DIVERSITY IN BLOOM
LIFE AT YALE sounds pretty great, at least according to the Life at Yale1 Web site, surely an authority on the matter: “Yale is more than an institution of higher learning; it is a community where people of diverse cultures and nationalities live, work, and play—connected by their similarities and enriched by their differences.” Swoon!
Yale, that … that thing in our culture, that member of the triumvirate that haunts every high-achieving high school student (and every unrealistically ambitious parent of an apathetic one), isn’t just a university. It is—going by the Web site—far warmer and far fuzzier than that. A link to the “Arts & Culture” subsection reads, “Discover the countless ways that creativity and diversity bloom on the Yale campus.” What does it mean for diversity to “bloom,” outside of any botanical context? Whatever it is, it sounds vaguely progressive and upbeat; let’s go with it. The “Service” section, meanwhile, is introduced as follows: “Yale community members are dedicated to transforming the world for the better.” Translation: These aren’t just a bunch of former go-getter high school students who pretended to care about the poor for a few weeks, to check a box on their applications. Alternate translation: Anyone who made the cut is a good person; if you don’t get in, you may want to consider the possibility that it’s because you are not.
Let’s skip on over to the “Health & Wellness” section, which is cozier still: “We strive to keep our students, staff, and faculty healthy in every respect.” No paltry health insurance, this. We are in the realm of wellness, which is, in the context of an elite university Web site, a buzzword evoking Gwyneth Paltrow, green juice, and gratuitous gluten free. Appropriately, the accompanying photo is of a woman, from the back, doing yoga, in a shirt that says—what else?—“Yale” on the back.
My reason for close-reading this Yale online brochure is not that I’m thinking of applying there for college; I think that ship has sailed. It’s because it seems as if there might be some sort of relationship between the 2015 student protest movement—the one exemplified by the episode at Yale, where students objected to an administrator’s letter in defense of the right to wear offensive Halloween costumes—and life on campus, the real or idealized version.
CAMPUS PROTESTS: FANTASIES AND REALITIES
STUDENT PROTESTS HAVE been going on since forever, but have, in recent years, merged in the popular imagination with preexisting complaints about student hypersensitivity. Versions of that think piece kept appearing; the most notable is probably Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s big Atlantic story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which offered a psychological explanation for students’ purported belief in “a right not to be offended.”2 Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an academic free-speech nonprofit, and Haidt, a social psychologist, conferred an air of authority to a question that had already been answered as far as public opinion was concerned. Ask someone with no personal connection to today’s college students what they’re like, and you’re bound to hear something about their outrage-prone ways.
Anyone trying to sum up, in a sentence, what the student protests of the last several years have actually been about will come up against a problem: They’ve been kind of all over the place, location-wise and thematically. Does a Columbia student hauling around a mattress3 to protest her alleged sexual assault have much in common with Princeton students wishing to rename the Woodrow Wilson School?4 How much overlap do either of these have with students at the University of Missouri protesting racist incidents on that campus and in the state more generally (that is, in Ferguson)?5 There have been so many protests that The Atlantic—the publication most dedicated to covering the students-these-days beat6—published a “cheat sheet” for keeping track of them.7 A New York Times roundup of letters in response to several op-eds about campus protests covers so much ground (“safe spaces”! “use of the N-word”! “the ossification of old norms”!) that it’s unclear what, exactly, is being debated, except in the broad sense of, “So, students today, huh?”8
The most that can be said is that they fall into three overlapping categories: sexual assault, racial sensitivity, and free speech. The “speech” in question will generally be that of professors, or of prominent invited speakers known for controversial views on topics relating to those first two items. What draws the student protests together, and perhaps separates them from earlier varieties, is the intense focus on improving the schools themselves, and on what the schools can do to fix any problem, big or small, that may arise.
As the brochures suggest, college in the United States today isn’t something so banal, so pedestrian, as school. Yes, there are classes, professors, and so forth, but it’s so much more. It’s an all-encompassing, 24/7 experience. And no, I don’t mean the continuous landscaping, and the dining halls whose offerings are no longer limited to grayish slop. I’m not talking about the student as consumer, or not only. What these schools are promising is sort of … everything. And not “everything” in the sense of what would be provided at a spa. Everything in the sense of, every minute of the day will be spent with people who were, like yourself, handpicked for all-around perfection, as well as for serving some kind of preordained role in the impeccably balanced community. Your peers were not just accepted to college, but holistically admitted, their every trait (current and projected) having met the approval of gatekeepers who no doubt went through some sort of rigorous selection process of their own. Your professors are the result of a winnowing system that excludes the vast majority of ostensibly qualified, doctorate-granted candidates. Yet most importantly, an administrative apparatus exists, or seems from brochures as if it would, to make it so that nothing goes wrong. Ever. Every moment will be inspirational. Every facet of your being—mental, physical, spiritual, cultural—will be looked after, and looked after by your college. Who needs police, hospitals, or, for that matter, supermarkets? Everything ordinary people avail themselves of—all public and private services—is, for those four-ish years, superfluous. The point is to live in a bubble where everything is taken care of, to an extent that exceeds what would have been the case for just about every high school kid still living at home.
A word about the fact that not all schools are Yale, or, for that matter, its competitors: Nope, they’re not. What these schools do, however, is offer a portrait of how everything should go, according to the ideals of our age. As in, if money is no object, and if a school can get anyone it wants, what’s valued? Another way to put it is that elite schools set the tone. Whether one looks at it as entitlement or empowerment (or simply as misdirected grievances, some more reasonable than others), the fact remains that today’s student protests are narrowly tailored requests for their schools to get it, whatever it is, right.
While brochure hypocrisy has long been a pet peeve of mine,9 the notion that the phenomenon might somehow relate to campus unrest is reasonably widespread, if never quite front and center, where it belongs. In a December 2015 New Yorker essay,10 Vassar English professor Hua Hsu speculated that a discrepancy between what schools claim they’re offering and what actually happens on campus might be behind the student protests that so dominated the news in that year: “Maybe the efforts of students pushing to fulfill a brochure’s promise of community and belonging feel purely symbolic or naïve.” Sure enough, in a Medium post from the previous month,11 Yale senior Aaron Z. Lewis offered exactly that assessment:
[T]he protests are not really about Halloween costumes or a frat party. They’re about a mismatch between the Yale we find in admissions brochures and the Yale we experience every day. They’re about real experiences with racism on this campus that have gone unacknowledged for far too long. The university sells itself as a welcoming and inclusive place for people of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, it often isn’t.
Brochures, though, aren’t the whole picture. Universities continue to sell themselves, as it were, to matriculated students as well. Meghan O’Rourke pointed out, also in The New Yorker, that the Yale Halloween costume protests were really more about protestors asking for what they were told they’d receive: “When one of those students insisted … that ‘in [Nicholas Christakis’s] position as master’ it was his ‘job’ to create not just an intellectual space but ‘a place of comfort and home,’ she was simply insisting on the story that Yale itself spun her.”12 O’Rourke presents this as specific to Yale, and to its residential college system. Could be, but I doubt it; one only needs to hop over to yet another New Yorker piece, this one by Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk, for examples of home-and-coziness rhetoric elsewhere.13
Student entitlement, or hypersensitivity, or whatever one wishes to call it, may be excessive, but it’s an excess that universities have invited. It’s not only that college costs so much, although that’s part of the picture. It’s not that the brochures are glossy, or that the gyms are state of the art, although these may enter into it. It’s more that what’s promised is a progressive utopia, while what’s delivered is a system that perpetuates inequality. The “perpetuates inequality” bit wouldn’t cause such concern—and wouldn’t inspire such seeming overreactions—if students hadn’t been told that college would be perfect. The “safe space” fuss is, at its root, about the fact that a safe space was promised. Sexual assault—tragic under any circumstances—becomes that much more shocking when students have been told that they and their classmates were hand-selected for character.14 How can someone who made the holistic cut be a rapist? The campus sexual-assault crisis is in the fact that it happens at all; that rape is less common on campus than off is irrelevant. So, too, with racism. Are there more dire questions in American racism today than comments three young black women at Harvard have received about their hair?15 I should think so. Yet small-scale racism is still racism, and, in principle, a school like Harvard couldn’t possibly have any.
