Julia Harte | Vertigo in the ivory tower

William Deresiewicz lost some illusions recently.

The Yale English professor emeritus says so in an essay entitled "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" in the most recent issue of The American Scholar.

As Deresiewicz tells it, his own elite education induced him "to believe that people who didn't go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren't worth talking to, regardless of their class."

He opens the piece by recounting his conversation, or lack thereof, with a plumber five years ago.

"I suddenly learned that I didn't have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him," confesses Deresiewicz. "So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn't succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work."

So he lost the foolish illusion that people who didn't attend Ivies weren't worth talking to - and instead realized that he had nothing to say to them. He and they share, after all, no common experience, values, or language.

It's hard for me to decide which misapprehension is more incorrect, or, indeed, more arrogant.

Deresiewicz argues that Ivy League universities instill the following traits in their graduates: a falsely aggrandized sense of personal merit, a belief that lower-paying jobs would be a waste of their intellect and an aversion to intellectual curiosity.

Christina Hsu, a rising senior at Yale, acknowledges that some of her peers believe their Ivy status entitles them to special social prestige.

"But that's only true depending on the personality that the student had in the first place, before they got to Yale," says Hsu. "If they feel that they're superior in high school, they're more likely to work harder - they get into an Ivy League because they're like that to begin with."

And Hsu thinks only a minority of students at Yale actually believe their academic prowess indicates, in Deresiewicz's words, their own "moral or metaphysical" self-worth.

Granted, I have seen Penn students cringe at the prospect of venturing into West Philadelphia beyond 43rd Street. I have seen some pursue careers for which they have little passion, or retreat into esoteric knowledge rather than engage in open debate.

I don't dispute the fact that the attitudes Deresiewicz describes are manifest in some Ivy League graduates. But they are also manifest in graduates of community colleges, state schools, and small liberal arts colleges.

Indeed, Becky Davies, a rising junior who transferred into Columbia last year from Williams College, says she encountered elitism "more at Williams than at Columbia, even though Williams is smaller and less well-known."

Furthermore, Davies hasn't encountered any Columbia students who consider themselves "superior people, in a holistic sense."

Eager to surprise the sinister vanity lurking behind every aspect of elite schools, however, Deresiewicz contends that their snobbish attitude "is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms ... Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect."

Yet almost all schools, elite and otherwise, are perfectly literal about the fact that they only grant admission to an elect group of students; most, given the chance, flaunt low admission rates.

The truly astonishing element of this passage is Deresiewicz's implication that all non-elite colleges are not walled domains with standards of admission - that they, perhaps, instead throw open their doors to anyone who wishes to partake of the charmingly proletariat education therein.

Deresiewicz has pulled off the well-worn academic maneuver of simultaneously criticizing and adopting the same stance: the presumption that elite schools and students should meet higher "moral or metaphysical" standards than the non-elite.

Of course, I may be mistaken. He's obviously concerned about the breakdown of communication between those educated within Ivy-covered walls and the rest of the country. Perhaps Deresiewicz has published an essay in the next issue of Plumbing & Mechanical Magazine bewailing the inability of its readership to engage passing pedants in conversation, or written a treatise on the anti-intellectual tendencies promoted in community colleges.

In a revealing attempt to attribute his elitism to Columbia University, Deresiewicz claims that, while a student there, "I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to elite colleges."

He arrived at Columbia, in other words, needing to be taught that not everyone who doesn't attend an elite school is an idiot.

I'm no longer surprised that he now blames elite universities for his inflated senses of entitlement and self-worth. It's easy to pin such embarrassing attributes on institutions.

It's harder to examine the illusions one brings to them in the first place.

Julia Harte is a rising College senior from Berkeley, C.A. Her e-mail is jharte@dailypennsylvanian.com

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