Transcript: William Deresiewicz

A conversation with the author of Excellent Sheep

The failure of our elites to manage society has been a topic since at least the financial crash of 2008. But it is very much on the minds of many Canadians these days, as we face a series of cascading crises, from housing and opioids to the cost of living and heath care. A decade ago, my guest on this week’s program wrote a searing indictment against the system of elite education — and now, with the release of its 10^th anniversary edition, his critique is more relevant than ever.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist and cultural critic, and the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. 

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the interview for free here.

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TH: This month, a 10th anniversary edition of Excellent Sheep comes out. So many of the ideas that you articulated in that book are, unfortunately, more relevant than ever. As you say in the introduction to the new edition, many of these things have gotten worse in the last 10 years. Let's begin today by talking about the crisis in mental health among young adults. For background, the book grew out of a viral article, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” for The American Scholar. You said last time you were on the podcast that, in some ways, you had been preparing to write that essay for the 10 years you were teaching at Yale. I want to start with the students you encountered there, who you really loved. In Excellent Sheep, one student describes themselves and their classmates as “dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong bootcamp.”

WD: There are quotations in the book like that, but I think it's worth pointing out that that particular one comes from William Fitzsimmons who has, for probably like 30 years, been the head of admissions at Harvard. That's who said that thing about dazed survivors. I think he was also referring specifically to alumni, who he'll meet at a reunion, who graduated 20 or 30 years ago and are still doing the thing — the hoop-jumping success, pursuing the thing that got them into Harvard in the first place. So yes, that's the profile of the student that I was concerned about and I'm still concerned about.

TH: Let's talk about what this rat race does to these kids. What did you see then, and what are you seeing now?

WD:  This is partly what's so interesting. I was at Yale for 10 years, from 1998 to 2008, and I had also taught as a graduate student at Columbia. I was increasingly concerned about what I saw among my students. Ultimately, as the title of the book, Excellent Sheep, suggests, they were very good. That is to say excellent — in the narrow terms of college admissions — at doing what the grown-ups wanted them to do. Or, really, it's better to say becoming the person the grown-ups wanted them to become. But as a result, they were sheep. I should say that phrase, “excellent sheep,” came from one of my Yale students, as a self-description of herself and her peers. Some of them were exceptions, but many of them just really had a lot of trouble figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives. Because the question of what they wanted to do, as opposed to what the grown-ups were telling them to do, had never really come up.

It leads to anti-intellectualism … a superficial, directionless careerism. They want to get to the top, but they don't know what top they want to get to. And they certainly don't know why. But the big piece, actually, that I hadn't been aware of — even as a professor who made room for his students to have open-ended conversations with him — was the mental health picture that you referred to earlier. So, I wrote the “Disadvantages” article in 2008 about most of what I had observed. But I got this flood of responses from students at schools all over the country that talked about the mental health picture. Which I myself had not been aware of. Because part of the profile is that you conceal your distress. You're supposed to be perfect, and so this feels like a failure. You think you're the only one. Because no one's talking about it. 

The grown-ups — parents especially, I'm afraid to say — think that if you're getting As, everything is fine. Parents like to think they know their kids. I think once a kid hits adolescence, that's less and less true. We can talk about what has happened in terms of mental health since then, but that's what I was first seeing and then learning.

TH: These kids are overscheduled. They have no time to breathe, let alone read, or contemplate their lives, or have four or five hour discussions with friends. You write in the book that the main thing now driving the madness is the madness itself. What does that look like on the ground for the students that you hear from?

WD: There is this whole array of college admissions requirements that has been developed for all kinds of historical reasons in American higher education. Actually, the original reason was because the schools were becoming flooded by Jews. But that's another story. Therefore, admissions went away from strict academics to all these intangibles. What kind of person are you? Leadership, service, creativity. Each one maybe originally had a reasonable rationale. Aside from the antisemitism, they were at least grounded in real human qualities. 

But once we in the United States shifted to a fully meritocratic system, which really happened in the 60s, displacing the old WASP aristocracy … When I said the reason for the madness is the madness itself — the system just started to feed on itself. So, when I started college in 1981 at Columbia, an Ivy League institution, my fellow high school students who had gotten into those schools had each done three extracurriculars and taken three advanced placement (AP) courses. This was 1980/81. Now, those numbers would barely get you into a community college. Kids who go to Ivy League schools will do 12 of each, or even more sometimes. Is it because this is enriching them in some way? Is it making them more intellectually deep? Is it turning them into better potential leaders? No. It's like an arms race. The United States didn't need 20,000 nuclear warheads during the Cold War. It's just that the Soviets had 19,000, so we needed 20,000. 

