Iqra’i

From the Department of Tricky Questions, Easy Answers…

to this:

The central injustice of the Ivy League, according to Samuels, is that it selects a group of 18-year-olds based on what it tells them is their hard work but is in fact their inherited privilege, and it then grants these golden children the freedom “to become someone new. In turn, the university will testify to the social legitimacy of your actions by putting its name on your diploma.” This was the case for Samuels, whose acceptance to Harvard was his ticket out of a strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing he was already itching to escape. But by Samuels’s own logic, such self-invention cannot possibly be widespread in elite institutions whose aim is to perpetuate privilege across generations. Rather, such institutions rely on their students not to change, or else they risk losing the very assets that make them desirable to elite schools in the first place.

I offer this:

Many students — especially those from public high schools and those outside the West Coast and Northeast — deliberately decide to come to Yale because they have the freedom to change in response to the new opportunities presented to them or to throw off repressive social norms that their hometowns forced upon them. I know I did.

Of course, there are plenty of students here whose high schools are overrepresented within the student body…The well-established lifestyle some carry to Yale from private schools in New York and L.A. is appealing, even dazzling, to those from flyover states. I often wonder if the reason that Yale’s mainstream culture seems so upper-class to some isn’t because it reflects most students’ backgrounds, but rather because students who do have these pedigrees offer a pattern that the rest of us — who had no idea of what to expect when we got here — can follow. It’s not that middle-class students are forced to conform; it’s that we’re given the opportunity to become the sophisticates we imagined ourselves to be.

Seriously, folks, admitting that college culture isn’t a monolith makes a lot of things so much easier.

(I snark. The piece is good, and the non-Ivy-centric thesis of the book it’s reviewing — that the “made” in “self-made man” should probably by followed by “from whole cloth” — is downright fascinating.)