William Deresiewicz, author of the controversial column “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League,” argues in his latest book, “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” that the current higher education system is facing a crisis. The Daily Princetonian spoke with Deresiewicz after a lecture in Whig Hall Senate Chamber about this crisis and what college students can do to change it.
Daily Princetonian: How did you initially come to pay attention to the “crisis in higher education?”
William Deresiewicz: It was a gradual process. When I was a professor at Yale for 10 years, just gradually paying attention to what’s going on with my students, students would come to me and say, “My parents want me to do this, but I want to do that. What do I do?” Students would come to me and say, “I feel like there’s no place for me here.” So [it was] just a gradual accumulation of observation, talks with fellow professors about it. Then I wrote the 2008 article, and it turns out that I got a lot of it right according to a lot of people who responded to it. That’s what happened.
DP: There are some conscious efforts on campus to address the problems of elite education. There’s discourse on racial and socioeconomic diversity, discussion on mental health, as well as on class and privilege. How do you feel about these efforts? What can students do to convey their message better, and what are some areas that students should pay more attention to?
WD: I think that’s awesome. I think that’s so great, and it really makes me happy to hear that. Things can build up gradually, and then suddenly. People start to wake up to it. Like, inequality in larger society, people didn’t really talk about it until the Occupy movement, and then all of a sudden, we talk about it all the time now. It made you aware so that we can start talking about it. It’s great if students are beginning to say that “this is screwed up.” I love that. I think that’s wonderful.
I talked about getting better career services — get better information about what you can do after college. I want students to pay more attention to who’s teaching them, because there’s been a huge trend away from professors teaching courses to adjunct graduate students [teaching them.] And it has a lot of bad consequences, for students and for the university, and I would love for students to push back against that and say, “We want to be actually taught by a professor, we want our professors to have time for us, we want professors to be rewarded for teaching, not just for research.” I would love for students to become more active about that.
DP: You discussed that leadership and service, as it is reflected in college applications now, are not true leaderships. I remember you giving a talk about solitude and leadership in West Point. What should the “leadership” be instead?
WD: I think true leadership is about putting others’ needs before your own. To best serving something larger than yourself, not your career. It’s about character, courage, honor and integrity.
DP: Do you think these qualities are somehow lacking in elite universities nowadays?
WD: They do seem to be. I don’t mean that nobody has any of these qualities, but leadership is really about ambition now.
DP: You mentioned that students need to choose to be what the world needs them to be, as opposed to what the market demands them to be. Princeton’s [unofficial] motto is “Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.” How can Princeton students carry out this motto in this world?
WP: You have to resist what the neoliberal context is telling you to do. It’s like that kid who got into a contentious little thing with me [during the lecture Q&A]. Unfortunately, I think even the way schools talk about global citizenship causes suspicion to me, because it seems to me [they’re saying these things] just to become a leader of global scale. And it seems to be that there’s this assumption that if you are a leader, then you are going to do good things in the world. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that. Look at the leaders we have – are they doing good things for the world? They’re doing good things for themselves.
My definition of leadership is sacrifice. You have to sacrifice, or at least you have to be willing to sacrifice. When I look at the leaders I really admire, I feel that, in a lot of cases, they got to some disciplined decision when they were presidents of wherever, where they put their principles ahead of their career, and they often suffered from it. You have to ask yourself: what are the principles that are more important than your career? And you have to get ready to make that choice if and when it comes to you. Are you going to have the courage? Are you going to have the integrity to make that choice, even if it cost you your position?
DP: Who are those leaders you admire?
WD: Who are they? I don’t know, I don’t know. It was on one of the comedy shows, “The Daily Show” or something; they did something about gun control in Australia because they used to have a lot of mass shootings in Australia like they do here, and they actually passed the gun control laws. And it was actually a conservative government that did it, and a lot of the people who did it lost the next election. And “The Daily Show” correspondent, I think it was actually John Oliver, he went to ask whether it was worth it and what’s the most important thing for a politician, and [the Australians] said that the most important thing for a politician is to do good for the country. And then [Oliver] came back here, and he asked the same thing to [a local] politician, what he thinks is the most important thing for a politician, and then he said, “get re-elected.” That’s what I’m talking about.
DP: In your article, you pointed out that the system of elite education manufactures anxious, goalless and timid young people. There has been a very active discussion on mental health going on at Princeton and other schools. What do you think about this?
WD:I’m glad that discussions are happening. The mental health discussions on campus have to do with the pressures students are under. This is the key distinction. It’s not that you are working hard; it’s why you are working hard. When people really care about something, they often work incredibly hard, whether it’s a writer or a doctor, or even a politician who wants to get re-elected. When you are working hard for a purpose, a goal that’s really meaningful to you, that you have determined for yourself, then hard work is not the problem. It’s when you are working so hard but you don’t know why, and you don’t even feel like you have an ownership over the decision, that’s when people get that sense of emptiness or aimlessness, or hopelessness.
DP: What can students and universities do to break the inertia of excess working, working without purpose? What should change?
WD: I think the only way to stop doing something is to stop doing it. Take your foot off, I guess. I think students do have the power to make changes. I don’t know how much power, but I do know that one of the problems with American universities is that they are treating their students like customers. But the thing is, if they treat you like a customer, you guys will act like one and make the kind of demands that customers make. They do care about what you think. They see you as future alumni.
DP: Many colleges, including Princeton, take the U.S. News & World Report’s college ranking very seriously. In fact, Princeton was ranked No. 1 for several years. What’s your opinion on college ranking system?
WD: These rankings are huge problems. They are one of the reasons things got so much worse in the last two decades. They drive a lot of bad decisions that students make; they drive a lot of bad decisions that colleges make because the colleges are also gaming the rankings. They know what the metrics are. One of the reasons I admire Reed College in Portland is that it refuses to submit numbers to U.S. News & World Report. Its ranking is much, much lower than it would be if it submitted its numbers, but they’re like, “No, we’re not gonna do this.” And I would like other schools to demonstrate that courage. Of course, if you are number one or two or three, you wouldn’t want to do that, but if they think about that, it would be great. It would be leadership by example.
DP: What advice would you give to your college self? What advice would you give to Princeton students?
WD: That’s the whole book. Don’t choose your major during orientations. If you are reading a novel during calculus, maybe you should be an English major. Don’t worry about the future; don’t worry about the future now because you can worry about it when you get to the future.
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