<p>Has any one read his book?What do you think?</p>
<p>Here is the link
<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/douthat200505260818.asp%5B/url%5D">http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/douthat200505260818.asp</a></p>
<p>Here is the article</p>
<p>Harvard Gone Wild
Ross Douthat tells tales out of school. </p>
<p>Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez </p>
<p>Ross Douthat used to be my waterboy. </p>
<p>Coffee? You call this coffee? Too light! Darker, kid, darker! </p>
<p>Seriously, though </p>
<p>Ross Douthat, a former National Review intern, is author of the Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, about his time as an undergrad at Harvard. He's now a punchy staffer at The Atlantic Monthly. NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez, for once not shouting orders, recently chatted with him about the book, higher education, and the seamy underbelly of conservative journalism internships. </p>
<p>Kathryn Jean Lopez: Okay, most important revelation in your book: What was that you say about long lunches while you were working that summer at National Review? Did you not have enough work, Mr. Gary Condit Correspondent? And you didn't even bring me back anything? Wassup with that?</p>
<p>Ross Douthat: Look, given that you were keeping us up all night feeding the coal-burning printing presses, sneaking out for long lunches (while you and Jonah were downing martinis on the NR roofdeck) was our only chance to eat anything at all. The year before, several interns actually starved to death because they never left the NRO sweatshop er, office and we weren't going to let that happen to us.</p>
<p>Lopez: So there's a lot about sex in your book or at least the Harvard student's frustrations over it and often pathetic attempts (no offense) to get some, as they say. How big a role does sex actually play in Harvard life?</p>
<p>Douthat: Less of a role than it does at a typical American college, I imagine, in part because the student body contains more than its fair share of dorky and socially awkward kids (of which I was certainly one), and in part because the spirit of the place emphasizes the pursuit of a successful career over the pursuit of the opposite (or the same) sex. Everyone or at least every male student spends a lot of time talking about sex and thinking about sex, but this has more to do with the smog of sexual frustration hanging over campus than it does with any real licentiousness. I think that most Harvard students come to college with great expectations for either debauchery, or romance, or both consequence-free sex and true love, the great promise of the sexual revolution and for the most part, they're disappointed by what they find. But this doesn't mean that anyone's rethinking the sexual revolution itself; it just means that everyone complains a lot about how little sex they're having. I'd like to agree with, say, Wendy Shalit of Return to Modesty fame, that we're poised for a large-scale backlash against the oversexualization of American culture. But I'm not holding my breath.</p>
<p>Lopez: Did anyone in your family suffer from a little too much information reading Privilege?</p>
<p>Douthat: Well, I told my sister that she wasn't allowed to read it until after she graduated from college (she's sixteen), but apparently she didn't listen, because whenever I go home for a visit she keeps threatening to read certain chapters aloud to everyone at church, school, the doctor's office . . . You name it. (I think she's kidding.) </p>
<p>Lopez: In a sentence, what did you learn at Harvard? </p>
<p>Douthat: A smattering of academic knowledge, and a great deal of knowledge about how to compete in the American meritocracy.</p>
<p>Lopez: Is there, uh, actually learning going on in, like, classrooms at Harvard? You say that's the easy part?</p>
<p>Douthat: There's plenty of actual learning going on but all too often, it feels optional, both because the environment of the place is career-focused rather than learning-focused, and because the curriculum makes it easy to skate through without being challenged. So it's possible to get a great education at Harvard (the professors and students are, as you might expect, brilliant), but you have to go out looking for it, and you have to seal yourself off from all the other pressures that the place presents. And the number of people who make resist these pressures, and make academics the center of their Harvard experience, is far smaller than it should be. </p>
<p>Some of this is the students' own fault, admittedly, but a greater portion of the blame belongs to the people running the university, who have let undergraduate education founder for decades, with terrible-to-nonexistent advising, a disastrous Core Curriculum, and a general sense of academic drift. The prevailing attitude seems to be that "if you're smart enough to get into Harvard, you're smart enough to get what you want out of it" which sounds swell, until you consider that however smart Harvard students may be, they're also just teenagers away from home for the first time, with all the confusion that entails. </p>
<p>And depriving them of any kind of guidance because guidance might require actually asserting that some forms of knowledge are more important than others, and nobody's willing to do that anymore turns out to be good way to ensure that they aren't as well educated as they should be, given everything that a school like Harvard has to offer. </p>
<p>Lopez: Was liberalism or Marxism shoved down your throat at the big H? </p>
<p>Douthat: Not at all, actually. There was very little of the kind of political-indoctrination horror stories you often hear about on college campuses, and insofar as there was pressure to conform politically, it was soft pressure the pressure that comes with being surrounded by a campus where liberalism is the default position (the "conservative" position, in a sense), and some kind of quasi-Marxism is the only approved form of political dissent. Today's elite universities are surprisingly depoliticized places, which sounds like a good thing after the excesses of the last few decades until you realize that they are depoliticized because everyone, students and faculty and administrators alike, are primarily concerned with careerism and the bottom line, rather than with the older ideological debates. There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.</p>
<p>Lopez: Would you send your daughter to Harvard-assuming the atmosphere were the same? Would you send a son?</p>
<p>Douthat: It would depend on the child, I think. I was very happy at Harvard, and I think if I hadn't gone, part of me would have always regretted not getting a taste of what such a famous (and fantastically weird) place is like. To borrow from St. Augustine, Harvard is the "city of man" in all its glory, and however much you'd like to shelter your kids from the worldliness of modern American life, a certain kind of kid (the hyper-ambitious kind, mainly) is going to want go out and experience it eventually. Or to use another analogy, Harvard is like New York City: It's not a place for everybody, and it's not necessarily the best place to form good moral character or pursue the life of the mind. But for all its faults, there are people who simply wouldn't be happier living (or in Harvard's case, going to school) anywhere else.</p>
<p>If I was certain, though, that my child would be happiest at a smaller or more intellectually-focused college if they were interested in a more contemplative college experience, let's say then I would probably discourage them from going to my alma mater. </p>
<p>To be continued on part II</p>