Southern Gothic vs. Ivy League Gothic

You go North — you become expatriated, exiled. You reach out for the first symbol that completes your apostasy — you become a Communist or a social worker or you marry a Jew. In all good faith, too, yearning to repudiate the wrong you've grown up with, only to find that embracing these things you become doubly exiled. Two losts don't make a found. Marry a Jew or a Chinaman or a Swede, it's all fine if you're prompted by any motive, including money, save that of guilt. My father told me when I went barreling off to the University, "Son," he said, "you don't have to be a camp-follower of reaction but always remember where you came from, the ground is bloody and full of guilt where you were born and you must tread a long and narrow path toward your destiny. If the crazy sideroads start to beguile you, son, take at least a backward glance at Monticello." —William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness

Shikha Dalmia has a belly-ache over legacy admissions ("Legacies of Injustice") in February's Reason:

America's fundamental promise is that individuals ought to control their destiny through hard work and talent, not arbitrary accidents of birth. Legacy preferences are no less damaging to this promise than racial preferences. Those who oppose race as a factor in admissions but ignore legacies open themselves to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But, worse, to the extent that they succeed in dismantling race while leaving legacies intact, they risk putting in place a less — not more — fair admissions system.

Speculating about what constitutes "fairness" in admissions is like trying to write a dictionary of coffee-tasting adjectives — it's difficult to translate personal experience into any kind of an abstract rule. To the extent that Dalmia's complaint is about money, I am unsympathetic, not because I think she's wrong but because I have a hard time getting worked up about starting salary differences between Yale graduates and NC State graduates.

She's on more compelling ground when she claims that purely meritocratic admissions will make universities better at what they do, but there's a long-running thread in Southern literature that suggests "Can Meritocracy Prevail?" is not a question that Dalmia can ask and expect to get a sensible answer. William Styron, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe all wrote about disillusioned young Southerners who headed northward in hopes of finding a place with more appreciation for book-learning (Lie Down in Darkness, The Sound and the Fury, and Of Time and the River), and all three came to the same conclusion: Harvard and Yale are primarily capitals of New England culture, not capitals of academic learning, and New England doesn't actually care about academic learning any more than the South does. The elite New England way of speaking sounds intellectual, but at the end of the day the resemblance is superficial. The fact that Ivy League graduates all talk like professors doesn't indicate real erudition any more than the fact that Southern politicians all talk like Baptist preachers speaks to their individual piety.

Thomas Wolfe is the most relevant of the three because after Harvard disappointed him in his search for a bookworm's paradise he went on to be disappointed by intellectual circles in Paris, Germany, England, and New York. His example suggests that when opponents of legacy admissions ask Yale to be a palace of lively intellectualism, they're not just asking Yale to be something it has never been. They're asking Yale to be something that has never existed.

Dalmia isn't the first person to want Ivy League schools to be clubhouses for the world's brightest minds. When she realizes that this can never been the case — and unless she wants it more than Thomas Wolfe did (which I doubt) she inevitably will — I hope that she writes a great novel and not another plaintive article.