<p>An old joke:</p>
<p>A doctor hires a plumber to fix a leaky drain. When the doctor sees the (high) bill for services rendered he says “Wow! I’m a doctor and I don’t make that much for an hour’s work!” The plumber replies “When I was a doctor I didn’t either.”</p>
<p>phantasmagoric - I enjoy your posts.</p>
<p>annasdad, let’s face it: it’s clear that no one but you cares. And you haven’t even backed up your topic title. Even if your daughter was an “Ivy Canidate”, nothing would’ve stopped her from choosing her to go to any other school. I’m not sure why having more choice is actually bad for you.</p>
<p>Right, chaositka, no one else cares, which is why we’re at 80+ posts. </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Thanks for another great post, phant. My response is more than I want to type on my phone so will have to wait. </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>MOWC, I’m grateful for people like your D who is willing to devote her life to serving others. What percentage of her classmates made similar choices? </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Writer of this article is hypocritical.
He is most guilty of stereotyping.
AND the article is tongue-in-cheek, so shame on those who are taking it literally.
And the article is clearly sensationalist- and it is most effective at getting our attention, as it has been linked to and discussed numerous times on the CC site.</p>
<p>It plays so well into all the insecurities we CC parents have about the value, impact and prestige and quality of education and the underlying class warfare, fears about economic power, etc.</p>
<p>Do not let this writer seduce you, reduce you into a simplistic, emotional thinker!!</p>
<p>ALL schools are somewhat little ivory towers unto themselves. At large unis, departments and divisions can be like this. A school is a little enclave where there is the freedom from some material fears to think, be creative, to commune and learn.
This camp-like atmosphere is unreal, but it is a cultural more for the USA, where opportunities exist to question the status quo, to solve problems, to see things in a new way.</p>
<p>Not all students take advantage of this safe world, not do they open their eyes to diverse opinions.</p>
<p>Personally, I find the whiners about money, about how others have it so easy just as “entitled” and those whom they are labelling entitled.</p>
<p>FORTUNATELY, these divisions are not the norm. Many do benefit from cross-cultural, cross-geographic, cross-SES relationships, questioning issues in the classroom and outside, so as to realize that generalities are unfair and unhealthy to a community.</p>
<p>**** it.</p>
<p>I’d give up a whole life worth of speaking knowledge to go to the Ivy Leagues.</p>
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<p>Well, one can argue that some churches’ role in this respect has changed from a gathering place for all to a gathering place for social conservatives…</p>
<p>But there have also been other aspects of self-segregation. For example, a greater percentage of the US population lives in political landslide areas (and not just because of gerrymandering) because Democrats tend to live among Democrats and Republicans tend to live among Republicans more often. And people are now more likely to get their news from partisan sources like Fox and MSNBC, rather than centrist (or slight left/right) aligned news media that is that way because it tries to sell to everyone.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure why you don’t realize they’re just here to attack you and the repeated claims you bring up.</p>
<p>Oh wait, they’re just defensive adhominers. oook</p>
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I haven’t read the article, but I’m somewhat attuned to think that many (if not most) students at top universities are, by definition, non-intellectual (I’ve seen some anti-intellectualism too, though it’s rare). Students have to get almost straight As in every class to get into such universities. This puts an emphasis on grades over learning. Although the two often overlap, many times they do not. The most intellectual students I knew in high school were not the ones with the 4.0s (rather they were often in the 3.5 to 3.8 range). The 4.0s just worked harder and “smarter.” Accordingly, they were the ones who landed at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. </p>
<p>I had an upward trend in GPA in HS, but I would actually consider myself less of an intellectual as time went on. In college I have a downward trend in GPA, yet I’m finding myself more and more intellectual. I do not think I am the exception, though who knows? </p>
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At Stanford, right? I go there too, but I don’t see as much of this. I see people who rail on IHUM for (God forbid) making them learn about philosophy, religion, or art. I see people who avoid courses with tough curves. I see Courserank reviews where the reviewer states that he didn’t need to do the reading to pull off an A (sometimes concluding that therefore one shouldn’t do the reading). Yes, many students have a passion. I’m just not sure that is always learning. And I am definitely not sure that it is learning about the “big ideas.” Some students want to learn about that kind of stuff. Others just want to finish their problem sets. </p>
