[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
William Deresiewicz
New York: Free Press, 2014
245 pp., $26.00 pb
Henry Gonshak, PhD
Professor of English and History
Montana Tech of the University of Montana
In 2008, just after he'd been denied tenure at Yale, William Deresiewicz published an essay in The American Scholar entitled, "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education." As its title implies, the essay argued that the Ivy Leagues were producing students who were shallow careerists, obsessed with the money and status they were sure would be conferred on them by their degrees, rather than seeing their education as a chance to acquire the breadth of knowledge and self-awareness the humanities have traditionally provided. Given The American Scholar's small circulation, Deresiewicz expected his article to reach a limited audience composed mostly of fellow academics. Instead, as the author reports in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (an expansion of the essay into a book), after only a few weeks the piece had been viewed over a hundred thousand times, with many more viewings to come in the months and years ahead.
Deresiewicz realized he'd struck a nerve. "As it turned out from the many emails I began to get," he writes, "the vast majority from current students and recent graduates, I had evoked a widespread discontent among today's young high achievers—a sense that the system was cheating them out of a meaningful education, instilling them with values they rejected but somehow couldn't get beyond, and failing to equip them to construct their futures" (3).
Excellent Sheep is divided into two long sections. The first discusses what Deresiewicz sees as wrong with today's Ivy League (and, by extension, with much of higher education in general). The second section outlines Deresiewicz's prescription for a college education he argues should replace the current system. It's unfortunate that Deresiewicz chooses to focus narrowly on the Ivy Leagues because his incisive analysis is highly relevant to academia as a whole. On the other hand, since the Ivy Leagues are generally seen as the pinnacle of American higher education, and since these schools contribute much of the country's leadership class, perhaps the author's focus is justified. In any event, Excellent Sheep, while not perfect, is an extremely important book that anyone concerned about the American university should read.
Deresiewicz's portrait of the typical Ivy League student will ring true for many professors, and not only at Harvard and Yale. Such a student has been groomed almost from birth by his or her parents to enter the Ivy League. The author maintains that starting in the 1980s "the decade saw the explosion of the college admissions industry: test prep, tutors, guidebooks, consultants" (34). Especially wealthy parents spent hundreds of dollars preparing their children for the SATs and other standardized tests, while pressuring their offspring to take as many Advanced Placement courses as possible, rack up extracurricular activities—anything to pad their résuméés. Such opportunism also abounds in the composition of college application essays, says Deresiewicz, where "experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function," as students learn "to commodify [their] experiences for the application" (57). In other words, rather than having experiences and then writing about them, students have experiences in order to supply them with topics for an application essay.
Like many other recent books on higher education (e.g., Gerald Graff's excellent Professing Literature: An Institutional History, 1987), Excellent Sheep discerns a basic conflict between the two primary models for the contemporary American university: the British "teaching college" and the German research university. While the British system focuses on student instruction, mostly conveyed through small-group tutorials, the German model sees the university's primary function as the production of professor-scholars who then pursue research far too advanced to be understood by the average American undergraduate. In Deresiewicz's estimation, the German model has won out in America. He detects a strong anti-teaching bias, especially in the Ivy Leagues, where promotion is determined almost exclusively according to the "publish or perish" imperative, and star professors are given so much release time to do their research that they rarely see an actual underclassman. In particular, introductory courses (which Deresiewicz views as the most important in the entire curriculum) are largely taught by untenured junior professors, or by ill-prepared, woefully underpaid adjunct instructors. Indeed, adjuncts compose the most rapidly growing population among college teachers, since, in our depressed economy, when university budgets have been cut, this is by far the cheapest way to instruct students.
