Poverty is such a hard council! Jesus says to the rich man to sell everything that he has and follow him. He tells us to live off of begging and not to worry about tomorrow, and to give to whomever asks us. John Chrysostom said that there is nothing wrong with wealth as long as it is all given to the poor. St. Francis devoted himself to “Lady Poverty” and poverty is virtuous for the Franciscans in and of itself. St. Thomas thought that poverty was not itself a virtue, but embraced it as a means to other virtues. John Wesley said that the only reason to make as much money as you can is to give it all away, since heaven depended on it.
But it seems such a waste! Even for those of us who are convinced that poverty is indeed the way that God would have us live, even for those of us who have slowly come to reject the quest for comfort and the ideal of acquisitiveness to which we are habituated, poverty seems a council so far away. It is simply the case that very few of us, even when turned to face Lady Poverty, will do what Jesus said and simply sell everything we have worked so hard for and live as paupers.
There seems even to be a nagging query whether this is really the way God would have us live. Poverty - how foolish! How idealistic! Utopian! Wouldn’t it be better if we kept up a decent standard of living and gave much away? Think of all the suffering we could help stop. We must be “responsible” with what we are given after all. And yet the entire tradition and Our Lord at its head continually and patiently beacons us beyond.
So, all right, things are hard to give up. Comfort. Possessions. Privacy! It takes a gigantic soul to make a sudden move like St. Francis to abruptly sell and give all. For most of us the ascent to Lady Poverty will be gradual if at all. But God draws us along and one way he does this is by giving us friends. One thing we all know about friends is that they lean on each other. One’s abundance supplies another’s lack. Now one in one way, later the other in another – not keeping accounts or counting losses, since a friend’s good can never be my loss. This is an integral part of friendship. We all know of relationships that feel more like contracts, and these we do not really call our friends.
And so God helps us along especially by giving us friends who are materially poor. This is a true way to holy poverty. But I still mean friendships in a deep sense. I do not mean that all the poor should be our friends and so we should give to them. True as that may be, that is not much more likely than St. Francis’ conversion. And its not sufficiently personal. I mean friends that are really friends in the normal sense. Folks we’ve gotten to know over a long period of time. Whose back-stories, likes, dislikes, temperaments, loves, hates, vices and virtues we know. Whom we like to eat with, drink with, laugh and cry with.
The prospect of making a new friend is much less daunting than giving up everything I have. It is gentle, slow, joyful, familiar, open-ended. And, of course, as we make friends, if our friends are poor materially, then our goods will supply their lack. A friend may need food or shelter or clothing. These I have and these I will of course provide without a second thought, since her good is my own good. I may need a talk, a laugh, or a cry, and these she will give not keeping cost.
And slowly I begin to see emerge vaguely the nascent pattern of my own material poverty. This month I ate beans and rice everyday, took every free meal I could, tried not to eat between meals to save money on groceries. I couldn’t drive cause I was out of gas. I couldn’t eat out or go to the bar. I begged for some rent money from my parish. These trivial sacrifices are joyfully made since they allow me to supply my friends’ lack – to give a room, to make a pot of soup. They in their turn – not of course as repayment, but as my friends - keep up the house, pet the dog, bring home food when they have it, offer me a beer, keep an eye my bike, share their life-philosophies. None of us count the costs. “Cost” is, in fact, a strange way of putting it.
Thereby God is making us poor. He’s taking our superfluous stuff. It’s the same end as St. Francis attained after church that day by selling and giving, but the means are different. I could never call this a waste. It’d be hard for anyone who has ever had a friend, or a child, or a parent for that matter, to call this irresponsible. This is just what’s in our bones to do.
And of course all of this is just to say what Aristotle knew 2300 years ago, that friends are the key to virtue, which St. Thomas would later translate into St. Augustine’s terms: the path to holiness begins and ends with loving one’s neighbor.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friendship and Voluntary Poverty
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Roundtable: Prudent Finances
A roundtable discussion I would like to have in the near future would discuss the question: What is it to be Christianly prudent with our money?
[In general, I think having discussions like this when there is nothing immediately pressing (except salvation) is a good way for it to be fun and lively and for none to feel too pressed. We are not talking about what we have to do tomorrow, but for the clarification of thought. Then when the rubber meets the road we already have something under our belts.]
In this case I offer two exhibits around which maybe we could center discussion.
First, the Sermon on the Mount, and especially Matthew 6:19-7:29. If we assume that this has a lot to do with our finances, or even that Jesus is actually talking about money the whole time, where do we go with it?
The second could be seen as one possible practical interpretation of Jesus’ teaching – an excerpt from Dorothy’s House of Hospitality.
What are the strengths and weaknesses this early Catholic Worker model?
We were looking over our last accounting which we sent out to our friends last September and we noted that not only has our circulation doubled, but the number of people being fed has quintupled. This means that the printing bill is $450 a month, and that the food bill for the Charles Street place and the country place combined is about fifty a week, or $200 a month. That includes fifteen quarts of milk a day, and it isn't we hale and hearty ones who drink it, but the children and invalids, of which latter there are always about four.
And lest this large grocery bill, which our readers pay after all, staggers them, let us count ourselves up.