“PRIVILEGE” ON CAMPUS
WHAT’S RILING TO today’s progressive college students is hypocrisy. Privilege awareness so often serves as a cover for a system that actually perpetuates inequality. The scholarly examination of inequality coexists with, and obscures, the fact that it costs $70,000 a year to be sitting in the seminar room contemplating life’s unfairness in the first place. Academia remains as hierarchy obsessed as ever, and with white men still at the helm. Yet seminar classes pore over theories of power imbalance and symbolic “violence.” Having been in such classes, it seems to me at the very least possible that this is where a lot of the campus radicalism one hears about is coming from. That is, it’s not that campuses are the most racist and tragic places in America. Far from it. However, they’re the only places claiming to be havens from life’s ills.
The possibility that these schools are overpromising—and that the solution is simply that they need to promise less—never seems to come up. Or maybe it does, but in a very roundabout way, through objections to the student-as-consumer setup, like when Freddie deBoer writes:
If students have adopted a litigious approach to regulating campus life, they are only working within the culture that colleges have built for them. When your environment so deeply resembles a Fortune 500 company, it makes sense to take every complaint straight to H.R.16
However, the answer is always, somehow, that the university must do more. Not necessarily spend more, but offer a finer product. DeBoer frames his New York Times piece about the university’s “corporate” turn around Purdue University’s decision to replace a garden with an expanded “research park” (hardly a luxurious amenity, but apparently a problem because it wouldn’t interest undergrads), which is sad, in his view, because he finds the garden charming. This romantic notion of the university amounts to almost the same thing. David Brooks, in a column musing on the flaws of the modern university, suggests that schools need to “foster transcendent experiences.”17
All too often, though, as deBoer and others point out, attempts to address college inequality—on campus, and at the level of admissions—are quite pricey. I’m thinking of Brown’s controversial18 decision to answer student unrest by spending $100 million on increased privilege-awareness efforts.19 Moves like Brown’s not only serve to alert marginalized students to their marginalization, but also add (indirectly but still) to the cost of college. If the aim is increasing accessibility, adding a Center for Niceness, or whatever, may not be the best way.
And while I think they overestimated student fragility (and more on why in a moment), Lukianoff and Haidt were correct in placing the blame on the schools themselves. Yet they, too, fall into the trap of assuming this is a problem that could be solved via further administrative intervention:
Teaching students to avoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especially when the students come from many different cultural backgrounds. But students should also be taught how to live in a world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incoming students how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy?
Or: Why not teach incoming students? (Period. The end.) What if all the angst (and I’m including the adult angst over purported student angst) stems from the college as an impossibly ideal experience?
THE IVORY DILDO
IN A YEAR-END roundup, Karin Agness of Forbes asks readers to “consider the ten most ridiculous student protests of 2015.”20 The examples she lists tilt toward the titillating, or visual. What they are not—not uniformly, at least—is “ridiculous.” A “free-the-nipple” gender-equality protest does sound silly. But is a protest for “tuition-free public college” all that hilarious? Idealistic, sure, but by that standard, what is an acceptable student protest? She brings up the Oberlin cafeteria food “cultural appropriation” episode, wherein uninspired Asian-fusion dining hall dishes got recast as a microaggression against Asian students. One can debate whether students who make such demands deserve a public shaming, but it’s clear enough that this would fit the “ridiculous” bill. Yet how about “UT Austin Students Protest[ing] Concealed Carry with Dildos”? The university allows guns in classrooms, but not sex toys, which suggests that the school itself needs the reality check. Unfortunately for Agness’s argument, the protestors make a good point. Yes, yes, dildos, hilarious, but the absurdity would seem to be allowing guns in classrooms in the first place. (“Trigger warnings,” indeed.) If the height of student entitlement is that time when students wanted to go to class without getting shot, it would seem that the panic over student hypersensitivity isn’t entirely justified.
Despite its timely framing, Agness’s top ten reads as a throwback to a simpler time on the campus-criticism landscape: the conservative critique of education.21 In my day—which is to say, when I was just out of college, so 2007-ish—the big thing was for right-wing writers to churn out fountain-penned screeds against the pool of decadence that higher ed had, in their view, become. These concerns were rooted in wider political debates, and had only a tenuous connection to actual college students. Those discussing student crises tended not to have any particular stake in the topic (that is, academia), beyond a vague gesture at the importance of Great Books (or, conversely, of learning something practical), and a desire not to see the youth corrupted.
In 2011—after the arrival of “privilege,” but before the latest round of student protests—Joseph Epstein, the conservative cultural critic and emeritus Northwestern English lecturer, wrote a Weekly Standard essay riffing on that moment’s college dildo scandal.22 Much of what’s changed in the past few years—not on campus, but in media discussions of college life—comes through if we lay these two dildo-gates side by side.
The episode in question seemed tailor-made to fit with what right-wing commentators on academia had long feared, or excitedly imagined: Northwestern professor J. Michael Bailey had hosted a live sex-toy demonstration for his undergraduate class. Not in class, but as an optional after-class activity, perhaps not the best idea. While not entirely unprecedented—remember the sex-demo-as-lecture scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life?—it was certainly odd, and noted in the media as such.23 The demonstration seems to have involved a naked woman, a (clothed?) man, and something called a fucksaw, which—contrary to what the name would suggest—can apparently bring a woman to orgasm. Outrage wasn’t universal; Joseph Bernstein defended the dildo prof, and class, in The Awl.24 But—lest this need stating—you don’t have to be all apocalyptic about the state of academia to think that maybe a “fucksaw” demonstration for undergrads is not why you sent your kids to college. It also wasn’t representative of anything. Not of college courses, nor of “studies” or otherwise newfangled disciplinary areas. Not even of this professor’s human sexuality class. Yet that didn’t stop Epstein from using the episode as a starting point for a wholesale condemnation of modern campus life.
At the time,25 I read Epstein’s essay as a greatest hits of the conservative critique of education, touching upon all the key tropes. (Sample sentence: “Who is to say that the films of Steven Spielberg are less important than the plays of Shakespeare, or for that matter that Shakespeare himself wasn’t gay and a running dog of capitalism into the bargain?”) Which is why I think it’s useful to look at where his grievances differ from today’s. And oh do they ever!
Epstein’s article amounts to a case for limiting campus speech. His first non-dildo-related grievance is with Northwestern’s president, over the school’s pick for commencement speaker. (Stephen Colbert. Not serious enough.) Yes, that’s right—a conservative protesting a commencement speaker! Next, Epstein moseys on over to the topic of student-professor romance, which he is unequivocally against: “Does sleeping with one’s undergraduate students come under the shield of academic freedom, or was it instead an academic perk, or ought it, again, to be admonished, if not punished by dismissal?” Approving of such relationships is, he seems to be saying, something liberal professors do. How far, indeed, from the conservative rush in 2015 to defend Laura Kipnis, another Northwestern professor, when an article she wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, defending professors who sleep with their students, inspired student protests.26
In the heyday of the conservative critique of education, the students were the sacred innocents, and the professors, the villains. Two clichés dominated this period: the maligned (probably male) conservative student, bringing underappreciated ideological diversity to campus; and the naïve coed (think I Am Charlotte Simmons), dreaming of a boyfriend-turned-husband but stuck coming of age in the era of hook-up culture. Today, students themselves are the shared enemy of conservative critics of academia (who are very much still around, giddily declaring the campus worse than ever27) and a fairly wide coalition of moderates, liberals, center-left, and contrarian-left sorts. (Defenses of Kipnis spanned the National Review all the way over to The Nation.28) A range of at times contradictory, complaints about college students have emerged, creating a portrait of student as consumer, student as victim. The radical, 1960s-relic professor is no longer this menacing brainwasher, but is instead the true victim. Yes, quite possibly of his or her own ideology, but there’s surprisingly little I-told-you-so to go around. Something has shifted, because today’s puritanical students (that is, the subset of students who are vocally puritanical) often identify as progressives, while from-the-left critics of liberalism, as well as conservatives, wind up siding with the profs.
If I’ve been suspicious of this latest campus-crisis narrative (and, spoiler alert, I have been29), it’s partly because I’ve taught hundreds of undergraduates (at New York University and the University of Toronto) on and off throughout the era of supposed disaster, and apart from the usual unhappiness over not everyone being able to get an A, I haven’t found the students all that sensitive or entitled. (I know, NYU!) I kept waiting for the spoiled-and-pampered brigade to appear, but it didn’t happen. I move in academic circles as much as the next PhD with an academic spouse, which means my friends and acquaintances span plenty of universities and disciplines, and even so, my knowledge of mandatory “trigger warnings” and so forth comes from op-eds, not anecdotes.