Deresiewicz also questions the common claim made by elite schools that they educate a "diverse" student body, one whose placement in these select institutions has been determined by individual "merit," rather than, as in the past, by wealth and privilege. The author concedes that today's Ivy League students, rather than belonging to a WASP aristocracy as they used to, are diverse in terms of geography, ethnicity, religion and gender. But he insists they almost all share one thing in common: just like the old WASP aristocracy, most of them are rich. Deresiewicz argues that the Ivy League's financial aid policies are skewed toward the undeserving: "Since SAT scores closely correlate with family wealth, that means more money to kids who don't need it and less to those who do" (68). As for the Ivy League's alleged "diversity," Deresiewicz claims that "diversity of sex and race has become a cover, even an alibi, for increasing economic resegregation. …Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri, another one from Pakistan, or one plays the cello and the other lacrosse—never mind that all of them have parents who are bankers and doctors. They aren't meeting 'all kinds of people,' as they like to say. They're meeting the same kind of people; they just happen to come from all kinds of places" (209 & 210). Thus, Deresiewicz sees the Ivy Leagues as contributing, deliberately or not, to the class stratification and economic inequality that increasingly plague American society, as many liberal pundits and politicians (including President Obama) have lamented.
Deresiewicz notes the dramatic shift in student majors from the 1960s to the present. "The dreaded English major is now the choice of all of 3 percent," he reports. "Business, at 21 percent, accounts for more than half again as many majors as all of the arts and humanities combined." He sees this change in majors as reflecting a shift in students' core beliefs: "In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it was essential or very important to 'develop a meaningful philosophy of life,' 37 percent to be 'very well-off financially' (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we've been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job" (79).
The author views academia's current craze for on-line education, which, in its most drastic form, has produced MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), whereby thousands of students are taught by a "master teacher" through their computers, as another example of how our educational system worsens economic and class divisions: "Students complain that their professors are remote, so we're going to make them more remote (literally so, in fact). …They need challenging assignments and detailed, individualized feedback, so we're going to give them multiple-choice quizzes that we grade by machine. …[MOOCs] promote a range of practices and behaviors that higher education ought to fight against: passive learning, diminished attention, the displacing of reading by watching, teaching as showmanship, and the professorial star system. …MOOCs are not about democratizing education. That is just their cover story. They're about reinforcing existing hierarchies...as the higher education market lurches and heaves. The kids at Harvard get to interact with their professors. The kids at San Jose State get to watch the kids at Harvard interact with their professors" (185-186). He also notes, "Only about 4 percent of students who start [a MOOC] actually finish it, but most of these are adult learners who already have degrees and are looking for enrichment or new skills—people, that is, who are capable of directing their own education. Yet that is exactly what kids go to college to learn how to do" (187).
Moreover, since the Ivy Leagues largely produce America's leadership class, the shift to more vocationally-oriented study that satisfies students' rabid career goals has produced leaders who are really "followers," obsessed with climbing the social ladder, an endeavor that demands social conformity, rather than working for the public good, or becoming gadflies who provide much-needed critiques of our culture. Deresiewicz quotes the academic and public intellectual Mark Edmundson: "What people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge. Leaders tend to be...little grown-ups who don't challenge the big grown-ups who run the place" (135). Clearly, this state of affairs is bad news for American democracy.
What are Deresiewicz's solutions to these dismal circumstances? Basically, he advocates adopting an educational system that is the polar opposite of the one currently in place. Primarily, he supports a curriculum focused on the liberal arts, rather than on career-oriented fields like business and economics. Excellent Sheep devotes many pages to touting the virtues of a humanistic education. Deresiewicz quotes the poet John Keats, who said the world is a "vale of Soul-making," in order to argue that this vital transformation is facilitated by the liberal arts (83). Humanistic education, the author insists, inculcates in students a "habit of skepticism. …It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions" (79). By studying, say, literature, we are forced to transcend our narrow selves in order to empathize with characters with whom we may have nothing superficial in common, but who nonetheless enthrall us. In this way, we expand as human beings, turning into individuals rather than mere products of our background. Deresiewicz endorses Great Books curricula such as that offered at Saint John's University, not because the "classics" are the only books worth reading, but because an understanding of our civilization's past is required for fathoming the present.
Contrary to received wisdom, Deresiewicz insists that a B.A. in English or philosophy isn't a "wasted" degree that can't possibly get you a decent job. He refers to a Wall Street Journal poll that surveyed 318 companies and found that "93 percent cite `critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills as more important than a candidate's undergraduate major,' in part because they are filling positions with 'broader responsibilities' and 'more complex challenges' than in the past" (151). Of course, "critical-thinking, communication and problem-solving" are precisely the sort of "soft" skills engendered by the liberal arts.
