William Deresiewicz lost some illusions recently.
The Yale English professor emeritus says so in an essay entitled "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" in the most recent issue of The American Scholar.
As Deresiewicz tells it, his own elite education induced him "to believe that people who didn't go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren't worth talking to, regardless of their class."
He opens the piece by recounting his conversation, or lack thereof, with a plumber five years ago.
"I suddenly learned that I didn't have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him," confesses Deresiewicz. "So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn't succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work."
So he lost the foolish illusion that people who didn't attend Ivies weren't worth talking to - and instead realized that he had nothing to say to them. He and they share, after all, no common experience, values, or language.
It's hard for me to decide which misapprehension is more incorrect, or, indeed, more arrogant.
Deresiewicz argues that Ivy League universities instill the following traits in their graduates: a falsely aggrandized sense of personal merit, a belief that lower-paying jobs would be a waste of their intellect and an aversion to intellectual curiosity.
Eager to surprise the sinister vanity lurking behind every aspect of elite schools, however, Deresiewicz contends that their snobbish attitude "is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms ... Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect."
Yet almost all schools, elite and otherwise, are perfectly literal about the fact that they only grant admission to an elect group of students; most, given the chance, flaunt low admission rates.