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Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ross Gregory Douthat, an editorial analyst for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of the new book, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.
FP: Mr. Douthat, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you here.
Douthat: It's a pleasure to be here.
FP: What inspired you to write Privilege?
Douthat:Well, Harvard is a terribly fascinating place, and an ideal subject for any writer – it has a storied history and an important place in our society, and it’s populated by a dazzlingly diverse and strange cast of characters. I spent a considerable amount of time writing about it while I was an undergraduate -- both for the Salient, the conservative paper, and for the Crimson, our daily -- but usually this took the form of columns or short articles, tackling particular controversies rather than the big picture. So when I graduated, I felt that there was a lot more to say about the place, and (hopefully) a lot of people who would be interested in reading about it.
At the same time, it seemed to me that there was a lack of any recent books about college that tackle the nature of campus life from the perspective of the student. There have been countless books about academia, of course, but mostly they focus on academic controversies of various stripes, or on university politics and governance -- and when they do touch on student life, it's usually only insofar as it illuminates some larger academic debate. There are occasional exceptions, in which older writers parachute into campuses and attempt to do a kind of anthropology among the students. But even when these efforts succeed -- David Brooks, for instance, has written a number of insightful articles about today's undergrads, and Tom Wolfe’s recent novel certainly got a lot of details right -- they are limited by the fact that they're written by outside observers, who are decades removed from their own college years and are describing what is, to them, essentially an alien landscape. Whereas Privilege, I hope, by virtue of being a true inside account, gets closer to the heart of what elite college life is really like for the students.
And ultimately, I think it’s undergraduate culture – whether it’s the protest marches, or the dormitory soap operas, or the competition for extracurricular positions and job openings – that’s the most significant part of the university, and the aspect most deserving of our attention. The four undergrad years are the one adult (or semi-adult) experience that everyone in America’s upper and middle classes has in common, and they’re the foundation, for most people, for the friendships and romances and career paths that they follow for the rest of their lives. It’s not that the rest of what goes on at a university – the research at the labs, the training of lawyers at the law school, and so on – isn’t important or deserving of analysis. But the graduate schools and the laboratories and the alumni outreach efforts are ultimately secondary, I think, to the formation of character, of ideas, and of lifetime priorities that goes on at the undergraduate level.
Plus, there are very few times of life that are as fraught with turmoil, with excitement, and with bizarre adventures, as one’s college years – so hopefully an account of them makes for an entertaining read.
FP: What exactly is a culture of privilege? Tell us a bit about how it exists at Harvard.
Douthat: Privilege is something that shows up in any elite situation – which is to say, whenever you have a collection of people who constitute a ruling class, or an upper class, most of those people will have enjoyed a wide variety of advantages in life, be they financial, familial, or what-have-you. What makes the present-day kind of privilege unique, the kind you see at a school like Harvard, is its interaction with an ethic of meritocracy, which makes people believe, albeit often subconsciously, that they aren’t privileged, that what they have and will have is theirs by right – the right of hard work, and the right of talent. And this sense is only heightened by the cult of diversity at most elite schools, in which administrators insist that their student bodies represent a perfect cross-section of America, and of the world. We aren’t privileged, the assumption goes, because we’ve got people here from every state in the union, every ethnic group, every European nation, and so on.
This is largely nonsense. Harvard is more diverse than it was fifty years ago, sure – but not that much more diverse. Instead of being a school for the top 5 percent of the population, it’s a school for the top twenty percent or so – and specifically, the part of the top twenty percent that grows up in the richer precincts what we all now call “Blue America.” Basically, Harvard and elite schools like it are educational training ground for America’s liberal gentry. Students come to Cambridge from the northeast, the west coast, and then scattered elite enclaves and university towns around the country. They don’t come from the South or the Midwest or the Rocky Mountain states – and they certainly don’t come from the inner cities. So there’s no geographical diversity (there’s certainly no political diversity, but everyone knows that) – and there’s little economic diversity either. The Educational Testing Services did a survey of top colleges, and found that three-quarters of students in such schools came from the richest quarter of the American population . . . while just three percent came from the poorest quarter.
