Bill Deresiewicz on the area of his expertise

David (the one with the thought experiment catchphrase) forwarded me this article by Bill Deresiewicz on why the Ivy League is breeding "excellent sheep":

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.

The likelihood of a conversion experience seems like a decent barometer for how real a place's intellectualism is, and, while my old Daily Themes professor is right about Yale culture, I'd be curious to see what he'd make of the Yale Political Union's subculture, a place where conversion experiences are constant fodder for the grapevine. ("Did you hear? George rejected the Enlightenment!" "What, so he's not a Randian anymore?" True story.) There's a reason why David gave his email the subject line "Why a Yale Political Union."

I don't know why Yale refused Deresiewicz tenure, but I've always wanted to thank him for a moment of heroic courtesy during a Daily Themes lecture. The week's topic was journalism. Our first two writing samples were "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" and "Twirling at Ole Miss." Deresiewicz took a moment in the middle of his lecture to apologize for starting with two examples of what he called "Southern blackface," which, if you've read the pieces, is just what they are. He acknowledged that Terry Southern and Hunter Thompson--both Southerners--probably knew exactly how their northeastern readers would feel about sentences like "Anybody who wanders around the world saying, 'Hell yes, I'm from Texas,' deserves whatever happens to him." He was an exceptionally considerate lecturer, and I hope he stays in the game.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for turning your back on the academy with a tip of your hat and saying, like Robert Benchley, "Remember me fondly, as a ship departing a sinking rat."