On Sheep and Other Mammals

When I graduated from high school in 2017, William Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep: The Mis-Education of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life was taking the world of higher education by storm. Excellent Sheep was given to me as a graduation gift and I have returned to it many times throughout my three years at Dartmouth. 

Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, wrote this book after becoming extremely disillusioned with his Ivy League students. Contrary to what reviews of the book might lead you to believe, Deresiewicz does not “skewer” or revile these students—he pities them. Deresiewicz expresses his concern that with the combination of pushy parents, personal drive put in overdrive, and a commodified of the college experience, America’s brightest young minds have become soulless academic robots.  Consequently, both their intellectual and personal lives lack depth, leaving the students unhappy and unfulfilled. 

Specific examples of the “robotification” of students include students making poor value assessments with their time. Students will spend 10 to 12 extra hours studying alone to make up the difference between 93 and a 96 on an exam instead of investing their time in enriching extracurriculars or in any way meaningfully engaging with what Deresiewicz calls the most valuable part of their “elite” education—community and conversation with their peers. These choices make students robots in Deresiewicz’s eyes and put them on a path diametrically opposed to the path “towards a meaningful life.”  But what makes them sheep? 

Deresiewicz argues that these elite students are sheep because, bright and insightful as they are, they know what they are doing to themselves or what others are doing to them but they insist on following the herd anyway.  They are content to go along passively on the road to unhappiness rather than to take a stand for meaning in their own lives and for true value in there supposedly “elite” education.

I have loved this book so much over the years because I have found it such valuable perennial evidence I am making the right decisions with my education and making them for the right reasons. The decision I have been most pleased with by far is my decision to come to Dartmouth. Despite the broad strokes the Ivies are painted in in the book, I have always found Dartmouth to be a truly soulfulplace. I believe the majority of students are pursuing a life well-lived and true value from their education.  Thus I would argue that Dartmouth students, either by innate virtue or conditioned response, lack the robotic and the commodifying tendencies that Deresiewicz describes in other Ivy Leaguers and which I have observed in friends at other elite institutions. 

That being said,  I am dismayed by the commodification of education and “robotfication” of self I have observed in some of my peers over the course of this remote term. Some of these changes are unavoidable.  Our online interactions are necessary though they grate on us all. We are all attempting to make the best of our Zoom classes despite the universal recognition that this is a very poor replacement for a true Dartmouth term. However, I would actually argue that this is actually an extremely expensive replacement for a true Dartmouth term—both the monetary and opportunity costs are exorbitant. 

Dartmouth,  like essentially every other school in America, is charging full tuition this spring. I am not against that decision—this situation is completely unexpected and people are doing the best they can to adapt without sending the College into a financial black hole.  What I find shocking is my peers’ willingness to shell out for additional online terms, and what that decision reveals about their attitudes towards educational value.

When I begin to question my friends as to why they aren’t jumping ship on the online summer term, answer that I get is always the same—“What else would I do?”  This response truly turns my stomach.  After just a couple of months of online school, some of the most creative,  proactive, and engaging people I know seem to have lost all ability to see a world beyond their computer screens. Any kind of engaging pursuit, be that volunteering in their communities, acquiring a new skill, leaning a new language, or working on a thesis, has lost all appeal to them. They now paying for online school when they could just wait an retire to Dartmouth later is a waste of money and time, but they don’t care— “I don’t what to put my life on hold,” they cry! My response: “But what are you rushing towards?”

These students’ lives have become those of the sheep that Deresiewicz describes—an endless trudged towards the finish line. It’s the get the degree and get out mentality—the belief that as long as you get the A, actually learning something or building meaning relationships with classmates or professors is of comparatively little value. 

For the first time rereading this book, I now feel the ache that Deresiewicz described during his time teaching at Yale. People I love and admire are becoming shells of themselves in front of my eyes.  How on Earth can, gifted, young, healthy Dartmouth students believe that the only thing for them to do in the world is watch YouTube videos?  Because let’s be very clear,  that’s what these classes are. YouTube videos are what you are paying $20,000 a term for. Quite literally, more than one Dartmouth class this term that is literally solely assigning YouTube videos that are given by professors at other schools and are already available for free online. So in the coldest possible terms, speaking to a newly robotic audience, how do you justify this expense?  

Even if you reject Deresiewicz’s premise that the most valuable aspect of an elite education is the community, even if you say that the only thing you were paying for was the classes, why would you pay $20,000 each term after this one? Large segments of the Dartmouth community may well be online until the winter or the spring, paying for educations that they could receive for free, why? The answer is clear, these students are paying for a degree not an education. For the privilege of keeping your life moving at a swift clip towards meaninglessness, you are paying thousands of dollars for a piece of paper. When compared with the depth of a true  Dartmouth education, I can’t imagine anything that would seem flatter.