In book tour, Deresiewicz criticizes higher education

William Deresiewicz, author of “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life” discussed the crisis of higher education at a lecture on Thursday.

A former Yale professor, Deresiewicz gained national recognition after his column “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” went viral online in 2008. His recent column, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League”, which appeared inThe New Republic in July, restarted a debate on the crisis of higher education.

In the lecture, Deresiewicz discussed the key ideas of his recent book, “Excellent Sheep.” According to Deresiewicz, the current higher education system trains its students to be “excellent sheep,” individuals who are superb at doing what they need to do in order to get into colleges, at the cost of self-direction and purpose.

Deresiewicz noted that many graduates of prestigious colleges choose to go into four industries — law, medicine, finance and consulting — rather than millions of other career options.

“I’m not concerned about the choice; I’m concerned about how the choice is made,” Deresiewicz said, explaining that students who choose to go into these industries are often driven not by self-direction, but by psychological constraints and the incentives the jobs offer.

While he said that he does not undermine the value of the vocational and cognitive purpose of higher education, Deresiewicz said that he believes that the essence of higher education is the moral purpose or the forming of character.

When one student in the crowd asked him whether it is realistic to do what one wants to do against what the market wants one to be, Deresiewicz said, “Do you want to do what you want to do in your life, or do you want to do what others tell you?”

He further explained the fact that elite schools, including the University, receive public funding is a valid reason for students to choose not to be what the “neoliberalist market” demands them to be.

“You should choose what you want to do not because the market is telling you to do it, but what the world needs you to do,” Deresiewicz said. “The world needs you to do something other than go to Wall Street and play computer games with other people’s money.”

Another student asked what the University and the students can do in order to deal with the elite education crisis. To this, Deresiewicz said that he is not aware of a single school that makes enough attempts to address the problems of Ivy League education, and that students collectively should ask the school to do what it is not doing right now.

Other solutions that Deresiewicz suggested to rebuild the elite education system to include restructuring the admissions system to reduce the pressure to get into prestigious institutions, as well as “taxing the crap out of the rich … so that we can have free, high-quality public higher education.”

Deresiewicz discussed his book with Joshua Rothman ’02, archive editor of The New Yorker. In August, Rothman published acolumn inThe New Yorker claiming that many of the points Deresiewicz raises should be understood in the context of modernity, and that there are limits to what colleges can do to provide solutions.

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Rothman said that, while he finds Deresiewicz’s argument valid, there is a diversity of ways to find meanings in one’s life — and many of them do not involve reading books and discussing ideas with friends.

“You should be realistic about how long it would take and how difficult it could be to find out what you want in your life,” Rothman said.

Rothman added that the problems with higher education system suggested by Deresiewicz may not be solvable at all — that after all, time may be the only solution.

The event, titled “You’re Not Weird Enough,” took place at 4:30 p.m. in the Whig Hall Senate Chamber.