Disdaining huge lecture classes, Deresiewicz insists that small seminars are the ideal venue in which to teach the liberal arts, because they force students to become actively engaged through class discussions, rather than passively letting their heads be filled with information from lectures. As for teachers, Deresiewicz sees them serving as mentors, guiding their students in the process of "Soul-making," even functioning as surrogates for parents who may be aghast at their children's choice of an "impractical" major. Turning to his own experiences in class, the author writes, "I myself became a decent teacher only when I started to relinquish some control over the classroom—stopped worrying so much about 'getting my points across' and recognized that those moments of disorder that would sometimes occur, those spontaneous outbreaks of intelligence, were the most interesting parts of the class, for both my students and myself" (176). He concludes, "My years in the classroom, as well as my conversations with young people about their college experiences, have convinced me there are two things, above all, that students want from their professors. Not, as people commonly believe, to entertain them in class and hand out easy A's. That's what they retreat to, once they see that nothing better is on offer. What they really want is that their teachers challenge them and that they care about them. They don't want fun and games; they want the real thing" (177).
At the end of Excellent Sheep, Deresiewicz offers some practical recommendations. He advises parents and high school seniors looking to enter college to disabuse themselves of the delusion that a quality education can only be had at an Ivy League school. On the contrary, the author insists that a fine education can be found at public universities, for a fraction of the cost, especially since public schools often boast Honors Colleges, where the liberal arts are studied in small seminars. In particular, Deresiewicz urges students to choose small, so-called "second tier" liberal arts schools, such as Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, and Mount Holyoke—schools that, in his estimation, "instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, have retained their allegiance to real educational values" (195). Deresiewicz points out that, given the current glut of Ph.D.'s in the humanities, churned out by the hundreds from irresponsible graduate programs into a depleted job market, great teachers can be found virtually anywhere, even at the most obscure institutions—teachers happy to have a tenure-track position at any school. The author also recommends that college affirmative action policies be based on class rather than race, which would reverse the current trend whereby a middle- or upper-class African-American student is given preferential treatment over an impoverished white student from Appalachia. But most of all, Deresiewicz wants to upend the current raison d'etre of a college education, transforming the system from a factory that produces status-seeking students bent on ritzy careers, to an environment that nurtures independent, introspective, cultured human beings.
But there is a contradiction in Deresiewicz's argument. He seems to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, he maintains that students who major in the liberal arts should, after graduation, ignore status-seeking and embrace a non-materialistic life. Yet he also argues that liberal arts majors can find financially lucrative, prestigious careers.
As Deresiewicz demonstrates throughout Excellent Sheep, most Ivy League students, who are both careerist and convinced that majoring in the liberal arts is a sure path to the poor house, will dismiss either argument. Students who attend schools other than the Ivy Leagues share this attitude to an even greater degree. At Montana Tech where I teach English, the majority of the student body, most coming from middle- or lower-class backgrounds, are convinced that, though the liberal arts may be entertaining and even enlightening to study, majoring in the discipline is a luxury they simply can't afford. Our administration abets this perspective by "informing" prospective students that they can make big bucks with a "practical" major like engineering or business. Meanwhile, our entire society reinforces this viewpoint through its deeply entrenched careerism and materialism. Clearly, for Deresiewicz's prescriptions to be taken seriously, a societal upheaval is required. Such an upheaval is especially unlikely if American students continue to suffer from the economic anxiety that plagues them today.
Like my panicked students, I am not as optimistic as Deresiewicz that students can succeed in the corporate world with a major in English or philosophy. Nonetheless, the central argument of Excellent Sheep is an important one. It is possible to lead a happy life while rejecting American materialism. If anything, materialism seems to lead to perpetual unhappiness, because there is always a new object to want and another rung on the social ladder to be scaled.
As well, the job market in technical fields invariably fluctuates. In contrast, a liberal arts degree is less affected by economic shifts. Such a major provides transferable skills, which can prove advantageous to those working in a wide range of professions. After all, nearly every well-paying job requires employees to write and communicate well. Indeed, as literacy rates in America continue to decline, such skills may well become even more prized.
In short, I highly doubt higher education will follow Deresiewicz's proposals any time soon. But it would be a boon to the American university, and to American society as a whole, if it did.
[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]