Are Stanford Students Just Excellent Sheep?

In a series of articles and speeches over the past few years, William Deresiewicz has levied some damning accusations against elite education in the United States. Paraphrasing a bit, it goes like this. Harvard is accepting and educating a generation of hoop-jumping, gold-star accumulating, mindless meritocrats. Princeton tells its impressive student body that it prepares them for leadership and service to the nation and world, and then funnels staggering numbers of them to Wall Street and management consulting. Stanford advertises a liberal education that invites students to ask big questions but delivers to the world small-minded technologists who ask little questions about how to get ahead in the start-up world.

Deresiewicz has now assembled a full indictment of elite education in a soon-to-be-released book, Excellent Sheep. An excerpt appeared this week on the cover of the New Republic under the title “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.”

Deresiewicz visited the Stanford campus in April to discuss the book in a room full of students. Despite the damning charge that they were sleepwalking through their education, Deresiewicz elicited occasional laughter from the audience. I recall one commenting,

“It has never been more enjoyable to be so completely criticized.”

Another student, recently elected President of the Associated Students of Stanford University, described the event as a pleasurable slap in face:

What happens when you tell Stanford students that the elite education they have worked so hard for is merely an entry point into a meaningless leadership class of mediocrity deserving no praise or honor? Surprisingly, they don’t get mad. They don’t storm out of the room. They like it.

I introduced and interviewed Deresiewicz during his visit. (Video excerpts from his presentation are below.)

To get a sense of his argument, there’s his book to read. But in advance of that, here are three passages from various articles over the years that convey his message.

From The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)

Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students.

From Solitude and Leadership (2010)

Things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors.

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “ really excellent sheep.”

From Generation Sell (2011)

The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out — an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary. Where did it come from, this change? Less Reaganism, as a former student suggested to me, than Clintonism — the heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship that emerged during the Millennials’ childhood and youth. Add a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.

A few years ago, I observed that Deresiewicz’s views share something in common with a widely circulated 2001 article by David Brooks called “The Organization Kid.” Brooks portrayed the average Princeton student as kind, earnest, bright, and absurdly accomplished but also as uninspired, herd-like conformists.

Deresiewicz issues a less ambivalent judgment. It’s straightforwardly negative, though he blames plenty of folks aside from students for the predicament: helicopter parents, university administrators, a cultural ethos that venerates financial gain rather than personal flourishing.

With the release of the book, a backlash against Deresiewicz, a former Ivy Leaguer and Yale Professor himself, is sure to begin. It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction ensues as students head to campus this fall.

Deresiewicz returns to Stanford for a book reading on October 23, 2014.