up arms. And so we did." This sentiment may seem to be excessive guilt or perhaps masochism masquerading as nobility. To some extent, it is wildly ungrateful to resent a hard-earned gift from previous generations. Yet Privilege, purged of certain anecdotes, eloquently discourages us from feeling too smug, from forgetting that success is a means to something higher. That's rather important.