My experience of East Coast elitedom is that you talked about ideas all the time, on dates and otherwise. My relationship with my spouse started with a series of discussions about French vs. Anglo-American feminist theory. I remember being at a regular Tuesday night party some people in my college sponsored where the outgoing football team captain, all four sheets to the wind, conducted an impromptu seminar on his in-process senior thesis about an aspect of pre-Socratic philosophy, with critical questions and encouragement from many sides. Lunchtime discussions were usually about that morning’s lectures in popular classes. My wife and I had a good laugh when our son, as a Chicago first-year, condescendingly started to explain Michel Foucault to us, apparently never having noticed that he had grown up with copies of Foucault’s major works – in English and French – in his home.
During her first year at Chicago, in one of the breaks, my daughter did a quick tour of various other colleges where she had friends. That was actually an important watershed in her relationship to Chicago, because she had been chafing against the Core a lot. After the trip, though, she reported that most of her friends felt they couldn’t talk about ideas or classes during social time, and she couldn’t imagining living like that. But she wasn’t talking about HYPS. Post-college, people she knows from Yale and Stanford, at least, don’t have that problem.
Excuse me, but I had done plenty of thought experiments and actual experiments about other possible lives, including but not limited to full-time manual labor and (what everyone expected me to do) academia. I didn’t lack at all for opportunities to do that. I was completely mystified by the business world, however. Apart from a great-uncle who had run a retail business started by my great-grandfather into the ground before I was 10, I didn’t really know anyone in “business.” The useful thought experiment, for me, was understanding that I could take that route if I chose, and that my skills had applications and value there. That was tremendously liberating, especially given how utterly miserable 100% of the young academics I knew were.
For my wife, the important thing she got out of her internship was a sense of how people like her, who wanted to change the world, actually went about it on a daily basis and got results. Neither of us used our internships to start a career – we both went in very different directions when we had the chance – but for both of us the internships vastly expanded our sense of what was possible for us. I do wish my children had gotten that kind of experience in college. My son, especially, who has barely left the University of Chicago since he showed up there 10 years (less 45 days) ago. He could really use a wider sense of what’s possible to do in the world with integrity.
It’s awfully funny to think about Andrew (not Anthony) Abbott telling people to delay entering the Establishment. He was born into it and never left.