My skepticism derives from the campus pseudocrises of the early 2000s, my own college years. Specifically, I remember the near-complete lack of overlap between what I’d read was happening on campus, and what either my friends at other schools or I experienced. Canonical texts were still assigned, and the much-hyped “hook-up culture” hadn’t supplanted dating or monogamous pairing off. (Or, for that matter, chastity, voluntary or otherwise. It was not unheard-of for college students to remain virgins at graduation.30) A “crisis” served political ends once; why not once more? The conservative critics of academia (I’ve gone with CCOAs, an acronym to convey the seriousness of their endeavor) built the student-crisis story; today, a far broader coalition lends its support.
Evidence also, initially at least, looked scant. The quantitative information available on the topic—principally a 2015 National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) survey, suggests that the prevalence of the trigger warning, while implicating more than one student, isn’t terribly extensive:
Although fewer than 1% of survey participants reported that their institution had adopted a policy on trigger warnings, 7.5% reported that students had initiated efforts to require trigger warnings on campus, twice as many (15%) reported that students had requested warnings in their courses, and 12% reported that students had complained about the absence of trigger warnings.31
I’d pause on that “fewer than 1%” bit, and keep it front and center when trying to sort out whether free speech on campus is kaput.
THE GLIMMER OF TRUTH BENEATH THE SEA OF PANIC
IF YOU WERE hoping to read about campus PC run amok, you will be disappointed. But the culture does, indeed, shift over time, and at least some of today’s students have bought into a “privilege” worldview, if not necessarily full-on anti-“privilege” activism. A 2015 Pew survey showing that far more millennials than students of earlier generations, want the government to ban speech offensive to minorities suggests that speech concerns are grounded in something.32 Another survey, released in 2016, found today’s college freshmen “more likely to participate in a student-led protest than each of the nearly five decades of classes that preceded them,” as The Chronicle of Higher Education put it.33
And then there was the mess at Wesleyan,34 where, as the Jezebel headline bluntly put it, the “Student Government Retaliate[d] for Dumb Op-Ed By Dramatically Slashing Newspaper Funding.”35 The episode—which involved one student writing an op-ed critical of Black Lives Matter, and more than a hundred petition signers boycotting the publication—was plainly awful.
Regardless, whether or not the amount of “awful” is as great as some imagine, it matters that universities themselves are taking these complaints seriously, which they are (and which they have to be, given the media attention), both by restating commitments to free speech36 and by ramping up sensitivity efforts.37 There’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy. The NCAC survey informs that “[w]hile there were widespread expressions of concern and respect for students, nearly half of respondents (45%) think trigger warnings have or will have a negative effect on classroom dynamics and 62% think they have or will have a negative effect on academic freedom.” Maybe there’s an epidemic of professorial hypersensitivity, but that, too, seems important.
WHERE THE PRIVILEGED STUDY “PRIVILEGE”
THE “PRIVILEGE” WARS all seem to stem, in one way or another, from the campus: from Peggy McIntosh, privilege awakening Wellesley women and Brearley girls, to Tal Fortgang, the Princeton undergrad whose privilege was checked one too many times. The concept comes out of academia and—as the prevalence of campus “privilege” education suggests—continues to be popular among students as well.38 And the juxtaposition of so much have-ishness with so much talk of deprivation makes elite-campus privilege controversies easy targets for hypocrisy call-outs39 as well as more lighthearted mockery; for a mix of both, check out the South Park episode about a (white) frat obsessed with privilege checking.40 What was so great about that bit was that it didn’t simply showcase campus PC, but slyly emphasized the extent to which self-righteous bullies share demographic categories with their less noble-minded equivalents.
And now, a disclaimer. Not a privilege disclaimer, but a can’t-cover-everything one.
There are approximately a trillion things to say about the place of privilege and “privilege” in academia, and I have, by necessity, not addressed all of them. There are “privilege” controversies within scholarship, such as the question of whether sociologist Alice Goffman is fully aware of hers, but in a discipline-specific sense that only somewhat overlaps with popular understandings of “privilege.” (As writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus explained in a New York Times Magazine feature, “Above all, what frustrated her critics was the fact that she was a well-off, expensively educated white woman who wrote about the lives of poor black men without expending a lot of time or energy on what the field refers to as ‘positionality’—in this case, on an accounting of her own privilege.”41)
Debates about the academic profession are also sometimes YPIS-fests. In a (public) Facebook post sharing a Chronicle of Higher Education piece42 he’d cowritten with a fellow prof, Penn State literature professor Michael Bérubé wrote, “Jennifer Ruth and I have a new essay up, and I am glad to see that it took only half an hour for someone to complain that we are ‘privileged.’ (True! But apparently we forgot to check.)”43 In that context, “privileged” is less (directly) about unearned advantage, and more a criticism of the academic hierarchy itself, where tenured professors enjoy vastly higher pay and better job security than other college instructors. A mini-controversy also erupted surrounding a Princeton professor who nobly publicized his “CV of failures,” a document44 confessing to such shameful moments as the times when Harvard turned him down. Did this professor get called out for privilege? Why yes he did.45
As for the place of privilege in higher ed—that is, the extent to which colleges just replicate the existing social structure—there’s a ton out there already, plenty more that should be further researched and explored, but it’s a bit late in the game for another piece of writing whose purpose is to announce that “college educated” functions as a proxy for middle class, “Ivy League educated” for upper middle or upper class. What’s more relevant for our purposes is the way that the idea of “privilege” guides the student experience from even before students arrive on campus. When I was neck-deep in what sure felt like every facet of this topic, I kept getting drawn to the college-admissions angle. Everything’s sort of set up to be about “privilege.” It’s built into the way the schools are, at this point, designed.
THE SEMINAR-TUMBLR CONNECTION
MY OWN OVERT introduction to the concept of privilege—although it beats me if the word itself was used—was almost certainly during my freshman year at the University of Chicago, where I took a course called “Power, Identity, and Resistance”—one of the options in the famed core curriculum—and read what Foucault, Bourdieu, and other gentlemen of a Caucasian persuasion had to say about life’s systemic and microscopic unfairnesses … as interpreted by professors and instructors who were themselves, as I recall, of those same demographics. There’s little reason to believe that either of these details—the “oppression” course, or the faculty’s identity categories46—have much changed since I graduated from college in 2005, or French literature grad school in 2013. Concepts like “cultural capital”—or the idea that anything mildly unpleasant ought to be labeled a “violence”—were and are set forth within a deeply hierarchical and dare I say conservative structure.
What is new, however, is social media, with its porous link to college life. The result is continuous YPIS in all directions, among college students and at them from the outside, and at their critics. If you don’t learn about “privilege” in a seminar room, maybe you will on Tumblr from someone who did. Although the learning goes both ways. In a blog post with the fabulous title, “When Your Curriculum Has Been Tumblrized,”47 sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses the impact Tumblr and social-media activism have had on classroom discussions: “[S]tudents are very comfortable talking about ‘oppressions’, ‘intersections’, and the macks of them all, ‘privilege and microaggressions’.” This familiarity with sociological terminology, she explains, has some advantages (students arrive interested in the material), but can lead to confusion when the scholarly definition of these terms doesn’t match up with the Tumblr one. (McMillan Cottom compares the two varieties to “scalpels” and “hammers,” respectively.) And so, even in courses about privilege, a kind of privilege overload sets in: “I have taken to sending some terms on vacation in my class (e.g. privilege) and pulling others out of retirement to play first string for a bit (e.g. power).” Think, for a moment, about what it means that a leading public intellectual and academic who’s involved in social-media activism—and, not to mention, who happens to be an African American woman—is telling students, gently, to lay off the “privilege” talk.
NO, YOU’RE PRIVILEGED!
LIKE ALL CONTEMPORARY culture wars, the question of whether student activists are to be admired or reviled somehow ends up revolving around divergent notions (and exchanged accusations) of privilege. In one interpretation, the students are leaders in the fight against various forms of systemic injustice. They’ve become aware of privilege,48 and are damn well going to do something about it! Anyone who doesn’t get why students today are worked up—about sexual assault, about debt, about racism from fellow classmates and unfortunately named buildings—is out of touch, and operating on some version of liberalism that may have seemed progressive a zillion years ago, but that is now sort of … privileged.
In the other, it’s the student protestors and sympathizers who exemplify privilege. After all, there are worse plights in the world than being young and American and in higher education. That, and the fact that the specific concerns raised are sometimes comically minute. Agness concludes her 2015 protest roundup with a privilege critique: “What all of these campus protests have in common is that they demonstrate just how out-of-touch college students are with how the world works beyond the college bubble,” adding, “Here’s hoping that these protesting college students become more self-aware in 2016.” Finally, the schools whose crises make the news tend to be elite liberal arts colleges or Ivy League universities. The more privileged the student body, and the more micro the aggression, the more likely we are, it seems, to hear about it.
