A case study of "neijuan"
Ross Douthat's Privilege and the education of the ruling class
Ross Douthat’s Privilege is the type of smart cultural commentary that I live for, and only a parvenue, someone looking from the outside in, can write a book like this.
There’s a familiar cast of characters: the Groton boy who makes everyone feel insecure; the girls who summer at Sotheby’s and Christie’s; the climber who goes to extreme lengths to reinvent herself; the inner-city or rural student (doubly disadvantaged) who lashes out; the student of color who went to prep school (privileged poor) and does better.
There’s a familiar sequence of events: the hallway splits along race and class lines halfway through the first semester; a rando masquerades as an enrolled student; the middle-class student gets rejected in punch. I have witnessed all of these things this year. Sub PalmPilots for iPhones, and late 1990s Harvard will look pretty close to Harvard (or Stanford) today.
Douthat makes several observations about Harvard, which I think, by extension, are true for its peer schools. None of these come as a surprise, but it’s nice to see them in a memoir format with interesting anecdotes.
#1: The education that these schools provide is primarily cultural, not academic.
Douthat describes Harvard as an “incubator for an American ruling class”; rather than incentivizing intellectual pursuits, its primary function is to prepare students for the uppermost rung of society, to create the next generation of movers and shakers.1
It’s not that you can’t get a marvelous education during your four years. With its wealth of resources, of brilliant professors and endless research opportunities, Harvard remains one of the best places on earth to educate oneself. But in that last phrase lies an unspoken truth — namely, that Harvard will not actively educate you, will not guide or shape or even push back in any significant way against entropy and laziness and careerism. Education, at the Latin root that few Harvardians study, derives from educere, “to lead out.” But this is a function that America’s elite universities have increasingly abandoned, becoming less schools than factories, you might say, assembly-lining the future bankers, lawyers, politicians, and doctors out into the wider world, while hoping to draw enough undergrads into academia to keep their disciplines afloat.
#2: Diversity remains elusive.
Douthat describes Harvard as “cosmetically diverse”: sure, there are blacks and Jews and Asians and Hispanics, but the vast majority of students come from the same kinds of places (wealthy cities and leafy suburbs) and had attended the same kinds of schools.2 He writes, “Meritocracy is the ideological veneer, but social and economic stratification is the reality.”
There is a strong regional division, cleanly across “red” and “blue” states. The coastal states and states with large-scale urban centers are tremendously overrepresented, and Harvard, “located in the bluest town of one of the bluest states in the Union, is cobalt to the core.” When Douthat wrote this book, roughly 22 percent of the “Yarvton” student bodies came from fewer than 0.3 percent of America’s high schools. I don’t know how true this is now, but a Princeton student published a statistics study on his blog (aptly named “My Side of Paradise”) about how very few students come from outside the Acela corridor.
This lack of diversity presents social challenges for low-income and middle-class students, even the upper-middle-class Douthat, who went to prep school in Connecticut (but not Choate). Douthat writes about his friend Forth, who came from Groton:
I liked Forth, but when you put him together with his high school friends, a strange and disconcerting energy emerged, and you were conscious of their unity, their shared world, and your outsider status. It wasn’t that they were unfriendly, exactly; other people complained that they were arrogant or aloof, but that wasn’t it. It was more of a sense that they had far more in common with one another than with anyone else, and that you moved within their social world on sufferance only - that only they really belonged there.
Social circles can require considerable wealth for admission, and it can be hard to tune out other students’ normalization of extreme wealth (Student parking lots filled with BMWs and Teslas, Canada Goose coats everywhere). Low-income or middle-class students can struggle to adjust to socializing with this moneyed elite and feel imposter syndrome from assimilating into what they perceive as a foreign culture. 3
There are also the tensions between needing to earn money during the term and partaking of the rich extracurricular opportunities here. Students on work-study and financial aid may not have as much time (or money) to socialize as their richer peersand sometimes, that extra time or money can mean the difference between acceptance into a meritocratic group or into one of the elite campus clubs. It's not that students are forced to spend, but money does make acceptance that much easier. (Diane A. Weinstein, a counselor at the Bureau of Study Counsel)
Consequently, students of color and lower-income students negotiate an uneasy existence in these bastions of privilege. Some assimilate easily. But they can still feel like they are there to enrich the education of white students; they are forced to sink or swim in an alien environment; they choose to self-segregate in ethnic organizations, religious groups, dance troupes, and in Stanford’s case, ethnic dorms.
