what does your Ivy education mean to you?

Vis-a-vis the Sotomayor debate, Helen Rittelmeyer has re-posted an interesting Culture 11 essay on what having an Ivy League degree really means today. I've written on this subject before, so I'll throw up some disjointed thoughts.

Caveat: Rittelmeyer and I did go to different Ivy League schools. From talking to people who have gone to the other six Ivies and similar schools, I've gotten the sense that American selective colleges are far more alike than they are different. That said, each school has its own unique culture, and some of my criticisms may merely reflect that Dartmouth and Yale are just different places.

1)I agree with Rittelmeyer's main premise that much of what gets from these schools is instruction on how to be a good member of the upper class. For a more extended discussion regarding my own experience, I refer you to a post from my old LJ on the tensions between different political groups on what that instruction ought to look like. Rittelmeyer seems to think that the group that I call Girondin dominates the Yale campus, just as it dominated Dartmouth. That doesn't surprise me. But inasmuch as Rittelmeyer implies that nobody was challenging the bobo Girondin consensus, I disagree with her. The Thermidoreans, Montagnards, and even Feuillants were doing plenty to dislodge the pleasant Girondin monolith and kept campus intellectual life quite lively.

2)I'm getting somewhat away from her main premise, but I'd challenge also somewhat her characterization of Yale as "careerist" (and inescapably so) rather than "intellectual."I heard the same thing about Dartmouth numerous times, when I was there and since I've graduated, from both close friends and op-ed columns. Perhaps this is a matter of different schools, different cultures, but I found that the same people were careerist and intellectual all at once. In which box am I supposed to put my sophomore year suite-mate who's in medical school and cares a lot about getting a good internship, but who also minored in English, loves Shakespeare, and good debates about sci-fi? What about the other suite-mate who graduated summa cum laude and is getting a Ph.D. in German literature from Yale, but who is so uninterested in anything outside her field that she once asked me if Howard Dean is a Republican? What about the guy who spent four years in a pot-and-beer-induced haze, who favorably impressed my law professor boyfriend at a party five years later with the depth of his reading about Indian politics?

I could go on much longer with related examples, but the point is that nearly everyone I knew had both impulses to some degree. Thus, by sophomore year or so, I found most complaints about lack of intellectualism unconvincing. Sometimes, the people who made them seemed to suffer from the illusion that all intellectual life everywhere ought to be more like Paris in the 1920s, the Bloomsbury group, or some other historical era. Other times, they seemed to have missed the crucial point that most eighteen-year-olds opining about world peace sound naive, pretentious, or both. Perhaps our willingness to remain silent on topics we knew little about was no great flaw.

And if that's true, shouldn't we recognize that these schools do have an intellectual mission, as well as a class acculturation mission? Shouldn't these schools try to find a way to play to the intelletual impulses that each of the people I described above have, while also acknowledging the reality of their careerist ambitions? (Rittelmeyer's line about leadership mattering more than intellect in admissions just seemed odd. I knew plenty of nerds with 1500+ SATs in college, and also plenty of dynamic Student Council president types with 1200-ish scores who tried for Ivies and wound up somewhere on the order of Bucknell.) Maybe not the one that Rittelmeyer or I would have imagined at 17 or so, but a real one nonetheless?