Critics of the recent student activism have flipped the “privilege” script, pointing out that anything Ivy League students are complaining about is pretty much by definition first-world problems. Writer Meghan Daum, for example, took to the Los Angeles Times to YPIS Columbia’s sexual-assault protests:
Why is Mattress Girl generating more headlines and postings than the victims of Boko Haram? Why (other than the usual vagaries of the class divide) are so many young women ignorant of the big picture captured by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting stats—that if you lived in, say, Gallup, N.M., in 2013 you were 47 times more likely to get raped than if you were enrolled at Harvard?49
While she also found space in the very same piece to mock privilege rhetoric (“just as we are told not to ‘privilege’ one kind of trauma over another, any suggestion that young American activists might want to also focus on traumas other than their own probably will be dismissed as schoolmarmish finger-wagging”), the point about Boko Haram is about as YPIS as it gets.
In an Atlantic piece, Conor Friedersdorf, meanwhile, offers the following, in reference to the Yale-Halloween situation:
These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film-editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can’t bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings?50
The essay that passage comes from, “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,” built upon an argument he’d been making (and that I’ve been discussing with him51) for some time. In 2014, he spoke out against some privilege-awareness training provided to Harvard public policy grad students. Specifically, Friedersdorf pointed out that as nice as it is to sort out who stands where among Harvard students, these are people who are all, by definition, vastly ahead of the general population.52 The gulf between Harvard students and everyone else, he suggests in that piece, is the big picture.
So which is it? Whose privilege is most in need of a righteous takedown, the students’ or society’s?
As is so often the case with such matters, both interpretations are correct. Yes, there’s something absurd about having “privilege” wars on elite college campuses, which are places where “class conflict” gets defined as the troubles of upper-middle-class kids who are made to feel poor. (As an example, see conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s presciently titled 2005 memoir, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, which explores the obstacles faced by a somewhat-privileged kid among hyperrich classmates.) Indeed, one of the main problems with “privilege” is that it’s a framework often geared toward the sensitivities of people who are, as things go, doing just fine. A caption to a New York Times photograph of an Amherst student apparently critical of campus life (but not otherwise mentioned in the article itself) reads, “A Latina sophomore … said she could feel lonely.”53 Could the same not be said of every college sophomore, or, for that matter, every human being? That Amherst has failed to successfully eliminate loneliness is somehow more out-there as a complaint than the already objectionable student-activist concerns mentioned in the article itself. (Such as: “They wanted students who had posted ‘Free Speech’ and ‘All Lives Matter’ posters to go through ‘extensive training for racial and cultural competency’ and possibly discipline.”) There’s reluctance even on the part of some of the protestors’ supporters to put too much weight on their concerns. In a Harper’s Magazine piece that’s ultimately sympathetic to student protestors,54 the writer Wesley Yang admits, “The theory of microaggression can’t help but seem to me mostly an indicator of how radically devoid of other threats our lives in America have become—at least in the fortunate part of the country where people go to college.” The privilege lens, which guides many of today’s student complaints, is worth condemning, and is, in some intrinsic way, associated with higher ed, and with elite schools especially.
However, I don’t think it’s helpful to dismiss the student protestors themselves as “privileged.” That meme, which mainly took off on the right, with less nuance than Daum or Friedersdorf brought to the topic, has all the same flaws as YPIS on the left. Why, I asked at the time, 55 are we talking about the students’ identities, and not their arguments? In a New York Times Magazine essay about the concept of “resilience,”56 Parul Sehgal brought up Friedersdorf’s “pianos” remark and criticized him for “assuming that an atmosphere of wealth should inoculate you from experiencing racism.” Aaron Z. Lewis, a Yale senior, took the entirely sensible point further: “I’ve heard a lot of people dismiss this situation out of hand because Yale is a ‘place of privilege.’ But if racial discrimination of any kind can happen at a place like this, then it’s certainly happening elsewhere in this country.”57 Those protesting a lack of one form of “privilege” are likely to have more than their share of another. That’s who has a platform.
It also seems worth mentioning that some students at Yale and the like don’t come from privilege. Many “inclusivity”-type concerns are coming from the (handful of) students at these schools who are first generation in college or working class. While there are, as I’ve argued, some major problems with thinking increased privilege awareness is what will help the students in question,58 it’s important for schools to remember that these students exist, and not to fall into the trap of classifying those rare instances of upward mobility as “privilege.”
In a sense, the “privilege” critique was tailor-made for intergenerational conflicts. When were the young not chastised for being spoiled ingrates? And when were the old not taken to task for having drifted to the right, to the establishment?
ON THE RIGHT TO BE YOUNG AND FOOLISH IN PRIVATE
IF THERE’S ANY consensus, it would seem to be over the necessity of commenting on campus trivia. Which is unfortunate. As Daum herself notes, it’s entirely possible that “when these women aren’t protesting the overrepresentation of white male authors in their classics curricula, they’re volunteering at inner-city domestic violence shelters or developing global strategies to empower women in the developing world.” So shouldn’t the issue be media coverage, and not the priorities of campus feminists?
On that note, a third way has emerged in response to the outrage on all sides. Some have argued—and they have a point—that we shouldn’t be putting students in the spotlight in the first place. In a New Inquiry piece, “Against Student Stories,” writer and academic Aaron Bady discussed an article in the Duke student paper that wound up going viral in the way that articles now do: via a sea of hot-take-infused aggregation, which Bady helpfully illustrates with snapshots of those near-interchangeable headlines.59 A Duke University Chronicle article about one Christian student’s reluctance to read a lesbian-themed graphic novel became a national news story about how Duke students, or just “students,” were hypersensitive religious freaks. No, but it made for good content. In a New Yorker essay I mentioned above, writer and Vassar professor Hua Hsu’s “The Year of the Imaginary College Student,”60 a similar picture emerges. Hsu writes about the “archetype” that the media keeps bashing: “The imaginary college student is a character born of someone else’s pessimism.”
Bady and Hsu have different ideas about why the student-controversy story fascinates. Bady mostly attributes it to “the collective hunger of the online, for-profit media for tasty content,” elaborating:
The collective news consciousness is vaguely aware that college students are Anti-Speech Social Justice Warriors not to mention generally bad news, because we keep seeing op-eds declaring that it’s a real problem. It’s an easy story, especially when there’s a Man-Bites-Dog twist, such as the students in question being Christians.
Precisely.
Hsu, meanwhile, projects a kind of world-weary pessimism onto the student-crisis-article audience. Maybe, he writes, “the reason that college stories have garnered so much attention this year is our general suspicion, within the real world, that the system no longer works. Their cries for justice sound out of step to those who can no longer imagine it. Maybe we’re troubled by these students’ attempts to imagine change on so microscopic a level.”
The “microscopic” bit seems right. As for the rest, I don’t think it’s quite so complicated. Student controversies make the news because eighteen- to twenty-year-olds—middle class and wealthy ones, at any rate—are a sexy-but-wholesome topic. As for why Yale makes the news if a student there has a hangnail, while something actually has to happen at Mizzou for anyone to learn of its goings-on … Well, look at who reads and writes for middle- and highbrow publications.
Campus speech controversies—that is, the ones involving middle-aged speakers getting turned away by self-righteous student activists—aren’t as obviously exciting, so it’s not as clear how they’ve become so hot right now. However, they do appeal to broader audiences, in part because “young people today” complaints are a timeless winner, but also because of our cultural fascination with jobs where you could say outrageous things (and insult your clients and employer) without getting fired. Point being, student life is put under the microscope, which has the inevitable impact of making it look like students think their internal, campus-based complaints are the most important thing happening in the world.
As for whether it’s an ethical violation of some kind to “put” student controversies in the news, there’s no easy answer that covers all cases. I’ve drawn a firm line against professors writing about what goes on in their own classrooms (as in, discussing specific students’ assignments or behaviors61), and would extend that to professors who comment on controversies involving named or readily identifiable students at their own universities.62 Students’ learning processes shouldn’t be treated as real-time fodder for culture-wars observations. There are many ways a professor who wishes to speak out on issues relating to academia may do so without specifically calling out students in his or her class. Oh, and if you’re a college president, maybe don’t use an anecdote mocking a student at your school as an opener to an open letter to be shared in The Washington Post.63
Yet what if—as is generally the case—the criticism comes from outside the academy? It’s certainly wrong for journalists (and I’d include student journalists, such as the one in the case Bady describes) to go onto ostensibly private online forums in search of pointless clickbait. In 2013, a glitch allowed gossip Web sites access to application essays written by Columbia’s incoming freshmen. Gawker published excerpts of a bunch, but reprinted two in full, even offering a download option.64 A commenter (who won a nod in the following comment from a Gawker staffer) rationalized the mockery:
I kind of want to chastise you for having a laugh at the expense of … what a bunch of 17- and 18-year-olds wrote to try and sound interesting to a college admissions office, but then I read what these 17- and 18-year-olds thought would sound interesting, and holy shit. Could these be anymore vapid and self-aggrandizing?65
A low point, I think, even for a site with plenty of low points.
