William Deresiewicz expected a spirited homecoming when he came back to Yale University on Wednesday.
The former English professor at the university has made a lot of enemies on the country’s most prestigious campuses—and it was unclear what reaction he would get during his first visit here since the publication in August of his new book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
The book’s attention-grabbing invective describes top students as smart, talented, and driven, but also privileged, “anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.”
That kind of language, and the pushback it has provoked, has tended to obscure the larger case that Mr. Deresiewicz makes for a liberal-arts education and the humanities in particular. And, lost in the range of responses—some respectful, others impassioned—lies an interesting point of agreement between Mr. Deresiewicz and his critics. They both see a key factor degrading the learning experience: the overcommitted student.
Indeed, during the visit to Yale to promote his book, an audience of students seemed less interested in criticizing the author than in seeking guidance on how to better make sense of college—and their busy lives.
More than 90 undergraduates packed into the living quarters of Morse College’s master (resident faculty member) and spilled out onto the patio. Much of the event took on the air of a counseling session, in part because Mr. Deresiewicz described how lost he himself had felt during college. He implored students to find a purpose in life that aligns what they truly care about with what the world needs. Words like “true north,” “gut instinct,” “passion,” and “purpose” got thrown around a lot.
“How do you temper that gut instinct with cold rationalism?” one student asked. “Do we just do trial and error?”
Mr. Deresiewicz ventured an answer. “I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but it’s important to always know what it is that you want to do,” he said, “even when the world doesn’t want to let you do it.”
He was not trying to prescribe a path for students, even though he took aim at the large numbers of graduates who enter fields like finance, consulting, law, and medicine, only one of which he saw as widely beneficial: medicine. “All I’m really saying is, I want you to hear yourself,” he said.
He despaired of students doing 12 different activities. Amy E. Hungerford—his friend, a professor of English and American studies, Morse’s master, and the session’s moderator—lamented that “a kind of hectic busyness has taken over the place of seeking experiences that really absorb you.”
Controversy and Agreement
For Mr. Deresiewicz, that busyness often means extracurricular activities.
As high schoolers vying to get into top colleges, he wrote, elite students acquire extracurricular activities by the truckload to gild their résumés. They continue to embrace such activities after they enrolled. “Students have constructed an alternative college out of extracurriculars,” Mr. Deresiewicz said in an interview before speaking with the Yale undergraduates.
This alternative version of college, he said, seems to have little use for the stuff that students do in or for class.
Many of those who have pilloried Mr. Deresiewicz’s arguments in print, online, and on their campuses have reached similar conclusions.
After excerpts from the book appeared in a widely read essay in The New Republic, Steven Pinker derided it as “long on dogmatic assertion and short on objective analysis.”
The essay’s advice, as expressed in the title—"Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League"—is “perversely wrongheaded,” wrote Mr. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. And the fact that the article was accompanied by an image of Harvard’s “Veritas” flag in flames didn’t win over faculty members in Cambridge, Mass. A recent stop on Mr. Deresiewicz’s book tour bore that out; he said professors, deans, and students there were “hostile, defensive, and uncomprehending.”
But like Mr. Deresiewicz, Mr. Pinker also sees extracurricular activities as the competition. And they’re winning. A few weeks into every semester, he wrote, he arrives to find his lecture hall half-empty, “despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor.”
Why? “Obviously they’re not slackers; the reason is that they are crazy-busy,” he wrote. “They are consumed by the same kinds of extracurricular activities that got them here in the first place.”
Those activities can get in the way of the experiences that academics often cherished most deeply in their own educations, which Mr. Deresiewicz describes as “reading, thinking, slowing down, having long conversations, and creating a rich inner life.”
The author was known to lead those sorts of conversations in the English classes he taught at Yale for 10 years, said Ms. Hungerford. He did not get tenure, and she thought his sense of alienation may have made him forget how much he and others had provided students with the sorts of experiences he advocates. (One online commenter rendered a more blunt opinion of that dynamic in Yale’s student newspaper, dismissing the author’s critique as “sour grapes.”)
Some faculty members, alumni, and students at Yale have been even more critical. Shelly Kagan, a professor of philosophy, chided Mr. Deresiewicz for being provocative in a way that isn’t useful. “He shows no sense of subtlety or nuance,” Mr. Kagan said.
But Mr. Kagan, too, agreed with Mr. Deresiewicz’s critique of Yale’s admissions policies as too focused on prizing extracurricular activities. In one of the more memorable passages of the book, Mr. Deresiewicz recounts serving on an admissions committee during which “kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the ‘brag’—were already in trouble because that wasn’t nearly enough.”
When those students get into Yale, Mr. Kagan said, they’ve internalized the drive to be involved in several activities at once, and each of those activities is often time-intensive. “It takes away from sitting around and thinking about ideas and discussing them over dinner,” he said. “I share with him the sense that there’s too much of that.”
Students, especially those at elite institutions, do seem to be diving headlong into extracurricular activities. Nearly half of all seniors at the most-selective colleges in the country spent at least an hour each day in extracurricular activities, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement. Fewer than a third at very competitive colleges, the next rung down on the prestige ladder, did so.
But several Yale students said they see such involvement as some of the best parts of their experience.
Michael Herbert, president of the Yale College Council, which is the student government, is also in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. “I don’t agree with his conclusion that I’m just going through the motions or that I’m doing activities for the sake of it,” Mr. Herbert said. While his commitments have given him “less time to sit in the dining hall for three hours,” he doesn’t think it has affected his education.
“If anything,” he said, “it’s enhanced it because you can learn a lot more outside a classroom than inside one.”
A fellow official on the college council, Isaac Morrier, shares that view. While he still gets his classwork done, he said, he spends much more time and energy on other things, like his role as communications director for the student government or the mobile app he’s developing with classmates.
“I can definitely say that class is probably right now the third- or fourth-most important thing I do,” he said.
Students have come to see, he said, that the projects they complete with one another outside of class will bear fruit in the long term in ways their readings or lectures won’t.
“There’s a culture on campus of finding your passion,” Mr. Morrier said, “and that may or may not be in academic departments.”