Down in the country there are ten children right now, aged six to fourteen, and their appetites increase and multiply with the days at the seashore. (During the summer we took care of fifty children altogether.) Then there are seven adults, which makes seventeen people sitting down to a meal three times a day, or fifty-one meals served a day--3,060 for the months of July and August. (But there are more than that, often fifty people over the weekends.) Of course, the midday meal is not rightly a meal, but just sandwiches, peanut butter or tomato, and either cocoa or milk, and you should see the bread and butter fly.
As for the Charles Street quarters, there are sixteen people living there and they've been on a long fast during the summer. Those who come back from the country tell of delicious lemon meringue pies, not to speak of ordinary food, and city workers lick their chops (especially Big Dan, whose large bulk is hard to satisfy on oatmeal in the morning, sandwiches, and not too many of them, at noon, and vegetable stew in the evening).
In addition to the sixteen living in the house, there are the two married couples living in little apartments and eating at home, whose rents and grocery bills, gas and electric, must also be paid. Also there are half a dozen coming in to eat at the office who do not live here. Rents total $150, whereas last year they were $62, and the combined gas and electricity amount to $25; laundry, $15; telephones, $ 18; mailing and express, $75. And as this month's paper comes out there is another printing bill of $450, and the rent goes on and so do the groceries. Disregarding the latter two items, we are faced with our large bills (there are other little ones) of $1,403 and nothing in the bank to pay them.
This, then, is the holy poverty we are always talking about. This is the insecurity which we do most firmly believe it is good for us to have.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
NY Times Blog Challenges the Market!
The New York Times has posted a video blog entry in the Opinion section by author Douglas Rushkoff that discusses some differences between Medieval monetary systems and our own. Click here.
The blog entry is basically a plug for his new book Life, Inc. (June, 2009) which also looks very interesting as it seems to cover a lot of the same ground as some of our favorite people (Bell, Franks, Long, Milbank, and of course the sources: Aquinas and Jesus). I think it is telling that the book gets a poor review from Publishers Weekly (displayed on the Amazon.com page) that includes the line:
"His unsupported and flawed assumption that societal interdependence is a natural or even preferable state for all people, everywhere, his disdain for filthy lucre and joyless recasting of independence as selfishness will leave readers weary long before the end." [my italics]
Need I say more about its overlap with St. Thomas?
We should probably read this book, as it is probably going to have a far wider readership that St. Thomas.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
St. Thomas Aquinas' Prayer to Acquire the Virtues
For numerous reasons I thought that now might be an appropriate time to post this beautiful and timeless prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274 A.D.) for the acquisition of the virtues. For those who regularly visit or contribute to our blog, I would encourage you to join me in committing to pray this prayer along with St. Thomas daily through the end of June. And, just so that no one misses it, be sure to click on "Read More" for the whole thing. Peace to you all and may we, like St. Thomas, learn what it means to be more fully conformed to the image of Christ through lives virtuously lived.
A Prayer to Acquire the Virtues
“O God, all-powerful and all-knowing, without beginning and without end, You Who are the source, the sustainer, and the rewarder of all virtues,
Grant that [we] may abide on the firm ground of faith, be sheltered by an impregnable shield of hope, and be adorned in the bridal garment of charity.
Grant that [we] may through justice be subject to You, through prudence avoid the beguilements of the devil, through temperance exercise restraint, and through fortitude endure adversity with patience.
Grant that whatever good things [we] have, [we] may share generously with those who have not and that whatever good things [we] do not have, [we] may request humbly from those who do.
Grant that [we] may judge rightly the evil of the wrongs [we] have done and bear calmly the punishments [we] have brought upon [ourselves], and that [we] may never envy [our] neighbor’s possessions and ever give thanks for Your good things.
Grant that [we] may always observe modesty in the way [we] dress, the way [we] walk, and the gestures [we] use, restrain [our] tongue[s] from frivolous talk, prevent [our] feet from leading [us] astray, keep [our] eyes from wandering glances, shelter [our] ears from rumors, lower [our] gaze in humility, lift [our] mind[s] to thoughts of heaven, contemn all that will pass away, and love You only.
Grant that [we] may subdue [our] flesh and cleanse [our] conscience, honor the saints and praise You worthily, advance in goodness, and end a life of good works with a holy death.
Plant deep in [us], Lord, all the virtues, that [we] might be devout in divine matters, discerning in human affairs, and burdensome to no one in fulfilling [our] own bodily needs.
Grant to [us], Lord, fervent contrition, pure confession, and complete reparation.
Order [us] inwardly through a good life, that [we] might do what is right and what will be meritorious for [us] and a good example for others.
Grant that [we] may never crave to do things impulsively, nor disdain to do what is burdensome, lest [we] begin things before [we] should or abandon them before finishing.”
Amen.
Aquinas, Thomas. The Aquinas Prayer Book: The Prayers and Hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas. ed. Robert Anderson and Johann Moser. (Manchester: Sophia Institute Press, 2000), 33-40.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
The following article comes from William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar. To access it in full, click here. I have included the first part of it for the blog as I think it is tangentially relevant to our interests at de pauperum in numerous ways (e.g., it addresses issues of ambition, wealth and class; it is apropos to we three Dukies who maintain the blog; etc.). The remaining portion I will leave the reader to look up and review for herself, as it largely and unfortunately devolves into individualistic drivel from that point onward (some of which is minimally forecast in what I have cited below). At any rate, I commend the excised section below to your contemplation and personal application.
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. 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. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
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. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
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. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.
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. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.
What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.
At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”
The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.
That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.
Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.
Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.
If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?
Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.
But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