Meanwhile, when cringe-inducing student-paper op-eds serve as content for mainstream publications, perhaps a measure of forgiveness is in order. Yet those papers are now public and online, put online by students themselves. There are some student writers who’d have been well served by the old model, where student writing practically never left campus. Others, though, are more than pleased to use a widely denounced student essay as a launching pad for a media career; an essay that infuriated one side will have generally delighted the other.66 This is true not just of student writers, but of student activists as well. As Hsu notes, “The logic of virality that governs life on the Internet has given student activists a sense of common struggle, as well as the means to escalate their grievances with relative ease.” College students, with few exceptions, are adults. To treat their publicly accessible writing as sacred is to fall into the “coddling” trap; why is the college paper private, but, say, the Tumblr of a nobody who may not have gone to college (and may not be an adult!) fair game? It seems best to place student publications in the same treat-gently pile as other public writing by people without real platforms, and who aren’t quite public figures.67 The students themselves, at any rate, are far less outrageous than the system they’ve landed in.
PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE: ADMISSIONS AND HYPOCRISY
THE JUICIEST “PRIVILEGE” controversies seem, at first, to be the ones on campus. However, the really egregious stuff is, as I’ve alluded to, happening at the level of admissions. The entire apparatus for selecting each entering class—that is, at the schools where selection is possible—is infused with “privilege” rhetoric. I’ll get at what this means, but first, a note about what it doesn’t. It’s often thought—and, less often, announced—that having privilege makes it harder to get into college these days. In a (very funny) post connecting Ben Carson’s life story with the college admissions process, Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri wrote, of college and politics, “Privilege is an anti-credential.” While she notes that a very scrappy background poses problems of its own, she presents the issue as, it’s now harder to get into college if you’re rich: “For personal narrative purposes, humble origins in adversity are priceless beyond rubies. (Rubies, after all, are something a privileged person would have.)” Privileged applicants are, she explains, in a bind: “There is no good way to overcome” the preference for a “rags-to-riches” narrative, she explains.68
Petri’s right about rich parents trying to find ways to present their kids as poor. Yet it isn’t actually harder to get into college if you’re privileged. Privilege is, was, and probably always will be the credential, in college and politics alike. It’s not as if there’s a dearth of serious politicians and candidates who bear the same last name as their predecessors. Privilege is great! It’s “privilege” that’s frowned upon.
“TRUFFLE DOGS”
THE QUESTION OF elite college admissions in the United States is always framed as one of how to select the right students, as though if only a proper sorting mechanism were arrived at, justice would be achieved. While opinions differ over who those students are and how they’re best discovered, what rarely gets questioned is whether fine-tuning the sieve is even a task that makes sense in the first place. Alternate possibilities—a flawed-but-simple system (say, a GPA cutoff, plus SAT, then a lottery) or a system where everyone just goes to the nearest large public university—aren’t as exciting as seeking out new ways of finessing the admissions process. Cheaper, but less compelling.
And so goes the end-in-itself quest to find the high school seniors who officially and objectively belong at elite schools. In an Atlantic book excerpt, Columbia professor Jonathan Cole argued that admitting students to college “is too important to leave to well-meaning young administrators.” Rather than recognizing that admissions committees are fallible, in part because there is no “right” group of applicants, Cole endorses a more involved sort of sifting: “There could be a standing committee of experienced and judicious faculty members who work on shaping the class—the ‘truffle dogs,’ with the ability to sniff out talented individuals who may have gone against the grain but who have exceptional potential.”69 I’ll start by questioning the comparison of seventeen-year-olds with prized fungus. Yet in all seriousness: Why are we assuming it’s possible for anyone to “sniff out” which seventeen-year-olds will wind up where? And—more to the point—why is it tragic if the kids who wind up at the top of their fields don’t spend four years at, say, Harvard? I get why Harvard would want the most illustrious alumni possible. But is creativity squashed when creative types wind up elsewhere?
And should we really be comparing the desired college applicants to something so upscale? Why truffles? Why not, say, some hearty root vegetable, inexpensive but roastable all winter long, with a video of food critic Melissa Clark advising on the best preparation?
It’s by now a college-admissions tenet that one must not come across as privileged. “Privileged,” in the college-admissions context like all others, isn’t a fixed category, so much as a euphemism for that which is, in whichever setting, undesirable. Privileged applicants, as in rich ones with connections and opportunities flowing their way, do just fine.
Truffle admissions is simply a hyped-up version of “holistic,” the process currently in place. “Holistic” means that rather than simply evaluating applicants on the basis of materials submitted, admissions committees are—we’re to believe—using them to arrive at assessments greater than the sum of their parts, with the goal of figuring out who each applicant is as a person. Assessing strangers as whole human beings is, of course, impossible. In practice, “holistic” is simply the way colleges justify their choice to admit the pool they wish to admit, without external critics (legal or otherwise) second-guessing their decisions. It’s a means to quietly correct for biases within a purportedly meritocratic system, but it’s also a cover for introducing a host of new ones. If you’re a brilliant inner-city kid whose high school doesn’t offer APs, or—at the other end of the spectrum—a dim-witted heir, “holistic” is for you. “Holistic” makes an enemy of members of the so-called overrepresented minority groups. (For more on the place of such groups under a privilege framework, see chapter 5.) If you’re from a group that’s not super privileged, but that tends to do well in school, “holistic” is one way of making sure you don’t get in.
Yet “holistic” also appeals to academically mediocre wealthy and middle-class (white) students and their families, because it suggests that the usual metrics for assessing academic performance aren’t the true tests of a student’s college-worthiness. What really counts is how special your child is, and whose child isn’t special? Denouncing quantitative assessment is, as I’ve argued in The Atlantic, a way for a certain well-off, left-leaning demographic to both advocate for the underprivileged and receive unearned advantages for its own.70
And so, in this climate, where the worst thing in the world is to be reduced to a number, college admissions become geared toward the assertion of individuality. This emphasis encourages and is even partially responsible for the ubiquity of the “privilege” framework. Students are being socialized into a culture of curated personal confession, one where the greatest good is to express oneself in the proper tone. What matters isn’t what you do, but how you come across when describing it.
The privilege framework is thus at the core of the holistic assessment. Privilege awareness has become an essential competence. An otherwise qualified applicant who demonstrates unchecked privilege is suddenly out of the running. And so, while privilege itself can be sussed out from other parts of an application (where a student lives, which high school, etc.), “privilege” needs to slip out inadvertently. And the slip-out-inadvertently part of every college application is, of course, the essay.
ON A SOCIETY THAT ASKS SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLDS TO WRITE MEMOIRS
THE COLLEGE ESSAY isn’t a cover letter but, as parenting writer Caren Osten Gerszberg put it, in a post on The New York Times’s college admissions blog, “a short form—or a portion—of their memoir.”71 American high school students are told that getting into college is achieved by presenting one’s most authentic self. Yet not too authentic, or New York Times columnist Frank Bruni might write a column about how you wrote about being poorly endowed on your application to Yale and then, insult to injury, didn’t get admitted.72 No one likes a sob story, but colleges do want to know if you’ve had to contend with any “special circumstances.” A broad, broad category that can, according to a 2012 handout on the National Association for College Admission Counseling Web site, include having “[r]idden public transportation (buses) on a regular basis.”73 Fantastic—I grew up riding, among others, the M4, down Fifth and up Madison. I guess that counts!
The college essay isn’t autobiographical in manner of, say, a cover letter. It’s not just that college essays are written in the first person, and are (targeted) descriptions of the self. It’s that their purpose—like that of literary memoir—is to get at the person within. The goal isn’t, as with other application letters, to demonstrate that you know how to come across as reasonable for a sustained period of time. (Which is, after all, what’s needed to hold down a job.) What’s sought is something far more extensive. You’re applying not merely for the hours each week you’ll spend in seminar, but for the chance to have late-night dorm conversations about Hegel (something that could well have once been how a college evening was spent) with a hand-selected cohort. You’re applying not just to be a student, but a friend, a spouse. Given the all-encompassing nature of what’s on offer, it seems almost natural that colleges would demand a level of openness above and beyond what, in any other case, a perfect stranger might ask.