I suspect that this stratification is increasing, incidentally, because the winners in the first round of meritocracy – my parents’ generation, many of whom were middle and working class people who really did bootstrap their way up – have grown up, become parents, and adopted as their primary goal the gaming of the meritocratic system for their children, by any means necessary. After all, the chief meritocratic status symbol is having a kid who gets into a good college – and so you have a cult of competition, in which kids are given SAT prep courses, and pressured into endless extracurriculars and resume-building activities starting at a younger and younger age, all to ensure that they don’t forfeit the place in the meritocratic pecking order their parents have gained. And it works. The winners in the second round of meritocracy tend to be the children of the first round’s winners. It’s about talent, sure, and hard work – but it’s also about economic class, and social privilege.
But people rarely admit this, and so the young ruling class – myself, my classmates, and people at other elite schools – ends up with many of the vices of older ruling classes, but without a lot of their virtues. We’re smug and rich and insulated and narrow-minded, but because we don’t acknowledge how privileged we are – and because parents, teachers, and administrators spend most of their time stroking our egos – we never have a chance to develop a sense of noblesse oblige, or humility. We never, or at least rarely, admit to ourselves that we owe our position to God or chance as much as to our amazing ability to score well on standardized tests.
FP: Could you illuminate for us briefly the embezzlement scandal at the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and Professor Cornel West's defection to Princeton?
Douthat: Sure. The Hasty Pudding is a famous, undergraduate-run theater troupe that puts on an all-male (and partially in-drag) musical every year. Early in my senior year, it came out that two classmates of mine, Suzanne Pomey and Randy Gomes, had embezzled around $100,000 from the organization, money that they spent on electronics, designer clothes, lavish birthday parties, and so on. The subsequent scandal and court case offered a window into the remarkable wealth floating around at Harvard, where even student groups often boast budgets in the millions of dollars. More importantly, though, it illuminated the cutthroat nature of the undergraduate social scene, where the social-climbing Suzanne – who was a Harvard rarity, a working class girl from a southern state – had managed to become a campus queen bee in spite of being viewed with fear and loathing by many of her supposed friends. She was the president of a sorority, the co-founder of an even-more-exclusive all-girls social club, and she also ran the summer program at the Philips Brooks House, the campus community service organization. For her various achievements, she was even picked by the Crimson as one of 2002’s Fifteen Most Intriguing Seniors, just before the scandal broke.
When the truth came out, when everyone realized that much of her social success was built on larceny, the whole campus turned on her with a vengeance – and I had a front-row seat for the whole thing, incidentally, being close friends with one of her “best friends.” (Her accomplice, Randy, had kept a lower profile, and was treated more kindly by his classmates and the campus press.) We turned on her in part simply because it was a such delicious scandal, but also because Suzanne’s ambitions, her grasping self-centeredness and her striving for success-at-all-costs, reminded us a little too much of ourselves. Suzanne’s quest for self-invention and social acceptance, and the corners she cut along the way, made her the embodiment of the dark side of meritocracy, and of the culture of competition that defines life at a place like Harvard.
The Cornel West imbroglio began the same fall, the fall of 2002, when Larry Summers, the new Harvard president, called West into his office for a meeting. West was a “university professor,” which is the top rank an academic can attain at Harvard, and he was a campus celebrity, famous for his left-wing speechifying and three-piece suits. The intellectual merits of his work had long been questioned, particularly by conservative critics – David Horowitz once called him an “affirmative action airhead,” I believe – but also by liberals and his fellow professors. And of late, he had been spending a lot of his time in ancillary projects – making a rap CD, or “danceable education” as he termed it; campaigning for Bill Bradley, etc. Summers called him on this unprofessorial behavior, and brought up rumors that West had missed some of his lectures (there was never any firm evidence of this last, as far as I know) – and West, unaccustomed to being “disrespected,” left in a fury, seethed for months, and then began to entertain offers to jump to Princeton.