In fact, so much of this is inimical to real learning, for all the reasons we've already started to talk about. You don't have time to think. You don't have time to think about what you're studying. You don't have time to think about any larger issues. So that's what I mean — and that's also why it hasn't gotten better in the 10 years since the book came out. There's no reason to think that it would have. Because this arms race among mainly upper middle class families, maybe some immigrant families as well, has just continued.

TH: I want to read a quote that is quite relevant here: “Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What's at stake when we ask what college is for is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.” Let's talk about what is missing, what students are not learning now that they need to grow as humans.

WD: That's from the touchy-feely, humanistic, hortatory side of the book. The book is a critique, and the subtitle is “The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.” I'm trying to provide students with some guidance, in the absence of other guidance.

Let me say, in case it isn't already clear, that all of this is driven by what students have told me. So, when I say that something is missing from a college education, it's not just because I believe that a college education should go beyond vocational training. It's because students have told me, and continue to tell me, that.  

This sense of, “I went to supposedly one of the best schools in the country and I feel like it left me empty” — students will say some version of that. Something deeper, for lack of a better word, hasn't been addressed, hasn't been touched. That thing is, I think, the inevitable, necessary, valuable hunger of young adulthood for meaning and purpose. Now, what role should college play in that? First of all, you don't have to go to college to develop those things. But if you're a typical American high-achiever, you're in college from ages roughly 18 to 22. That is exactly the time of life when these things need to be discussed and developed. 

It's also not the job of college to tell you, right? Once upon a time, in the 19th century, the 18th century, these were church-affiliated institutions. The president of the college, who was often actually a clergyman, would preach a sermon every Sunday at mandatory chapel and give moral exhortation: “This is how you should live your life.” Well, obviously it's been many years since we have thought that way. The job of college now is a more difficult job — to help students think these things through for themselves. Which means providing classes, specifically humanities classes, where those questions can be put on the table.

I think we touched on this earlier when we were talking about the run-up to college, those 18 years of your life — [that it’s important] to create a situation where students have time to think about these things. This is the problem. Whether it's before school, during college, after college, this success culture requires incessant busyness. It literally does not give young people the chance not just to think about these things, but also to talk about them with each other, with their professors. And also, to conduct experiments in life. To try things and fail at them. To try things, and stop doing them, and try something else. I'm not idealizing any supposed golden age, but it is true that college and post-college young adults used to have more time for these things. 

Ironically, one way of looking at how college works now is that it's actually terrific preparation for adult life. Because this is what upper middle class, professional, managerial class, adult life is like. There isn't a notable epidemic of happiness, I would say, among those classes. People have written about this. But it starts when you're young.

TH: There's some interesting advice in the book. You suggest people do not go to the Ivy Leagues. And in another notable suggestion, you say that if people are interested in doing service, instead of parachuting into disadvantaged communities, usually overseas, they should try waitressing. Service work. That that would be more instructive.

WD: So, let me be clear. It's not that I say that people should not go to the Ivy League. There was an advance piece for the book that was published in The New Republic that they called “Don't Send Your Kids to the Ivy League.” They don't ask writers about things like that; I didn't like the title. For one thing, I don't like the idea of sending your kids anywhere. It's not the parent, I think, who should be running the process. But the real point is not where you go to college, but why you go where you go, and what you do when you're there. But yes, I have some fun with the notion of service, which has become one of those boxes that you need to check. The stereotype is you go to Guatemala and start an orphanage — and sometimes it's just that ridiculous.

We always have to pay attention to the consequences of the metrics that we're creating. Colleges would look for people with altruistic motives, let's say. But of course, once people know that that's what colleges are looking for, they're going to construct … There are actual companies that run programs that are designed to help you check that box. That are designed to give you something to write your college essay about, which is supposed to reveal you in all of your unique individuality. But again, it's all just become a performance. It's become a sham. 