Less recognized, but no less important, is the way that the privilege turn in education constitutes an invasion of young people’s privacy. The road to meritocracy that’s been settled on these days involves asking students to confront their privilege or lack thereof. It’s not sufficient to level the playing field through broad demographic factors—that is, by giving a boost to poor students and those from underrepresented minorities. Every student’s unique mix of advantages and disadvantages must be assessed; for this to happen, the student must self-report. Somehow, all of this navel-gazing is meant to inspire the haves to give up their unearned edge, and to inspire confidence in the have-nots. How exactly self-examination is meant to bring about justice isn’t really explored—the idea is that it just will, and that you’ll look insensitive if you question the benefits of this approach.
To get into college, students must offer up confessional essays, while somehow avoid oversharing. That balance eludes many professional essay writers, yet random seventeen-year-olds are meant to have figured it out. In their admissions essays and, once on campus, in activities like the “privilege walk,” in which students are asked to take a step forward or backward according to, say, whether their parents went to college, students are asked to dwell on and, more troublingly, make public statements about the most sensitive aspects of their backgrounds. (There’s also a T-shirt checklist version.74) Part of being well educated is having achieved this higher plane of self-awareness.
In this grand quest to eliminate obliviousness, there’s actually quite a great deal of it. Everyone seems to miss that the most vulnerable students are precisely the ones who won’t come forward about their disadvantages. Meanwhile, the students socialized to view themselves as deserving of special help tend to be … privileged. The edge provided to students who know how to, and are prepared to, speak out about their disadvantages is a built-in flaw with a system that classifies everyone who fails to cop to disadvantage as advantaged. As with other incarnations of the privilege approach, privilege gets reinforced.
Yet even apart from the further hypocrisy concerns, there’s a broader ethical question: Do students owe university administrators or professors their life stories, and by extension, those of their relatives? Is it right that students get penalized for reticence, or rewarded for candor? Right or wrong, it’s viewed as acceptable, unquestionable. Consider the New York Times College Scholarship Program, an academic grant announced on the paper’s Web site alongside the strictly charitable Neediest Cases Fund.75 The program is, on the one hand, to be praised for mitigating (if only for a handful) the racial and socioeconomic disparities in college accessibility. And yet there’s something unsettling about the accompanying article, where (named) students’ family tragedies (stories of extreme poverty, but also of parents’ physical and mental illnesses) are made public.76 These students are more impressive than most, and it’s indisputably right that they’d be recognized, but this apparently must involve publicizing their misfortune. At the very least, this way of assessing merit demands that students disclose personal histories on their applications. And it’s not especially difficult to picture why many would be wary of doing so.
THE “DELICATE DANCE”
MEANWHILE, ON THE other end of the advantaged-ness spectrum, students who haven’t faced Times scholarship-worthy obstacles scramble to portray themselves as something other than privileged. And there are so very many ways an applicant might come across as privileged in an essay. The first is straightforward boasting. It’s not wise, say the experts (and anyone with common sense), to use the limited space offered by the personal statement to share how delighted you are with your new Audi. That sort of materialist bragging is, however, easily avoided, compared with some of the other privilege pitfalls.
In a wonderful blog post called “Checking Whose Privilege,” writer and former independent admissions counselor Lacy Crawford presents the “delicate dance of self-effacement [that] plays out across America every fall, when high school seniors whose families can afford college contort themselves to obscure this fact.”77 It is indeed striking, given the cost of college—not to mention the persistence of legacy policies, legs-up for donors’ kids, and the myriad more subtle but entrenched ways rich kids benefit in college admissions—how central the warning against coming across as privileged is to application advice. Be privileged, by all means! Just don’t seem it. “Unfortunately, many applicants submit essays that show their privilege a bit too much,” advises one admissions site.78 “Hard-earned accomplishments speak louder than privileged opportunities,” offers another.79 A third includes, in a list of the top five ways an essay can go wrong, “You Sound Like a Privileged Snob.” (Materialism gets its own separate entry.)80
THE HUMANITARIANS OF HIGH SCHOOL
ON HER BLOG, The Neurotic Parent, J. D. Rothman offers reasons “brilliant” applicants get rejected. (Granted, the post title—“Why Your Brilliant Child Didn’t Get into the Ivies”—reads as sarcastic.) Coming in at number three:
Your child’s application stinks of privilege. You had the best of intentions when you sent your son or daughter to Oxford last July to read the classics. But guess what? The colleges, who eventually are happy to accept your $200,000, aren’t thrilled about $11,000 summer programs, even the life-changing ones.81
The nonproblem anecdote (the sports injury is, it seems, a standby82) announces that an applicant has no idea what true suffering is. But the absolute worst, as all the Web sites and all the articles insist,83 is the voluntourism essay:
During the summer before my junior year of high school, I spent a weekend volunteering with the poor in post-Katrina Louisiana and realized that I am privileged. Most of what these people had had been ripped out from under them and life was very different there from my life in suburban Massachusetts. Amazingly, though, these people still seemed happy. I learned from this experience that money isn’t everything.
So goes a sample college-admissions essay introduction, offered on a New York Times education blog, as part of a post aimed at high school teachers seeking what-not-to-do examples to hand out to their students.84 Given all the many ways a college essay might go wrong, why this one? Surely there’s worse than a grammatically written, if banal, reflection on volunteer work. Surely thoughts far worse than “money isn’t everything” have been expressed. Worse, perhaps. But not more boring. In the post, called “Going Beyond Cliché: How to Write a Great College Essay,” Amanda Christy Brown and Holly Epstein Ojalvo suggest teachers read that paragraph aloud, and then ask students to role-play as admissions officers deciding the fate of the poor (and, one hopes, fictional) sap behind that intro. “Does this paragraph grab you?” (No, you’ll say if you’re one of those students, to your teacher’s delight.) “Are you interested in reading more of this essay?” Judging by your teacher’s tone and body language while asking you this question, the answer had better be no.
Then it gets personal: “What do you think this paragraph says about this student?” Tellingly, the exercise asks students to judge this theoretical classmate not as a college applicant, or even as a writer, but as a person. The implicitly correct answer is that this isn’t merely a bad essay, but a bad person. But bad how? And here’s the implicit answer: Never in as few words has anyone come across as quite so privileged. Or quite so dull. It’s almost as if the paragraph were composed by professional writers as an example of what “privilege” minus personality would sound like. Can this (theoretical) applicant hear himself? (For some reason, the passage reads male, and since there’s no such thing as misgendering a straw applicant, that’s what I’m going with.) Two days this kid spent volunteering? No wonder he thought Katrina victims were “happy.” And “suburban Massachusetts?” Ack. Why not just open with, “I am demographically overrepresented, criminally unoriginal, and will contribute nothing unique to the incoming freshman class”? The privilege-acknowledgment portion of the paragraph—as is so often the case with such confessions—reveals the opposite. The worst things a college applicant can be are sheltered and suburban, and literally all we know about this applicant is that he’s both of those things.
The voluntourism choice is the educational equivalent of the “Humanitarians of Tinder”85 phenomenon, where white, Western hook-up app users pose with beaming, impoverished African children as a method of impressing would-be sex partners. Here, the would-be seduced are admissions committees. And they are not impressed.
