The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff
Croft Woodruff
The Best and the Brightest Led America Off
a Cliff
By Chris Hedges
December 17, 2008 "Truthdig"
December 08, 2008 -- -- The multiple failures that beset the
country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to
our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East,
can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite
schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through
the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement
classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all
authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of
the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in
places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the
financial and political centers of power.
The nation's elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is
by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often
subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines,
narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain
answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions
service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the
primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary.
This vocabulary, a sign of the "specialist" and of course the elitist, thwarts
universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant
questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines,
faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It
allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and
neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who
defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and
irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse
to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology,
self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
"Political silence, total silence," said Chris Hebdon, a Berkeley undergraduate. He went on to
describe how various student groups gather at Sproul
Plaza, the center of student activity
at the University of California, Berkeley.
These groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice
know as "tabling."
"Students table for Darfur, no one tables for Iraq. Tables on Sproul Plaza
are ethnically fragmented, explicitly pre-professional (The Asian American
Pre-Law or Business or Pre-Medicine Association). Never have I seen a table on
globalization or corporatization. Students are as distracted and specialized
and atomized as most of their professors. It's vertical integration gone
cultural. And never, never is it cutting-edge. Berkeley loves the slogan
'excellence through diversity,' which is a farce of course if one checks our
admissions stats (most years we have only one or two entering Native
Americans), but few recognize multiculturalism's silent partner—fragmentation
into little markets. Our Sproul
Plaza shows that so
well—the same place Mario Savio once stood on top a police car is filled with
tens of tables for the pre-corporate, the ethnic, the useless cynics, the
recreational groups, etc."
I sat a few months ago with a former classmate from Harvard Divinity
School who is now a
theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a
torrent of obscure academic code words. I did not understand, even with three
years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this absurd retreat
into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every graduate department
across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and
women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist. This
specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she
has never been taught to question and looks down on the rest of us with thinly
veiled contempt.
I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of 10. By the time I
had finished eight years in New England prep
schools and another eight at Colgate and Harvard, I had a pretty good
understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia,
New York University and Princeton.
These institutions, no matter how mediocre you are, feed students with the
comforting self-delusion that they are there because they are not only the best
but they deserve the best. You can see this attitude on display in every word
uttered by George W. Bush. Here is a man with severely limited intellectual
capacity and no moral core. He, along with "Scooter" Libby, who attended my
boarding school and went on to Yale, is an example of the legions of
self-centered mediocrities churned out by places like Andover, Yale and Harvard. Bush was, like the
rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections. That is
the real purpose of these well-endowed schools—to perpetuate their own.
"There's a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the
mystique and prestige of his own education," said Elyse Graham, whom I taught
at Princeton and who is now doing graduate
work at Yale. "This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger
hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton
nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect? And so on. And he comes
away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with
the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning; college socializes you, so
you learn to present even trite ideas well."
These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My prep
school—remember this is a high school—recently built a $26-million gym. Not
that it didn't have a gym. It had a fine one with an Olympic pool. But it
needed to upgrade its facilities to compete for the elite boys and girls being
wooed by other schools. While public schools crumble, while public universities
are slashed and degraded, while these elite institutions become unaffordable
even for the middle class, the privileged retreat further into their opulent
gated communities. Harvard lost $8 billion of its endowment over the past four
months, which raises the question of how smart these people are, but it still
has $30 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford and Princeton
are not far behind. Those on the inside are told they are there because they
are better than others. Most believe it.
The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were
plumbers, post office clerks and mill workers. Most of the men were military
veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant
book reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting,
and they were a steady reminder that just because I had been blessed with an
opportunity that was denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If
you are poor you have to work after high school or, in the case of my
grandfather, before you are able to finish high school. College is not an
option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the
most important difference between them and the elites.
