The "New Havard" vs. the "Old Harvard"

[DwightEisenhower]

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Because a few people seem to struggle with critical reading, this is the same concept explained in more detail:</p>

<p>The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: an article by William Deresiewicz about how universities should exist to make minds, not careers | The American Scholar

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<p>They’re not really the same, despite your greater critical reading prowess. The first article argues that elite colleges should admit less successful people to be truly “diverse,” making the claim that all Harvard students are success-oriented and thus all exactly the same.</p>

<p>The second article doesn’t really have an overarching argument, but instead is a list of things that are wrong with elite education. Here’s a representative sample: </p>

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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.

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<p>Wow! According to William Deresiewicz, I am guaranteed to be rich. Fantastic.</p>

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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.

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<p>Fortunately, though, we Ivy League students have developed an ingenious method to dealing with this problem (because, of course, everything we do is ingenious). While it’s true that non-Ivy Leaguers such as Starbucks employees speak a different dialect of English, about half of them are usually literate to some degree. So if you hand them a note that says, in big block letters, “COFEE CREAM SUGAR” they can usually gather most of it. </p>

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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.

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<p>Yes, there are no poor people at elite colleges and any of the many statistics that say otherwise are obviously fabrications. </p>

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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.

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<p>Yes. As everyone on this website knows, all you really need to get into an Ivy League school is a perfect SAT and GPA. And, while we’re here, that’s really all that’s important. When someone introduces himself to me, he says “Hi my name’s Steve, I’m in Adams House and I have a 3.9 GPA.” If my GPA is less than his, I’m expected to bow in deference because one day he will be my boss. </p>

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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.

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<p>Yeah, I’ve always wondered why it’s only Ivy League schools that use an ID Card system…And the guardtower on Mass Ave with snipers is really frightening!</p>

<p>To be fair, the author does make some good points. He argues at one point that elite colleges tend to give more “excuses” in terms of extensions, expulsions, deadlines, etc. I think this is true. </p>

<p>However, in large part, this is an article playing upon outdated or fictional stereotypes for an audience that presumably wouldn’t know otherwise. I’m not sure if the issue is that Deresiewicz went to Yale in the early 80s and things were different then, or if it suits his rhetorical purpose to imagine that every student at an elite university lacks the ability to communicate with “normal people” because they’re infatuated with their own GPA. His premises are simply untrue and ridiculous.</p>