In case the point hadn’t been hammered home quite enough, there’s the fact that humor writer Paul Rudnick parodied one of these essays in a New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs”:
When I was twelve, I first became aware of the world’s suffering, and I used the dividends from my trust fund to fly to Berlin to help the victims of the recent tsunami. Upon my arrival, I discovered that, while the tsunami hadn’t affected Berlin, I could still express my empathy for the victims by joining an activist performance troupe and mounting a piece entitled “Younami: The Superstorm Inside Us All.”86
It would be one thing if colleges frowned on these essays because if narcissistic musings on expensive trips to far-off locales are the best a student can come up with, the kid may not be that bright. Yet phrasing it as “privilege” suggests there’s a social-justice component to rejecting these applicants. And there’s a further hypocrisy: Families pay tutors to show their kids how to seem less privileged in these essays, thus creating a system where the students who seem the most privileged in their applications are, by definition, not the ones getting the most help. A tutor might, for a healthy fee, tell you to mention the job flipping burgers, but gently urge you away from spelling out that you did this for two weeks in the Hamptons, at an upscale restaurant owned by a family friend. In a post on admissions site Essay Hell, called “Is Your Privilege Showing?,” college admissions coach Janine Anderson Robinson offers up a list of nine sample phrases that would lead to a yes to that question, helpfully placing the offending terms in bold.87 “During a shopping trip to Paris with my mom…” should apparently be avoided, because—as must be painstakingly spelled out to naïve high schoolers fresh from a Petit Bateau restock—not everyone does this. There’s a gendered-male version as well: “While flying to Boise in my dad’s plane…” (Why Boise? I’m too New Yorker–privileged to get its significance as a marker of status.) Robinson insists that there’s “nothing wrong with being privileged,” but that “you just want to show that you have a realistic sense of the world and your place in it.” As she notes, “Many of the students I work with are from privileged backgrounds. (Hey, it’s expensive to hire a tutor!)” True enough. I’m thinking of that Dolly Parton quote, “It costs a lot to look this cheap.”88
WEISS PRIVILEGE
IN THE LIKABILITY sweepstakes, few fare as badly as an academically unimpressive white kid who thinks he deserved to get into Harvard. When—as it inevitably does—Harvard sends a many-qualified-applicants letter to the unremarkable B student from Scarsdale, who really had no business applying to the Ivies in the first place, any disappointment that kid voices will get classified as “privilege.” In this understanding, “privilege” isn’t the discreetly Kennedy-affiliated legacy who gets in, but the suburban nobody who does not.
That said, the nobody contingent does little to help its own case, focusing its resentment on affirmative action and other diversity efforts, and not on the myriad ways the system benefits the super rich. The cry of the aggrieved, entitled elite-college reject is that the admissions process benefits the underprivileged, leading sensible people everywhere to remind that no, it does not. It’s a behind-closed-doors sort of sentiment, but one that makes the occasional public appearance, as in a New York Times letter to the editor from an Oxford student named Jaimie Arona Krems, responding to a piece that had detailed the tremendous overrepresentation of the highest-income families at selective colleges. Krems acknowledged that her parents had paid for her entire education, private school through grad school, and that this had, you know, made her life a bit easier. Yet she objected to the idea of colleges giving a boost to applicants without those advantages: “In theory, hard-working, low-income kids deserve help; in practice, their 1,250 SAT scores’ counting for more than my 1,300 doesn’t reflect meritocracy.”89 The letter reads less as a thought-through rejection of income-based affirmative action, and more as an average student who faced no particular obstacles (or none worth mentioning) asking for a medal for having managed not to massively screw things up. The most public face of this sort of resentment, however, is Abigail Fisher, who took up her altogether reasonable-sounding rejection from the University of Texas with the Supreme Court. She didn’t fall into the top 10 percent of her high school class—the way most of that school’s admits get selected—but she really wanted to go to that school, and shouldn’t wanting something be enough? The expression “white privilege” comes up time and again regarding Fisher,90 as it will if one volunteers to be the textbook example of a phenomenon.
Not that Fisher doesn’t have competition. Then-high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss’s 2013 humor op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me,” went viral in the brash, sorry-not-sorry, budding-conservative way that Tal Fortgang’s privilege essay would the following year.91 It is, at first glance, almost a point-by-point guide to what not to put in a college essay in order to avoid coming across as privileged. Along with some sensible observations about voluntourism and holistic admissions, there were these sentiments: Weiss suggested she’d have gotten into her dream school if only she had “two moms,” and complained, “I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker.” Her cutesy way of lamenting colleges’ emphasis on ethnic diversity—“had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school”—was casually racist on enough levels to fill an entire master’s thesis about microaggressions. And the entire thing is an ode to her own underachievement (all the sports she didn’t play, the charitable and leadership activities she didn’t get involved with). A self-deprecating anecdote about preferring to watch the “Real Housewives” to making use of “the wonderful gifts I have been afforded” might have worked in some other context, but in a rant about not getting into nice enough colleges, it falls flat.
Among those taking the opportunity to hurl YPIS at Weiss were students who had fared a bit better in the admissions process: “During the three minutes I wasted reading this piece, a word continuously screamed and shouted in my head: privilege,”92 wrote Steven Gu of Swarthmore. The Huffington Post found a high school senior who’d been “accepted to Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” who was none too impressed by Weiss’s “privilege and sense of entitlement.”93 Morgan Jerkins of Princeton had much the same take: “[F]or a young woman who gloated about being accepted in the big 10 schools, receiving a 2120 on the SATs and achieving an astounding 4.5 GPA, it baffles me how blind you are to a term that perhaps may or may not have crossed your mind before you wrote your letter. Would you like to know what it is?” I would, but I have a guess. “It’s privilege.”94 What else?
There’s something about the mix of academic mediocrity and entitlement that’s off-putting in that narrow way where “privilege” seems appropriate. Students like Weiss, Fisher, and Krems—seemingly unashamed of their unexceptional academic records, and all too delighted to blame society’s have-nots for their own minor setbacks—are certainly unsympathetic and entitled. However, it’s quite likely that their spots, at least where private universities are concerned, went not to the underdogs they’re happy to trample, but to the still-more privileged. According to a 2014 Harvard Crimson survey, “about 15 percent of the incoming freshmen said their families earn above $500,000 per year, putting them among the top 1 percent of earners in the United States.”95 What this—along with the accompanying stats on legacy admissions—conveys is that it’s possible to exude all manner of suburban white-privileged entitlement … and still fall far short of that stratosphere.
The issue for bitter, upper-middle-class students, in other words, may be the opposite of what’s generally assumed. It’s not (just) that they’ve failed to acknowledge the privilege they do have. It’s that they’ve overestimated their privilege, mistakenly imagining that they’re competing in some kind of general privileged-person pool, and not realizing that if they were really privileged—that is, if they were members of political dynasties, or so well-off that their parents could offer up a new gym—they wouldn’t have to face rejection from Harvard, let alone the University of Texas. The “ugh-privilege” reaction such students inspire (and they inspire it in me) isn’t entirely warranted. It’s emotionally unavoidable, I suppose, but it still involves redirecting class rage away from the super elites, who will get into the top schools regardless, and toward the sheltered but hook-lacking middle and upper middle class.
Rejecting applicants on the basis of “privilege” has become a convenient stand-in for actually addressing all the unfairness that enters into the college admissions process. It seems progressive to picture a bunch of gatekeepers in a sealed-off room, all putting some mediocre-yet-entitled kid’s essay in their desktop trash cans in a fit of righteous disgust. Yet it isn’t substantively changing anything. It isn’t opening up slots for more than a handful of underprivileged applicants. All it’s doing is penalizing students who write crummy essays, or essays in which they display poor judgment. Which is to say, it’s just one more means of keeping a college elite.
TWO STEPS BACK
IN RECENT YEARS, elite and elite-adjacent colleges have explored ways of changing the process. I want to say, “of addressing systemic inequality in college admissions,” but that’s not quite it. Basically, the system is unfair, as everyone agrees, albeit for a range of contradictory reasons. In order to address concerns, if not necessarily realities, these schools have sought out ways to ramp up their emphasis on “holistic” assessment.
Sometimes the hypocrisy’s really over the top, like when Wesleyan framed its decision to go from need-blind to need-aware (admissions-speak for, it’s officially easier to get in if you’re rich, as versus just an unstated likelihood) as a noble effort to keep disadvantaged students out of debt.96 I’m not entirely clear on how this works—wouldn’t getting rejected from Wesleyan just mean taking out loans to go to a different college?—but it’s hard to see how else they’d have presented the move.
Mostly, though, we’re looking at the sort of changes that seem on the surface to be helpful, but that, upon closer examination, either wouldn’t improve matters or would plainly help the rich.