The elite schools, which trumpet their diversity, base this diversity on race
and ethnicity, rarely on class. The admissions process, as well as the
staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and working class. When my
son got his SAT scores back last year, we were surprised to find that his
critical reading score was lower than his math score. He dislikes math. He is
an avid and perceptive reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class
families do. We hired an expensive tutor from The Princeton Review who taught
him the tricks and techniques of taking standardized tests. The tutor told him
things like "stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting
test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you." His
reading score went up 130 points. Was he smarter? Was he a better reader? Did
he become more intelligent? Is reading and answering multiple-choice questions
while someone holds a stopwatch over you even an effective measure of
intelligence? What about those families that do not have a few thousand dollars
to hire a tutor? What chance do they have?
These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests
and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of
drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions
to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished
what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and
dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to
Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a
year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information.
They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating
ones, not that they could tell the difference. They may have known the plot and
salient details of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but they were unable to
tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being
branded political and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and
administrative overlords who rule such institutions, did not draw the obvious
parallels with Iraq
and American empire. They did not use Conrad's story, as it was meant to be
used, to examine our own imperial darkness. And so, even in the anemic world of
liberal arts, what is taught exists in a moral void.
"The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but
however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a
few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence:
the analytic," William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale, wrote in "The
American Scholar." "While this is broadly true of all universities, elite
schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators)
possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to
ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and
what most makes for one's advantages. But social intelligence and emotional
intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not
distributed preferentially among the educational elite."
Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess.
It can be used to further the rape of the working class by corporations and the
mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these forces. But
if you determine worth by wealth, as these institutions invariably do, then
fighting the system is inherently devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite
institutions is to make as much money as you can to sustain the elitist system.
College presidents are not voices for the common good and the protection of
intellectual integrity, but obsequious fundraisers. They shower honorary
degrees and trusteeships on hedge fund managers and Wall Street titans whose
lives are usually examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed. The message to
the students is clear. But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn't
any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the
power of your fists.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority.
They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and
institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are
socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even
if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead.
Challenging authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite
campuses and begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into
the elite academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time
they graduate they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day
electronically moving large sums of money around.
"The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and
the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can't be measured by a
letter or a number or a name," Deresiewicz wrote. "It forgot that the true
purpose of education is to make minds, not careers."
"Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger
intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim
soul," he went on. "These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least
because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like
Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like
Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don't
think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American
university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance
to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and
debating clubs that flourished on campus."
Barack Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden
Cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley
and Princeton. Their friends and classmates
made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the
same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy
language of privilege and comfort and entitlement. They are endowed with an
unbridled self-confidence and blind belief in a decaying political and
financial system that has nurtured and empowered them.
These elites, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country.
These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find
"solutions," such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms,
that sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don't expect
them to save us. They don't know how. And when it all collapses, when our
rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our
imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as
helpless, and as stupid, as the rest of us.
American Human Development Report by Oxfam America
The first ever American Human Development Report launched on July 17, 2008,
by Oxfam America, finds that
although the US
spends more per capita on health care than any other nation in the world (5.2
billion dollar daily), its citizens live shorter lives than citizens of
virtually every western European and Nordic countries.
The US
has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's
richest countries. The US
ranked 34th in the survival of infants to age. There are huge gaps in living
standards and quality of life among different US states. The US ranked 42nd in global life
expectancy. Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind
others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and
standard of living.
Suicide and murder are among the top 15 causes of death in the US.
Although the US
has 5% of the global population, it contains 24 % of the world's prisoners.
The report concludes that even though the US is one of the most powerful and
rich nations in the world, it is woefully behind when it comes to providing
opportunity and choices to all Americans to build a better life.
Despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free
enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points
to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities.
From:
http://democracyandsocialism.com...om/
InBrief.html
--
Croft Woodruff PhD
"It should be obvious that action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is, can never improve anything." ~ Theodore Roszak
"Woe to the man who tries to remain objective and to maintain a wide perspective: every one will label him as an enemy." ~ Paul Tournier
"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson