For those of us who teach, work, and study in universities–especially those who, unlike me, find themselves within Ivy League institutions—no topic has aroused more passion recently than William Deresiewicz’s New Republic article, “Don’t Send Your Kids To the Ivy League.” If one can look past the article’s click-bait headline, one discovers that the substance of the piece deals with a number of weighty issues in American life: the dramatic increase in income inequality; the slow and painful decline of the humanities; the lack of creativity in lucrative professions (and the lack of lucre in creative ones); the troublingly narrow metrics for measuring a meritocracy.
Yet at its core, this article conforms to a longstanding American tradition of battling over brainpower: who has access to the benefits of intellectual privilege; where one has to go to access intelligence; who gets to define what it means to be smart. The robust conversation about the original piece—sample replies and counterrebuttals can be found here and here—confirm the volatility of these conversations even as college becomes increasingly accessible (admittedly through paralyzing debt) to a greater swath of the population. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion as to whether one should or should not send their kids to the Ivy League.
It goes without saying that this conversation’s actual subject affects a tiny fraction of the college-going population. It is, after all, these tiny margins that render the elite elite. Yet the furious responses the piece has elicited suggest a nerve has been struck in folks both within and outside these rarefied institutions. To those for whom the Ivy track was never an option, a small hint of satisfaction accompanies any suggestion that students, faculty, and graduates outside the tip of top-tier universities might have some advantages (in this case creativity, flexibility, and common sense).
Those inside the Ivy League have found themselves in a defensive posture, steeling themselves against Deresiewicz’s charges with appeals to professional opportunity, intellectual challenge, scholastic vigor, and, perhaps most significantly, broadened access—the latter primarily through the vast expansion of need-based financial aid among elite colleges in recent years (which, it bears noting, has not necessarily done much to diversify the economic status of the universities’ student population). Students who find themselves in Ivy League institutions but do not fit into their traditional demographic (i.e., the 1 percent) remind readers that they would have been nuts to pass up the opportunity for betterment and economic advancement dangling before their 18-year-old eyes, especially when the financial package was so robust. Everyone else announces that Ivy grads forfeited the right to claim victimhood when they accepted a diploma that has more cultural capital than the Louvre.
There is something undeniably curious about the ferocity with which this particular conversation has unfolded. As much of the American population deals with crippling student debt, diminishing job opportunities, and a careerist approach to education that pushes the humanities to the margins of society, a debate about whether to accept an offer from the Ivies cannot help but feel a touch frivolous. This might truly epitomize what the Internet has taken to calling “first-world problems.” And yet we can detect in these conversations a continuing engagement with brainpower in American culture that is actually quite serious and important. The thrill experienced by those who feel validated in their second-tier diplomas might be rooted in schadenfreude against the elite, but it also suggests a conviction that status does not define intelligence; that the value of an education should be something that embodies the principles of democracy rather than a perceived perpetuation of the noble aristocracy; that college should be less about where you go (and which hedge fund you end up managing) than what you learn.
Though critics remind us that there is a leveling of inequality that happens in the Ivies—all that need-based financial aid! such diversity!—no one denies that the social status assigned to alumni places them among the haute monde, rather than bringing the upper echelons down to earth. If co-existing in a world with the Ivy-educated triggers outbreaks of status anxiety among graduates of, say, public universities, it is fun to watch Harvard graduates forced to defensively rationalize their choice to attend the Michigan of the East.
The current fascination with Ivy League education has long historical roots, as do the conversations about brainpower that are erupting around it. At the turn of the 20th century, representations of the “college boy” and the newly visible “co-ed” shared space in popular culture with advertisements by the Appeal Book Department for workers’ libraries and cheap editions of Shakespeare. With the latter, the prominent socialist John Spargo promised that “the humble possessor of a cheap copy of Shakespeare’s work is on an intellectual level with the owner of any of the expensive annotated editions.” In the 1910s, discussions about workers’ education for women in industry threatened to upset the notion that laborers could not be intellectuals. During the Great Depression, hundreds of novels and short stories were published that depicted proletarian cognoscenti who both diagnosed the economic crisis and taught managers a thing or two about the world.
There is no point in the past century or so when brainpower was not a central topic of popular conversation, but most of these conversations indexed intelligence as something best discussed outside the Ivy League. Conversations about Harvard were rarely framed as discussions about intellect; they were conceived as conversations about money. Funny, then, that our 21st-century debate evidently shifts discussions about brainpower to dissection of the college-selection process among those whose intelligence is already been presumed to be unassailable.
Yet here lies the novelty of this new conversation: While the bloggers go back and forth debating the merits or the profligacy of an Ivy League education, the assumed position that brainpower is naturally reserved for the upper elite is profoundly dislocated. Rather than a given, the intelligence of Ivy grads is being made a topic of discussion. These conversations are healthy and productive; they do the important cultural work of forcing to the forefront an acknowledgment that the assured conflating of educational institution and individual intelligence might benefit from some critical reflection.
In a democratic society, the value of education, ideally, ensures that everyone benefits from a smart populace, regardless of who gets into the Ivy colleges (and which they choose to attend once admitted). I yearn for this conversation not only to continue but to expand: where are the night-school philosophers and armchair autodidacts? Who will write the next great novel on poorly educated workers who change the world with their brains? I eagerly await that tome’s publication.
But until then, this conversation about whether parents should send their kids to the Ivies will do just fine.
Aaron S. Lecklider is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Inventing the Egghead: The Battle Over Brainpower in American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
