I think it’s ironic that he’s talking about character considering he was fired from his job as Senior Editor at the New Republic over sock puppetry-he took on his critics and extolled his own virtues as a writer by posing as a poster named “sprezzatura.”
Siegel seems to be ignoring the fact that the assistant manager at the Wild Pair is, through his or her taxes, helped to pay for Siegel’s fancy Ivy League graduate degree. Working hard at an unglamorous job-that’s character-not skipping out on your obligations to find your bliss.
Wow, what a nauseating sense of entitlement Siegel displays. He couldn’t lower himself to go to a state school because he “deserved better.” He had to go into his dream career because the alternative would have been “self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness” which would have destroyed his “precious young life.” He bestows the gift of his writing on the world in exchange for which he rationalizes that he is entitled to leech off the taxpayers who pay off his loans for him, his Mom who was likely hounded by debt collectors until she died, and his partner who was carefully chosen because she had “good credit.”
Siegel has the temerity to ask “Am I a deadbeat?” If he had any self awareness he’d realize that he was the poster boy for the term.
It does not escape me that there are plenty of poor immigrant families at elite schools where the parents are toiling at jobs far less pleasant and with far more unsafe working conditions than selling shoes at a retail mall.
He values education, but you know, the teachers need to be paid, and the janitors who clean the buildings need to be paid, and the cafeteria workers who serve the slop need to be paid, and so forth. I daresay he wouldn’t like if his publishing company defaulted on the payments due him for his books.
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I daresay he wouldn’t like if his publishing company defaulted on the payments due him for his books.
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Ha! Very good point! Maybe they’ll just send him a note that says, “we’ve found ourselves confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face…”
I think what burns my buns is that Columbia got paid and we hold the debt. Deficit spending not withstanding, we and our children will be paying our government or the bank back for this deadbeat with the the cavalier attitude. He got his value whether he could do anything with it or not, but it is now our problem. It seems he is going out of his way to rub this in face of the average citizen. My opinion of him is just below my feelings about Canadian geese!
All that said, the cost of college in this country is rapidly becoming a crisis, and the number of young people who are being saddled with ridiculous debts is a serious problem. Most other First World countries manage to provide much cheaper high quality higher education for their citizens. It’s not clear to me that we can’t do the same, if we wanted to.
It’s a shame that full-grown adults can be so unrealistic and illogical. Guys like this think that the world owes them something, and owes them an ivy league education. Ridiculous. I’m a high school student, and I hope people my age understand that ‘free’ college is not ‘free’ and that no one in the world owes you anything at all, especially a college degree.
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” - Mark Twain.
On behalf of all of us who worked, borrowed, studied, struggled, started paying off loans, got laid off, continued to struggle, found work, and, eventually, paid off all college loans and all interest: Grow up you spoiled leech.
Honestly, if I were a more conspiratorial person, I might think that NYT published this editorial to discredit those who are proposing various reforms of higher education.
The NYT, despite its reputation in some circles as the epitome of “the liberal media,” carries a lot of water for Wall Street, investment bankers and private equity - all of whom regard the existing higher ed financing regime as a cash cow.
There was a followup interview posted yesterday where he said all this debt was from his private college in the midwest, his NJ public college, and that he then transferred to Columbia where he worked part time but everything was paid for at Columbia (where he apparently went to school for 20 years or so).
Mom2collegekids, I think he probably had guaranteed student loans in the 80’s, which were issued by private banks but guaranteed by the government, so when he defaulted the bank was paid by the govt and ‘we’ do now own the loans. He claims the banks ‘don’t exist anymore’ so therefore he doesn’t owe anyone. Banks aren’t just closed and the debts wiped away. The assets of closed banks are sold to a new bank and while it might be difficult to find the old stuff, it’s not impossible. I was pretty surprised that when I paid off my student loans about 10 years after signing for them, after they’d been consolidated, I received all the original promissory notes back, 2 from Sparks State Bank, one from NDSL, onion skin paper, my own signature.
He also could have filed bankruptcy on the debt before 1998 if he thought that was such a good financial decision. It is just an excuse now. I hope they start garnishing his bank account and taxes now that he’s come out in the open.
@NickFlynn, depends on what you consider high-quality. For instance, in Germany, unis are tuition-free (nobody will pay for your room&board, however; if you want a sleep-away experience, that’s on you, and many/most students commute from home). However, what you get are lectures (often huge ones), a library, and exams. That’s pretty much it. No hand-holding. You’re expected to study on your own. Very much sink-or-swim. In that sense, a lot like big state schools here, except with less services. German unis don’t believe they exist to provide social services and even academic stuff like advising or career services are minimal. Forget about something like a writing center. Undergraduate research ranges from rare to unheard of. The unis there also aren’t competitive for the top of the academic market when it comes to faculty salaries.
None of that is bad, per se, but it’s not like governments there are subsidizing a Princeton education (arguably not even a UMich one). Granted, the top Canadian & Scottish unis like McGill/UToronto/Edinburgh are roughly comparable to good publics here like UCLA/UW-Madison/UNC (while St. Andrews is comparable to W&M) but with less services and fewer high-powered faculty (at least compared to UCLA) and so are a really good deal for Canadians & Scots. Then again, in-state tuition at UW-Madison as recently as 2000 was all of $3.3K a year, so the main difference seems to be that many foreign governments have kept on subsidizing their public unis at strong levels while most American states have not.
Do you have the link?
“There was a followup interview posted yesterday where he said all this debt was from his private college in the midwest, his NJ public college, and that he then transferred to Columbia where he worked part time but everything was paid for at Columbia (where he apparently went to school for 20 years or so).”
If you have a learning disability in one of these “free” university places- forget it. Mental health issue- that’s on you. It’s great to have free or low cost tuition but it comes with a “price”- winnowing which begins in the 8th grade to make sure that only the top tier kids get to college. I have a cousin in one of these countries who decorates cakes for a living. If she’d grown up in the US she’d be an architect or engineer.
“I agree college tuitions are obscenely expensive in 2015. In 1975-1980? I’m not so sure it was so out of reach, especially at state universities back then. The author is using the current situation to justify his past actions.”
This is where I land. Current prices are so outrageous that radical reactions make sense. A liberal arts degree at my state flagship costs at least $100,000. That’s not just wrong, it’s crazy. But if you can’t pay the loans you took to cover living expenses on the Upper West Side in the '70s, you’ve been irresponsible. Unless he was renting a place in the Dakota, that just wasn’t a lot of money.