Once this fracas came out, it quickly metastasized into a huge debate over the future of the African-American Studies Department – which Summers’s predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, had spent a decade building up – and even affirmative action itself, since Summers had made some noises about being unconvinced of the value of racial preferences in higher ed. So there were protests – Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton showed up in Cambridge, inevitably – and Summers had to mend fences, to pledge his commitment to diversity, and to apologize to West. For a while these gestures seemed to mollify West, but then he had surgery, and Summers apparently didn’t call him while he was recovering – but the President of Princeton did. So this was the last straw, and West debarked for Princeton, calling Summers “the Ariel Sharon of higher education,” and claimed that lots of Af-Am Department scholars would follow him to New Jersey. (In the end, only Kwame Anthony Appiah did – and he had probably been intending to leave Harvard anyway.)
It was an incident, I think, that demonstrated both the best and worst qualities of Larry Summers – his willingness to take on entrenched and overrated pillars of campus life like West, but also his inability to do so without making a host of enemies, and often having to backtrack from his original positions. You can see the same phenomenon at work in his recent comments about women and science – it’s great that Harvard has a president who’s willing to challenge conventional liberal ideas, but he doesn’t always seem to pick his battles prudently, and I worry that ultimately he’ll accomplish less than he should because he’s spending to much time doing damage control.
FP: How do you think we can work toward making the American college experience be about academic excellence?
Douthat: I would say that first and foremost universities need to decide what their mission is, and why they teach what they teach. At present, what you see in college curricula, and particularly in the humanities, is a strange confluence of political correctness on the one hand -- which says that you have never have canons, and you can never define a specific body of knowledge that every student should know, because to do so would be chauvinistic, Eurocentric, etc -- and market pressures on the other, which privilege what is useful and potentially lucrative, which is to say scientific research and economics. So the modern university increasingly functions like a trade school, in which there’s no sense of a liberal arts mission, and people pick classes either at random, or with an eye toward their eventual career goals. People talk about a “Harvard Education,” but there’s no corpus of knowledge that Harvard grads have in common, except maybe for a few oversubscribed courses in our badly-designed Core Curriculum, and perhaps Economics 10, the basic class that everyone takes to ensure that they can always fall back on a lucrative career as a consultant.
The odd thing about all this state of affairs is that the staunchest critics of the free market – left-wing professors in the humanities – have been a major driver behind the curriculum’s shift toward utilitarianism and careerism, because they’ve been the ones who have been the most scornful of canons, of survey courses, of the idea of a “general education.” They’ve spent decades wading in postmodern theory (in literature courses), complicated logic games detached from everyday human experience (in philosophy), and agonizingly detailed micro-historical research (in the history departments). The result is a humanities culture that mainly trains up future scholars, and has no confidence in its ability to “generally educate” the future doctors, lawyers, bankers and diplomats who make up most of the Harvard student body. And students, seeing this, either coast through their English and history classes, or they gravitate toward disciplines like economics or the sciences, which have a clear utilitarian purpose (and offer a clear path to eventual wealth, not incidentally).
This is where I think most grade inflation comes from – from a confluence of career-minded students pressuring their humanities professors to raise their grades, and humanities professors who have spent so much time dealing with theory and esoterica that they’ve lost all confidence in the large-scale importance of their disciplines, and so don’t have the intellectual confidence to resist the campus-wide pressure to let kids skate through with a “Gentleman’s B+”.
So before anything – before judging professors and granting them tenure based on their teaching skills as well as their research, for instance, which I’d also like to see – colleges need to recover the notion that they have something particular to say to their students, and that there’s something, or some things, that are worth knowing for everyone, whether they’re a would-be doctor or an aspiring poet. It’s a tough thing to do, because “canons” and “Great Books” have become indelibly associated with conservatism, and nobody at elite universities like conservatives or their ideas. But something like it has to be done, if an elite college education is ever going to mean something more than a very, very lucrative line at the top of your resume.
FP: What kind of leftwing messages do students get through the campus life deans and residence hall supervisors? Incidentally, they have another name at Harvard, what are they?
