William Deresiewicz’s book, "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite", has generated much discussion over the last few
months. Deresiewicz chiefly targets the Ivy League and their equivalents. An elite education should spark creative
drive, above all feeding and motivating student curiosity. Instead, Ivy League
students are ‘excellent sheep’, cultivating identical resumes from prep school
onwards, conveyed via uniform college A grades into the sterility of finance and
consulting.
My own biases tap nicely into parts of his description. Deresiewicz encourages high-schoolers to look beyond the elite institutions and to populate public universities and those liberal arts colleges that have stayed true to their mission. But lesser-raking colleges have similar ills. Almost without exception, universities have
become almost pure money making machines. The professors, who used to be
recruited on their academic brilliance and reputations, are now valued more on
their, admittedly related, ability to
bring in money. In science, a rapid drive towards group-think has led to
individuals being evaluated less on their ability to perform or directly
supervise research, and more for their ability to lubricate efforts federating
dozens or even hundreds of scientists in competitions for multi-million dollar
contracts. In a recent discussion I had with a Vice President of a midwestern college the only subject that seemed to interest him was the setting up of a lucrative company based on the university's research assets.
Tension between the acquisition of creative knowledge and
the acquisition of wealth is not new, but a truly intelligently designed system
recognizes their equivalence. Wither the Ivy.
