UPDATE 9am, Oct. 27: commenter says too rosy a picture of Middle? see end of this post
There has been a lot of talk this political season about Ivy League Elitism. My own background—of belonging and yet not quite belonging to the elite— makes me very conflicted.
On Monday, I gave a seminar (not for the first time) at my undergraduate alma mater, Bowling Green State University, which is located in my hometown of Bowling Green, Ohio. It was a very good audience, and I enjoyed as always interacting with my old professors, my first mentors in economics, Charles Chittle, John Hoag, and Leo Navin, as well as with one of BGSU’s new generation of star professors, Timothy Fuerst. I also gave a talk at my old high school (BGHS), and was very impressed with the knowledge and smarts of the students (from the Model UN club) and the Social Studies teacher who hosted me, Theresa Dunn, on development topics.
Earlier this year, I attended an awards ceremony where I was one of 100 alumni that were “among the most prominent” of BGSU’s first 100 years, 1910-2010. Some of my friends teased me that getting an award like this was a bit easier at BGSU than it would have been at, say, Harvard, and I played along with maximum self-deprecation. Yet at the awards ceremony, I felt very humbled by how impressive the rest of the 100 were, with high-achieving entrepreneurs, scientists, actors, artists, and athletes.
My Bowling Green experience always reminds me how American economic development is not just built on a bicoastal elite that went to the elite high schools and universities, but on a very broad and deep Middle America (usually dissed as “flyover America”). The bicoastal elite itself is not a fixed hereditary class, but is constantly renewing itself with new recruits from the same vast Middle, of which I am originally one.
The Massive Middle also provides upward mobility to the poorer regions. My family had lived in one of the poorest regions of the US, the Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia and West Virginia for seven generations. My father grew up in southern West Virginia during the Depression, after having lost his own father at age 2 to tuberculosis. Yet thanks to his hard-working mother and his own hard work, he got a Ph.D. at West Virginia University (WVU) and then got a job as a biology professor at BGSU. Government-funded education like WVU, BGSU, and BGHS is also what helped create the Massive Middle.
So after all this, I am a bit conflicted about the Ivy League Elite. I don’t like the anti-intellectual attacks on this elite (from the Middle); I respect very much all the incredibly smart and creative people I know who belong to this elite. Contrary to the perception of the attackers from the Middle, the elite universities do a great job producing world-class ideas and achievements.
At the same time, I don’t like the pretensions of some in the elite who look down on the Middle and who think they are the only ones qualified to contribute to our development.
Having been on both sides, Middle and Elite, it looks to me like BOTH are success stories in themselves and BOTH have played their own important part in America’s Miracle of Development.
UPDATE POSTSCRIPT 9 AM, OCT. 27: a commenter suggests my portrait of the Middle is too rosy and mentions the “cult of mediocrity.” I agree that this exists. In Bowling Green, the Junior High and High School periodically face threats of cutbacks to their (already limited) programs for gifted students. And yes, I perceived that many people in Bowling Green had anti-intellectual values, both when I was growing up and now, which does feed a “cult of mediocrity.” But Bowling Green is diverse (check out the coffee shop Grounds for Thought as the HQ of the local intelligentsia), and there were and are many who recognize and encourage those who do well in school.
19 Comments
Nice entry.
If I weren’t a troll, I’d agree with much here, as we share some similarities in our background.
I like Chris Hedges a great deal on this topic, and how he frames it in terms of empire, politics, and current cultural pressures.
Always appreciate that you don’t censor ideas in this forum.
Best.
Addendum: Of course, Hedges argues that there is no “massive middle” anymore, and this may be our biggest point of departure.
I think the policies of the past decade have more or less wiped out the middle class, and what hasn’t been wiped out yet, will come with time, without radical changes.
The erasure of a true middle class is where the acrimony against elitism comes in, and where Chris Hedges nails it. And this erasure of the middle class is precisely what the elites fail to recognize.
Important topic.
I am currently working toward entrance to an ivy league PhD program, yet come from what is literally poverty in the US.