<p>Phanta: At the end of the day I agree with a lot of your criticisms. My comments should be taken more as a “yes, but…” counter, as I lean closer to your side than what I presumed the author argued.</p>
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<p>Again, is it any worse than at non-elite universities? You may have an argument about the sense of entitlement, but anti-intellectualism? Seems that the less elite a university is, the more pre-professional (which you appear to equate as mutually exclusive to intellectual curiosity) both its curriculum offerings and its students are.</p>
<p>I think the university is irrelevant; it has more to do with education in America. With standardized testing beginning in 3rd grade in some states, students are learning that it is more important to memorize facts for a test than it is to learn the material and understand it well enough to apply it to any situation (real-world or otherwise) that may arise. I think this is causing students in other countries where education still focuses on educating for the sake of knowledge to gain an advantage over US graduates who have a degree but don’t know how to use their knowledge or don’t appreciate it’s value</p>
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<p>Stanford used to be known for late drop deadlines and disappearing (from transcript) failed or repeated courses. But it appears that they did away with it in the mid-1990s (current Stanford policies on such subjects appear to be fairly typical).</p>
<p>[Grading</a> discussion focuses on course-drop deadline; vote set for June 2](<a href=“http://news.stanford.edu/pr/94/940531Arc4233.html]Grading”>Grading discussion focuses on course-drop deadline; vote set for June 2)</p>
<p>Senior0991,</p>
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<p>Yes, I know how you feel about students at Stanford and their attitude toward humanities. I don’t share that view of yours, as you know.</p>
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<p>I’ve never known anyone to avoid a class with tough curves - because nobody knows what the curves are. Courserank can’t tell you, and even while taking the class, students never know just how the course is going to be curved. (That’s one reason I think it’s okay that in the end there’s some grade inflation - students work harder because they have no idea how the class is going to be curved.) I’ve heard of students not taking a class because it’s going to be hard, but that’s not ‘anti-intellectualism’ - e.g. a friend of mine majoring in English was avoiding any difficult STEM class and took CS 105 to get rid of the engineering requirement, STATS 60 to get rid of the math, etc.</p>
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<p>I can agree with that - that’s why I said ‘almost all the students I know.’ There are definitely some that what I said above doesn’t apply to. But even those who just want to get their assignments done, discussing the material with them always seemed to me that they enjoy the material regardless.</p>
<p>The only time that I see students being somewhat anti-intellectual - as in not caring about the material, avoiding difficult classes, not doing the reading - is in the GER requirements that Stanford imposes on everyone, something I’m staunchly opposed to. I think that’s the only source of gaming the system, where students just don’t care. And IMO it’s definitely not anti-intellectual not to want to take humanities when you really don’t like them, or math and engineering when you really don’t like them (and since they’re not your strength at all, you dislike the material, you dislike that you’re being forced to take it, and in the end you do poorly). </p>
<p>IHUM falls under this, and students hate it not just for the material, but for the class structure: you’re treated like a high school student, forced to attend section, forced to listen to inane lectures just so you can get the terms that will be on the midterm, forced to pretend to care about the themes of the essay you’re writing. This is not a problem with the students; the problem is with Stanford and its philosophy of “don’t like it? Too bad. We’re force-feeding you anyway.” Since the university realizes this, they’re giving IHUM the boot and restructuring the curriculum to adapt better to students’ needs while also giving them a liberal arts education.</p>
<p>Of course, the author of the article would disagree with me - as he suggests, this lack of emphasis on the humanities is part of the disadvantage of an elite education. :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Yes, now you can add/drop classes for the first 3 weeks of the quarter; after that, you can withdraw up through the 8th week (leaving a ‘W’ on your transcript). Failed and repeated classes are noted with NP/RP.</p>
<p>If you think Deresiewicz is on to something, but dislike his tone or his focus, check out Matthew Crawford’s Shopcraft as Soulcraft. </p>
<p>Crawford is a PhD philosopher who ditched his high-paying job as a think-tank director to find greater intellectual fulfillment in a motorcycle repair shop. His beef is not with elite universities (“His years in graduate school, he says, were the best of his life”) but with a post-graduation world of white-collar work that requires employees to “project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning”.</p>
