William Deresiewicz’s recent column in The New Republic, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies,” denigrates American elite education (particularly the Ivy League) and the parents who send their children to these depraved institutions. Beyond the obvious hypocrisy (Deresiewicz is a self-described “sleepwalker” who spent 24 years in the Ivy League, studying at Columbia University and teaching at Yale University), implicit in his moralistic overture about higher education, meritocracy and America’s elite is a critique of our generation — the intolerable “millennials.” The column is not addressed to the students of the Ivy League, but to the parents who chose to send us here. The entire argument hinges upon a complete rejection of our agency as students and as human beings. We are not sheep, and Deresiewicz is not our new shepherd.
Deresiewicz’s column is just another millennial think piece — a particularly grating and unoriginal journalistic trend — masquerading as an insightful reproach of our education system and America’s elite. He reveals an unsavory resentment for our generation of Ivy Leaguers, characterizing us as slaves to the allegedly soul-sucking industry of elite academia. Such a simplistic take on the Ivy League and the gifted students who attend it does us all an incredible disservice. If anything, it only further contributes to the massive groundswell of pressure that weighs on all of our shoulders, making us — understandably — at least acutely anxious. No longer is it enough to gain admission into these elite institutions, obtain passing grades and go on to work hard at a secure job (and, possibly, raise a family). Now we must be innovators, world-changers and disease-curers. Otherwise our education, our sacrifices and our hard work will be for naught.
Deresiewicz offers us little in the way of advice, save for the suggestion that we transfer to a public institution, which is hardly advice at all. He suggests that we came here because we were swayed by the prestige and status that comes with being a student in the Ivy League. I, for one, came here because I believed that Dartmouth would give me the most resources to become successful and to change the world. According to Deresiewicz, it seems, not only must we be successful in the grandest sense of the world; we must do so largely on our own, lest we be judged by boomers and Gen X’ers alike.
Yet those older — and self-proclaimed wiser — should be wary of casting the first stone. As aptly noted by Joshua Rothman in his takedown of Deresiewicz in The New Yorker, the anxiety and insecurity that Deresiewicz claims is characteristic of the current legion of Ivy League youth is actually more of a product of modern society than anything else. Indeed, what Deresiewicz mischaracterizes as a symptom of floundering elite education and the moral failures of a generation spoiled by privilege is actually one of a larger issue — and, Rothman argues, an unavoidable one at that. Our malaise arises from being confronted with the realities of modernity and of adult life, of coming to age in an era when the commoditization of our minds and our selves is to be expected. Such malaise, if anything, shows that we are willing to grapple with and think critically about our lives and our world. As Rothman writes, “if you’re feeling uneasy about life, then you’re doing the reading.”
Deresiewicz criticizes our generation of students for mindlessly playing by the rules. We may not like the world we live in, but we are taught that we have no choice but to conform if we ever want to have the resources and opportunities necessary to eventually change it. By denigrating us for being ambitious and high-achieving, he fails to understand our generation. We are constantly accused of being privileged, complacent and self-absorbed — of not understanding hardship and not caring to. But we know better. Deresiewicz alleges that his students were “content to color within the lines” of soulless academia. I find that hard to believe. To say that we do not yearn to color outside of the lines is to radically underestimate our grit, our spirit and our character. And to do so under the guise of concerned advice is to insult us.