Individuals who started at the top to end at the top often times have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to certain issues. Brilliant in some capacities, but totally ignorant in others… there is no substitute for life experience.
Yet at the same time, ivy elites are elite for a reason; they ARE often times the leaders. I just wish that more of the leaders had experience being on the bottom at some point in their life.
Matt, with all due respect, I must disagree with you about the mythology of the Ivy League.
I am attending one. Will receive a degree from one.
They are not always the leaders. in terms of ideas—-the truly great leaders usually are outside the system.
“Ivy Leaguers” are looked up to because a myth precedes them, a myth they have metabolized, and now believe themselves better than the pack.
Belief, here, is an intrinsic component.
Leaders? For how many decades and decades and decades have the Ivy Leagues been dominated by a white male Eurocentric world view.
Please. Let’s stop the mythologies.
Congrats on your PhD program.
You will soon be socialized into a group that needs to question itself more, instead of believing in its own innate leadership superiority.
Bill,
Great post. As someone who grew up in rural KY, then lived below the poverty line in NH, then was able – thanks to scholarships – to attend elite institutions, and now lives part time in WV – I can really appreciate this. It is what makes the US an amazing success story, despite its huge and maddening flaws.
This was the subject of much FaceBook discussion this past week as well; here is an article that I think is extraordinary, and a 45 minute video that may or may not be of interest to some.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCvSntOI5s
For the record. I was raised by a single, learning disabled working mother; my father was incarcerated in prison.
My “background” hearkens much more to what would be called “the black experience” here in the U.S.
I will be receiving my MA from Harvard (if the thesis makes the grade)– also, I have an extraordinary range of undergraduate credits earned in two Ivy Leagues.
I am resourceful, and I have managed an “Ivy League” against all odds, and that is not hyperbole.
While I think it’s fine to be grateful for the amazing success stories, to live as though this is certain for all is just not so.
I don’t think platitudes safeguard democracy, nor future generations, and they certainly don’t make these institutions better. Platitudes create bubbles of comfort.
IMO, change happens on the outside first, the real mavericks of transformation (look at Bill Gates) have little patience for the system.
The Ivy’s (or government, or two many other things) don’t change until there is external pressure for them to do so.
How long did it take for these esteemed institutions to include blacks and women. And even with those changes, there is still institutional racism and sexism, as we were reminded this past week of the complex matrix revolving Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.
Too much of the history of ideas is written by the white Eurocentric tradition, and that is what is still taught, women’s studies and African Americna studies are pretty much ghettos compared with economics and law.
So there’s much to be discussed on this topic, and I don’t think, with all due respect, that simply wallowing around in the successes is good enough.
We’ve a long way to go.
Apologies for oversights, eyes are trashed.
I have the strong impression that people with higher degrees from Harvard are massively overrepresented in quasi governmental jobs such “Diversity Consultant”, for which high intelligence is not only unnecessary, but dangerous and unhelpful – it is apparent that diversity consultants from Harvard are usually as thick as two planks glued together.
People with higher degrees from harvard are also massively overrepresented in financial engineering activities, which one might suppose require the very highest intelligence, yet in the the recent foreclosuregate crisis, wherein multiple banks foreclosed on the same house, it became apparent that they were guilty of the sort of bumbling idiocy and woolly headed incompetence that Joe the plumber would never slip into.
All of which suggests to me that Harvard does not really graduate people, so much as ordain them in political correctness.
To get certified as a card carrying member of the intellectual elite, one is required to show complete faith in a wide variety of mutually contradictory tenets of political correctness. To believe lots of impossible things, it helps if you are stupid.
Yes, but in the interest of diversity, let’s not restrict this to Harvard ….. there are plenty of other Ivy’s last time I checked.
Political correctness’s probably even more strident at Stanford and Yale …..
and why Harvard is invited Larry Summers back is beyond me.
Thanks for this, Bill. I’ve recently realized that my ability to speak both Ivy League and middle America/evangelical is a growth industry opportunity. The elites need translators.