The brochures have gotten even glossier, and by “glossier” I mean that their promises keep expanding. The Web site for the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success97—a group of largely elite colleges seeking “to improve the college application process for all students as they search for and apply to their perfect college” via an alternative to the Common Application—opens with an image of, well, perfection. A group of five young women of color (plus a sixth, of indeterminate ethnicity) are standing, in graduation robes, smiling. Every major nonwhite ethnicity is represented, but the camera’s focus is on a dark-skinned black woman. Well done! With the brochure, that is. The reality sounds substantially less impressive. In a column ambivalent to what he appears to view as a well-meaning development, Frank Bruni summarizes critics’ objections:
They predicted that privileged kids with hovering parents would interpret the coalition’s suggestion about beginning to fill a [virtual] locker [of “creative work”] in the ninth grade as yet another reason to turn the entire high school experience into a calculated, pragmatic audition for college admissions officers. Meanwhile, underprivileged kids, lacking the necessary guidance and awareness, might never take advantage of the platform.98
I’d dispense with all of that hedging, and say with confidence that this is exactly what would happen. Yes, making admissions procedures more complicated would keep out, rather than attract, students from less-advantaged backgrounds. And then there’s Turning the Tide,99 a Harvard-based effort at (further) emphasizing community service, essays, and general holistic-ness, which has met with the same sort of criticism, for more or less the same reasons.100
And then there’s the new SAT, a shift with the potential to impact even more students. Aimed at improving socioeconomic diversity,101 it, too, has flaws that make it seem as if it probably wouldn’t help, and could hurt.102 In any event, there’s already a page devoted to it at the Princeton Review test-prep Web site: “The New SAT. We’re ON IT.”103
More and more colleges are going “test optional,” or allowing students to apply without providing standardized test scores.104 This move, too, gets justified in terms of privilege. SAT scores correlate with family income.105 So surely a college that abandons that metric is doing so in order to make the student body more socioeconomically diverse. Or so the schools would have applicants believe, even if nearly all evidence points to other motivations.
In a piece about George Washington University’s decision to scrap the test requirement, journalist Sarah Kaplan writes, “The ironic thing is that the test was invented for exactly the same reason that GW is moving away from it: a hope of creating a more meritocratic admissions process, one that evaluated applicants based not on their privileges as children, but on their promise as adults.”106 Kaplan does indeed offer a quote from the school’s dean of admissions, some platitude about students “‘from all different backgrounds’” being encouraged to apply, but there’s reason to be skeptical. As journalist Kate Groetzinger pointed out in Quartz, George Washington had recently got called out for wait-listing students for requiring financial aid:107 “While not technically a lie, [a GW administrator’s] claim that the new admissions policy is aimed at increasing socio-economic diversity in the student body is misleading, when students are currently being turned away based on their ability to pay.” Writing in The American Interest, Jason Willick noted, correctly, “If anything, making the admissions process based more on subjective factors like essays, extra-curricular activities, and applicant ‘personality’ will tilt the process even more in favor of students who know the ins and outs of what admissions officers want to hear—students that are disproportionately rich and white.”108 A Daily Caller headline put it more bluntly: “Fancypants Rich Kids School That Waitlisted Poor Kids for Being Poor Dumps SAT, ACT.”109 Along similar lines, it sounded promising when a Wesleyan University dean, when asked about the reason for that school’s test-optional policy, cites the relationship between income and scores.110 Yet as long as Wesleyan remains not just pricey but need-aware—that is, it’s actually easier to gain admission if you can pay the full tuition—the phrase lip service will come to mind.111
There’s some evidence that scrapping standardized tests could promote diversity, but nothing conclusive.112 The overlap between schools that are need-aware113 and ones that are test optional (Wesleyan, but also Bryn Mawr,114 Pitzer,115 Bates,116 and then there’s Trinity which is “test-flexible”117) does raise the possibility that when schools claim to be moving away from standardized tests as a way of reaching out to bright kids from underserved communities, what they’re actually doing is courting the reverse demographic.
Consider the case of Bard College in upstate New York, heralded in 2013 and more recently for offering an essays-only admissions option. Rather than subjecting themselves to the tyranny of standardized testing (or, realistically, in addition to taking those tests, given that other schools still tend to demand it, and students apply to multiple colleges), an aspiring Bard freshman would have the option of writing a mere four 2,500-word research papers. Ones with no relevance to any project other than this one college application. In The New York Times, reporter Ariel Kaminer described the new exam, and its ostensible accessibility:
Bard’s audition is open book: Along with the menu of 17 questions, the college’s Web site will provide all the relevant source materials—from a Nobel lecture about prion disorders to the United Nations Charter to an Aeschylus play—with which to address them. (Additional research is permitted if properly documented.) Mary Backlund, Bard’s director of admission, said that that access will place students who may not have encountered the subjects in school or do not have good local libraries on equal footing with those who attended elite high schools.”118
I realize this is a book protesting YPIS. However, let’s just pause for a moment and ask whether providing source materials and merely “permitt[ing]” further research is enough to mitigate the tremendous disadvantage an assignment like this would place on students who didn’t have exposure to topics like these in high school—a point made in the piece by Stuyvesant High School English teacher Walter Gern (my own former English teacher)—not to mention ones who have the leisure time to devote to a project along these lines. And then there’s the question of tutoring, or the euphemistic sort of tutoring that involves someone else (a tutor or parent) writing an applicant’s essay. Eliminating test prep hardly removes the potential for corruption or “help” along those lines. As journalist Jordan Weissmann pointed out in The Atlantic, “Bard’s new admissions option isn’t just vulnerable to cheating; it’s vulnerable to cheating from undeserving students who can afford to cheat.”119 A lot seems to hinge on the belief that admissions committees just know if an adult is the real author, which is a level of confidence anyone who’s ever read fiction with a convincing adolescent narrator should find suspicious. The stakes become that much greater where essays are the only metric.
However, even setting aside the possibilities for outright cheating, a switch to emphasizing essays would so obviously benefit privileged students; any denial of this reads as obliviousness, willful or otherwise. Yet it’s being marketed as not just privilege neutral, but as a progressive measure. After all, as Kaminer reminds in her piece, “new evidence shows that few low-income students attend elite colleges, despite the financial aid they offer, a problem that Bard hopes its new approach can address.” A note, then, on “the financial aid they offer.” As of August 2015, according to the college’s Web site, “Bard has a need-aware admission policy.”120 Furthermore, “Applicants should be aware that not every student will receive assistance equal to his or her demonstrated financial need.”121 And yet we’re supposed to believe that offering applicants a chance to write 2,500 words on what Ezra Pound mused about Chaucer will somehow level the playing field.122
The refrain that subjective measurement is the way out of perpetuating privilege keeps getting repeated. In a Slate piece praising Bard’s policy, higher-education journalist Rebecca Schuman suggested other colleges embrace the approach and extend it beyond just essays:
What about submitting a spectacular and original science or math project? The detailed business model of a company you invented? I wish more American colleges and universities would stop asking students to jump through a series of increasingly privilege-reifying hoops (the current admissions process favors higher-income students) and start asking for applicants to show their real potential.123
Somehow, the corrective for a system that, as Schuman puts it, “determine[s] a young person’s entire future based on her choices as a 14-year-old” is to reward teenagers whose accomplishments are so great as to suggest they may as well just bypass college altogether. It’s as if we’ve all forgotten the proportion of kids with achievements along those lines, who were helped or “helped” along the way by parents or family friends. I’m thinking of “The Care and Feeding of Parents” episode (from 1972, but timeless) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which unfulfilled, overeducated housewife Phyllis decides that her twelve-year-old daughter Bess’s “A” on a homework assignment is proof of literary genius.124 Phyllis starts by trying to finagle connections to get Bess’s composition published in a teen magazine, but things escalate, and by the end of the episode, the beleaguered Bess is “writing a book,” although it’s of course Phyllis writing it, with Bess struggling in vain to get her mother to lay off, and to just let her be a kid. Any time children are judged by adult standards, this is only going to (further) encourage parents to do their kids’ work, or to pay other adults for this service.
The hypocritical tensions built into the privilege project are at their most obvious in higher education. Tremendous effort goes into a cosmetic appearance of commitment to social justice (look, a black woman on the cover of a brochure!), while the old ways (white men lecturing students about the achievements of white men, all within the context of a hyper-rigid hierarchy) remain. Seminars explore the minutiae of symbolic violences and socioeconomic marginalization, while adjuncts make do on less than a living wage. Campus life is on the one hand progressive enough to inspire a regular drumbeat of conservative outrage (Queer Studies is a thing!), and on the other, so terribly expensive that gay students with homophobic parents wind up staying in the closet for much of their young adulthood.125 A veneer of hypersensitivity allows tremendous on-the-ground insensitivity to flourish.
American colleges and universities are intensely privilege aware, at every level. And they become more privilege conscious by the day. Further privilege sensitivity has become the default answer to all problems, yet winds up making things worse. It does so by increasing the cost of college; by constantly alerting less-privileged students to their status; and by creating this new trait, “privilege awareness,” which is, by definition, only available to those with privilege about which they may be aware. A focus on “privilege” is convenient for the schools themselves, because it means, in all kinds of ways, an increase in demand. However, it also creates problems for the schools, because it keeps placing them in the news as sites of grievous harm.