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<p>[The</a> Philosopher-Mechanic](<a href=“http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0910/arts_sciences/philosopher.shtml]The”>The University of Chicago Magazine: Arts & Sciences)</p>
<p>If some elements of the Deresiewicz article ring true, the problem may have less to do with elite universities per se than with the kinds of jobs in business, finance, and government that many graduates seek. Unless you are going into academia (or to a lesser extent, law and medicine) you may not see a clear, practical connection between careers and liberal arts education. What many Ivy applicants are after (if CC posts are any indication) is not the classroom experience so much as the “networking” opportunities and prestige they believe will lead them to the highest-paying careers. In many cases these do start with what may appear to be soulless cubicle jobs. The burden is on the employee, from that starting point, to find a fulfilling career path.</p>
<p>The real issue is that money is the only thing many people care about these days. People only go to college to get the benefit of connections and a degree label. If people actually cared about their education, they would worry less about meeting requirements and more about expanding their knowledge base and awareness</p>
<p>Annasdad, I’m sorry, I have read the article and disagree with many of his assumptions.</p>
<p>Even leaving aside the fact that elite schools are far more diverse class-wise than they were in the days of yore when the Andover headmaster shook hands and got kids into Yale, I think he learned a lot of things in childhood that he just never got over, and it’s his parents’ fault for raising him that way. Most people don’t have problems “talking to the plumber” because they have common courtesy and decency and know that you talk to a plumber the same way you talk to anyone else in your house – hello, how are you, can I get you a glass of water, how about this weather, thank you, have a nice day. </p>
<p>Moreover, if someone believes – as this man did – that he “didn’t know that there are smart people who didn’t go to elite schools, often for reasons of class” – again, that’s his upbringing. Anyone with any sense of reality knows smart, successful people who haven’t gone to elite schools, or didn’t go to college at all. We all know people with blue collar jobs (plumbers, electricians, mechanics) who do quite well. This man was raised in a bubble by snotty, elitist parents and didn’t grasp simple life lessons evident to 99% of people. That’s not the Ivy League’s fault.</p>
<p>An addendum to the point I made above regarding anti-intellectualism: I think it’s all relative. I don’t consider the students I met to be anti-intellectual, but for someone who’s expecting more - like what you might find at Reed or UChicago - then the elite universities like HYPSM might seem anti-intellectual. Relative to the vast majority of people you’ll ever meet, these students at elite universities are definitely the intellectual type, and of the vast majority of colleges, you’ll tend to find more intellectual types at elite universities. That isn’t to say that non-elite universities won’t have these students, but simply looking at it as a proportion is probably very telling. Regardless, in my experience once a student found his/her academic interest (not just a major, but a niche within the major), there’s much more room for passion and intellectualism, and it shows. This is most likely the case at other elite universities as well.</p>
<p>The difference in viewpoint on this could also be completely from experience: perhaps I unintentionally surrounded myself with the more intellectual types, the ones who like the big ideas, learning for the sake of learning, while that’s not a representative sampling. I doubt that’s the case, but I’ll admit the possibility.</p>
<p>Regarding Deresiewicz: I wonder about the more political reasons for writing this article. He was an associate professor at Yale, yet his site says that “His separation from academia was a mutual decision.” I don’t think he was fired (he had tenure presumably), but that quote suggests that he was pushed to leave. Which isn’t terribly unlikely considering that, according to Wikipedia, he’s rather controversial in his academic circles, and his criticism of other academics “drew heated reactions within the literary community.”</p>
<p>I also wonder whether it was truly mutual; why include that comment if he had simply left? IMO it seems most likely that they pushed him to leave and he included that comment to make it seem as though it were mutual. If that’s the case, I’m not surprised that he would write an entire expose railing on elite education. Notice that in the article he focuses mainly on Yale and never mentions Columbia as a point of criticism (mentioning it only twice and always with Yale). Could it be that this was a I-hate-Yale article disguised as a general diatribe about elite education? Was this him flipping the bird to the (elitist?) literary community (and Yale) that shunned him for his radical views?</p>
<p>edit: a Google search yielded a blog that mentions that Yale refused him tenure. This is looking more and more like a petty vendetta rooted in his being rebuffed by an elite university.</p>