#3: Liberals dominate the campus discourse.
…the embodiment of the revolution’s concessions and compromises, its transformation from a bohemian revolt into what David Brooks has brilliantly termed “bourgeois bohemianism,” in which the rhetoric of revolution was co-opted by corporate America, by Nike and Apple and all the young Turks of the tech boom, and the incidentals of the 1960s protest – the Birkenstocks, the organic foods, the comfortable clothes and achingly authentic furniture – became the essentials of a new, self-congratulatory upper-class zeitgeist.
Douthat observes that most students in college fit into two categories. The parlor liberals believe in premarital sex and gay rights and abortion on demand, but are well disposed to the world and their privileged place in it; they believe in the inevitable triumph of Progress: the Information Revolution, the New World Order, Globalization, “and other phrases that tested well in focus groups.” The street liberals are the type of people who camp out on Mass Hall; they believe that institutions are inherently oppressive. But as the majority of these students become older and make money, they lose their radical faith. Only the most ardent go into academia:
So the modern university was born – a place where the professors are to the left of most students, and the students themselves are divided between those who follow in their parents’ post-1960s footsteps, believing in free love and free trade, and those who read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Mother Jones and believe in freedom, period; freedom from every structure of oppression, every arch and wall and flying buttress of the vast military-industrial-patriarchal complex, which they believe to have been barely dented by their forefathers’ noble efforts.
This book took me nearly four months to finish, even though it reads like Michael Lewis. My take on all of this is that Douthat is quite negative. He fixates on exclusivity and gatekeeping; there are always people who are accepting, but you will not find them unless you try.
My other takeaway is that while these types of books (about education access, elite education) are interesting to read, I really don’t want to read them anymore, because cultural capital is useless without actual capital. Does it matter if you know so much about art history if you can’t afford to step foot in a Christie’s or Sotheby’s or if you’re not a curator planning on marrying an investor? I’ve realized by now that I don’t want to compete for Theta, or whatever the top of the social totem pole at Stanford is. I don’t want to be a Suzanne Pomey or a Jay Gatsby. And I don’t need to be.
The best I can do at Stanford is to learn - to better understand the world and arm myself with the skills I need to create value for others, whatever that value may be.
📚 Books I want to read
The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
💡 Things, places, people
Black academics at Harvard: Cornel West (taught Harvard’s African-American Studies 10), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (the politically nimble Af-Am Studies department head)
Larry Summers: “His flesh spilled out, but so did his personality, and beneath lay the sharp beak and glittering, intelligent eyes of a velociraptor.”
Siasconset, Nantucket
The conservative staples: Milton Friedman, Charles Murray, Norman Podhoretz, Evelyn Waugh
💬 Quotes that stuck
There were so many. Douthat is a beautiful writer. But these were the ones that particularly stuck.
“The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized that most professors are socialists because they consider themselves smarter than boobish businessmen, and therefore resent the economic system that rewards practical intelligence over their (ostensibly superior) gifts. It’s not a bad theory, but I’m inclined to think that such academic ressentiment coexists increasingly, at least in money-drunk America, with a deep inferiority complex regarding the modern capitalist project, and a need, however unconscious, to justify academic life in terms of the fantastic wealth creation that takes place just outside the ivory tower.”
❓Questions I have after reading:
Why do students self-segregate?
Is my country worth fighting for?
Who is Nozick? Who is Rawls?
😎 Further reading:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2005/03/25/harvard-bemoans-elitism-and-ambition/
1 Given Harvard’s obsession with social exclusivity, it makes sense that Zuckerberg built a social network. I guess this is something that should be obvious from Sociology 101, but I feel that it is especially true for places like Harvard.
2 I also observed this when I was at Blair and Brearley.
3 https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/05/underhanded-undergraduat.html