Douthat: They’re called proctors. Everything at Harvard has its own pretentious name: Teaching Assistants are called Teaching Fellows; majors are called concentrations, and so on.
And I was actually surprised at how little left-wing indoctrination goes on. Everybody reads a booklet of essays that celebrate diversity during freshman week, and you get together with your roommates and your proctor and talk about “what diversity means to you” shortly thereafter – but then the subject is more or less dropped, except by a few of the more strident left-wing student groups. On the sexual front, there’s a base-level assumption that everyone wants to have as much sex as possible, and so condom dispensers are conveniently located and safe sex counseling is advertised on all the campus bulletin boards. (Although there’s also a widespread and largely correct assumption that most Harvardians are too busy, or too anti-social, to have really swinging sex lives.) And of course homosexuality is assumed to be identical with heterosexuality, and anyone who expresses a contrary opinion is automatically labeled a bigot. But again, the actual indoctrination is more a matter of cultural osmosis than a part of the official curriculum.
My overall sense was that unlike some of our country’s more overtly radical campuses, both the student body and the administration at Harvard have more pressing matters on their minds than pushing a left-wing agenda. Too much political activism would get in the way of resume-building, endowment-building, and the overall cult of success. Harvard is a school for Clinton Democrats, you might say – “parlor liberals,” I call them – rather than Kucinich Democrats, or “street liberals.” Which is why most of the political controversies at Harvard – like the living wage movement, in which students took over the President’s office to demand higher wages for janitors – involve conflicts between far-left student radicals and the center-left administration, rather than traditional left-right debates. (The campus right, I’m afraid, is more or less a nonexistent force.)
FP: Can you tell us a bit about the slant of the curriculum in the liberal arts faculty?
Douthat: Well, as I’ve said, there isn’t really anything that you can define as a set “liberal arts curriculum” at Harvard – there’s just a vast welter of humanities classes, and it’s tough to generalize too much about their political slant. Of course nearly all the professors are left-of-center, and this often comes across in their teaching – but the most stridently left-wing departments are also the ones that have the fewest opportunities to talk overtly about politics, because they’re occupied teaching French literature or art theory or something. Whereas the history department, which tends to grapple with political controversies a bit more, is one of the few departments that has an actual conservative or three teaching in its ranks. Not that many, of course, and most history courses are taught from a left-of-center perspective. But it’s usually more implicit than overt.
Overall, I would say that the tide of campus leftism, which crested once in the late ‘60s (among the students), and then again in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (among the professors), has receded quite a bit, and what you have now is a sort of low-grade bias – omnipresent, somewhat annoying from a conservative point of view, but not nearly as debilitating as, say, the political correctness that dominated campuses a decade or so back.
But then again, I went to Harvard, not Berkeley . . .
FP: What is Harvard's attitude towards the War on Terror?
Douthat: I haven’t been on campus that much lately, so I can’t speak too authoritatively. But my impression is that most of the student body – the parlor liberal majority, you could say – were completely behind the war in Afghanistan, and extremely supportive of the Bush Administration’s initial policies. Of course, there’s always been a minority of students, and probably a majority of professors, who have wanted “peace” and nothing else ever since September 12. But for the most part, I think people moved somewhat to the right after 9/11, and became more sympathetic to a conservative account of the world, and of foreign policy.
But then there was the Iraq War – and like most of the center-left, I think Harvard students and Harvard graduates alike were initially supportive, became increasingly disillusioned during the run-up to war, swung back to being supportive in the immediate aftermath, and since have slowly come to the conclusion that the war and the occupation are both mismanaged disasters. (The whole “not-finding-WMDS” business didn’t help matters.) And this has inevitably colored their thinking about the War on Terror as a whole. So there’s probably a lot more skepticism of anything the Bush Administration does, on that front, than there was in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks.
FP: When is your book coming out and where will it be available?
Douthat: It’s coming out March 2, though you can pre-order from Amazon.com right now. And it’ll be available in your local bookstore.