So, service is one of those things. It's a kind of upper class messianism. One of my favourite students, who is now one of my favourite adults, was from a working class background and had a serious part-time job in high school because he needed money.  He worked at Denny's, at a fast food chain. It's clear to me that that kind of work does all kinds of things that not just service, but any of these college admissions — performative activities — will never do for you. First of all, it teaches you that academic achievement isn't everything. Your first day at that kind of job is inevitably an extremely humbling experience. You actually are really stupid in certain ways. You're really limited in certain ways that you will grow out of, but you need to know that that's true. 

I think [class segregation] is one of the biggest problems with our elites in the West. Service work is going to give you contact as an equal — not as an upper class messiah, — with people from other classes. To me, the only solution to elite disconnection is living among as broad a section of society as possible, as an equal, which teaches you that you are an equal. They are your equal. And it might also help you understand their perspective, which I think you can only do actively, through personal relationships. Not by, I don't know, reading stuff. Not by reading reports or surveys.

TH: There's another piece that I wanted to highlight. You talk about the benefits of dropping out for a little while, of taking a break. Whether that's between degrees, whether that's during a degree. You heard from some students who have powerful stories on that. That really struck a chord with me. I've done that twice in my life, and both times that I did, it was a totally transformative experience — and produced that “breaking open” that you talk about in the book as a real education. Tell me about the students you heard from, who had decided to take some time off.

WD: I was thinking primarily of students of mine at Yale who would take a leave for a semester, or a year sometimes, because they were struggling. Not academically, but psychologically, socially. Then they would come back and as you just said, they were transformed. They had grown up in a way that you can't do if you just go straight through school. Again, because you're developing other capacities. You are testing yourself in new ways. You are introducing yourself to all kinds of people that you've never met before. 

They would come back and it was like the whole college scene, both academically and socially, was in perspective for them. When it came to all the social nonsense, and also in terms of academics, they had a much better sense of what they were looking for. Rather than just filling their requirements, in a new way they were in charge of their education. Which I think is so important. I talked before about what really matters is how you go to college — not where you go to college. Education shouldn't be something that just happens to you. I'm curious though, how old were you when you did your gap year? 

TH: The first time, it was three weeks into my Master's degree. I had been really pushing hard academically, and then unfortunately I got sick. I had a tumour in my colon and I had to have a colon resection. The tumour was cancerous. I found I just could not get back on the hamster wheel. I just couldn't do it. First, I took a semester off to heal from the surgery and to try to incorporate that experience, which was strangely disorienting, but also kind of spiritual. Then I went traveling. I went traveling through Southeast Asia by myself, and that experience made me a journalist. It made me a writer, and it made me a lover of human beings. The interactions that I had when I was on the road changed my life forever.

WD: People will have experiences like this at different times. Often they just wish they would have experiences like this at different times. I hear from people who worked in finance for 10 years after college and then realized they just have to stop. Or people who are 50 and say, “I really wish I had done this. I really wish I had done that.” My feeling is the earlier the better. That's the thing. 

I am a big believer in doing gap years after high school. Of course, now it's become the gap year program. I think those can be good. Although I should say that gap year programs are no longer “I go do something for a year.” Now, it's like they'll do 10 different things for a few weeks each. So, the logic of enrichment, building your resume, continues. I say gap year, with a program, good — gap year, with no program, even better. Learn self-reliance.

TH: Something else that you write about in the book is sitting with uncertainty, with not knowing what the next step is. 

WD: Absolutely. It's so terrifying to young people from this class that we've been talking about. Because it's terrifying to their parents, first of all. It's about uncertainty about what you do next. But also, I realized at a certain point along the way that the situation that's most destabilizing for young high-achievers is not when you fail a little bit. It's not getting the A-minus. Because you know how to address that. You just shave off even more of your nose on the grindstone. It's the situation where there's no success or failure, where there's no way of assessing success or failure.

Going through experiences like that teaches you that not everything in life is something that you can get an A in. As I'm sure you know, and have talked about. Part of the problem with contemporary parenting is this desire among parents to succeed at parenting. To get an A in parenting, which can often mean getting your kid into an Ivy League school. It's like, “No, the whole problem is that that's how you're thinking about it.”

TH: This book is a deeply personal book for you. You grew up the way a lot of these kids are growing up now. But you did also manage to break free from that, although it took time. Tell us about that process.