One of my favorite songs is about this topic, more or less:
http://ilike.myspacecdn.com/play#Robert+Earl+Keen:Out+Here+In+The+Middle:1080689:s68422432.15737063.43025336.0.2.188%2Cstd_76467dc8de104cca99746e26554d743a
@Word_Bandit I’m just getting into the whole exploring blog comments game. I noticed your handle links to a private blog, which I don’t hope to intrude on, but I’d like to know if you have more public-facing outlet for thoughts and comments.
As someone that did not, does not and never will have what it takes to reach to any elite, let me warmly agree with the core message of this post. But allow me also to warn you all against the myths the Middle build for themselves. This post, very naturally, sprang a lot of comments about the clay-footed intellectual Elite. But if you are tempted to think haughtiness and self-contentedness are bad, just try anti-intellectualism and the cult of mediocrity.
@ Taliesin Beynon
Thank you. I made it private last night. Most of my blog entries have been personal and pretty much for the circle of people I know.
I thought it best to keep it that way, for now, after some of the comments I’ve received here.
You’re not missing much, at the moment.
Appreciate your interest, and probably will do more in the future.
Best.
Interesting post. I find that coming from a working class immigrant background helps understand cultural dynamics in poor countries in a way that a university never could. That being said, there are many different factors that make one a ‘good’ aid worker and empathy can take many forms. Yes some aid workers from privileged backgrounds might have a lot of blind spots when it comes to understanding human nature historically – but they bring other valuable skills and energy to the table. Sometimes people from poor backgrounds (especially ‘national staff’) can be more contemptuousness of the poor than the white outsider. So it’s not about black and white.
@Word_Bandit: I come from Eastern Euro poor background but was aided along by a good Western social system. I happen to find the writings of the ‘dead white men’ – with their Eurocentric views – of great value. They were the learned and exposed and well-travelled people of their time – somehow taking points away from them bc of their historical position is wrong. The debates in our day have never been more open and no one is limited by the dead white men.
Good Chris Hedges article and I believe in many way us aid workers at big institutions fall into this very liberal class that traded in radicalism for comfort. Guilty as charged. Find it funny though how, according the Hedges, the church is all of a sudden a ‘liberal’ institution? huh?
James,
I am not disparaging all of all western learning, and if I wrote so, I miswrote. I am calling attention to a skew.
Anecdote: literature seminar in theory: all male European men, with the exception of Mary Wolstonecraftt (sp) and Judith Butler. Not even an American critic., not one black literary figure, not an Asian, not a Hispanic, not one iota of that apparently politically correct “diversity” at apparently the masthead for political correctness and all Ivy’s– Harvard.
The evolution of Western Intellectual History’s not on my agenda this week, so you’ll just have to accept that I am not against all dead white men: rather, I am for pioneering, expanding, and broadening the body of human knowledge, as grandiose and simultaneously pedestrian and politically correct as that sounds.
Politically correct seldom is. Another banal label that makes are discourse easier.
Glad you enjoyed the Hedges ….. and I think he may have been referring to the “God will make you rich Protestants” and their ilk, though you’d have to ask him.
Standing on thin line between poor white trash and Harvard educated elitism, this is a subject near and dear to my personal ruminations, and I thank Bill for indulging me my meanderings here.
I cannot edit in this box.
I only see all the mistakes after I post. Sorry.
There is a world of difference between anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism. Justified or not, there is a widespread perception that elite schools do not produce great minds, so much as they anoint the children of the elite and create an increasingly insulated and incestuous class of individuals who have a talent for performing well in school. (See the recent op-ed by Charles Murray in the Washington Post). That is what rubs many people the wrong way. Having an Ivy League degree on your resume is an enormous advantage, but I’m not aware of any evidence that suggests it makes one significantly more capable of doing anything other than tapping into a well-heeled alumni network.
TJM: I sympathize, but I think there is some of both in the Ivy Elite — genuine achievement and the kind of incestuous self-replication you mention. Hopefully, the market can usually tell the difference…
I suspect you’re right. But the perception remains. Perception is a more powerful motivator than reality. And a perception of unfairness is among the more powerful motivators for people to lash out.
I am a bit conflicted about the Ivy League Elite
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