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Notes -
Selecting for Cynicism in the Ivy League
I did high-school in Chile, graduating in 1985—but I only got around to applying to U.S. colleges in 1990. When I finally did apply, I was a flat broke 22 year-old—naturally, I applied only to need-blind schools: There was no point in getting into a college I couldn’t afford. So I pinned my college hopes almost exclusively on Ivy League schools, because all of them had need-blind admissions.
This wasn’t as fool-hardy as it sounds. I had the grades and the test scores—99 percentiles. But what I later realized made me so attractive to admissions committees was that I’d done stuff: Travelled through the Peruvian jungle, complete with a run-in with Shining Path guerrillas. Protested the Pinochet dictatorship, and gotten sprayed by a guanaco (water cannon) for my troubles. Lived through a 7.7 earthquake. Taught English as a second language. Written a first novel.
(I’d also done a few things which I realized wouldn’t go down so very well with the various admissions committees—like arranging my first FMF threeway at 19, brokering a sizable pot sale at 20, and other such adventures. These achievements I kept to myself.)
So when the envelopes from the various admissions committees finally got to my mailbox, they were all fat—I was lucky enough to have my pick of schools.
For fairly ridiculous reasons mostly having to do with the nearby Skiway and the shiny computers every freshman was supposed to get on arrival, I chose Dartmouth as my school. When I got to Hanover as a proud member of the Class of ‘95, I was surrounded by kids who were completely different from me.
Not in their brains or even their backgrounds. Most of them were—like me—private school kids of well-to-do parents. Most of them were—like me—incredibly smart, yet fairly arrogant about those smarts. Most of them—like me—had read pretty much everything, and could talk—knowledgeably—about just about anything.
But there was one big difference between me and my peers:
Community service, and volunteer work.
All of my peers in the Class of ‘95 had done boatloads of community service and volunteer work, before arriving in Hanover: Either reading to blind elderly people in nursing homes, or volunteering at the local homeless shelter. Fundraising for the Make A Wish foundation, or candy stripping at the local AIDS clinic. Going door-to-door for Amnesty International, or Greenpeace, or the World Wildlife Fund—these kids had done all these things.
It wasn’t just the ordinary American clubs and organizations that these kids had joined: Not merely 4-H, or the Boy Scouts (actually, there were precious few who had joined either one of those organizations). And it wasn’t short-lived trivial causes, like saving abandoned puppies for one Sunday afternoon in the year.
Just about all my peers at Dartmouth had joined socially aware charities and causes, and had devoted quite a bit of their free time to them. Quite a bit of work to them, often as much time and effort as if these causes had been paid part-time jobs: Ten to twenty hours a week devoted to these causes was not uncommon.
At first, I was rather intimidated by all this do-goodism—obviously: I was a hedonistic little shit. To me, “doing good” meant scoring some Thai stick, lining up a hot girl for the weekend, and being on a first-name basis with the doorman of coolest club.
But reading to blind people? Cleaning the diapers of old people in a nursing home? Teaching parolees whatever? Hell, I didn’t even know any parolees . . . except maybe my dealer.
So naturally, I was rather awed by all this do-goodism—at first. This do-goodism seemed to render my peers morally pure in a way that I could never be—
—that moral awe of mine lasted all of half a day.
Chatting with my new classmates on my first day in Hanover, I quickly learned that none of this do-goodism was genuine. That wasn’t my verdict—it was the verdict of my peers: The very ones who had done all this do-goodism admitted to me that it was not genuine—had never been genuine.
It was all done in an effort to get into a “good school”.
Since I’d done my high-school in Chile, I was completely ignorant of all these calculations—so my new classmates gave me an education. Very casually, as we hiked to Moosilauke Lodge—a trek every Dartmouth student makes before classes start—my classmates told me the ins and outs of extra-curriculars, and which were necessary in order to get into an Ivy League school:
One of the extra-curriculars had to be in a sport, varsity being the best. Another had to be a “leadership” extracurricular, like student government, or debate, or at least the presidency of some high-school club or other. One or two “creative” extra-curriculars never hurt, like glee-club or band or theater.
But community service or volunteer work was key: Any student serious about getting into an Ivy simply had to do community service or volunteer work.
Four years of high school meant eight “community service” extra-curriculars—one per semester. Anything more would seem like you were a “dabbler”, and therefore “weren’t serious”. But anything less would show a “lack of commitment”, which was equally bad. And the extra-curriculars had to be more or less aligned: You couldn’t read to blind people one semester and then go save the whales in the next. Rather, you had to work on saving the whales in one semester, and then volunteer to work on an organic farm in the next: That showed you were “environmentally aware”. Or else you had to tend a soup kitchen for the homeless, then read to the elderly in the next semester: That showed you were “socially engaged”.
My fellow Dartmouth students, as well as students at all the other Ivies that I would get to know over the years, did all this do-goodism as a requirement, in order to get into a good school—an Ivy League school.
They did it in order to get ahead—and they were openly encouraged to do it: Not just by their parents, but by their high-school guidance counselors, their college prep advisors, even the visiting admissions deans of the very universities they were applying to—
—it was simply part of the admissions process: “It’s like taking calculus,” I still remember a girl named Debra, from Nebraska, telling me on the bus ride back to Hanover from Moosilauke Lodge. “You have to grind it out, and get it over with.”
What is cynicism?
It’s the belief that people act for purely self-interested reasons, rather than out of honorable or selfless motives.
If you are encouraged to do certain highly visible “community service” and “volunteer work” for no other reason than to get something that you want—in other words, if you are encouraged to “do good” in order to get into a prestigious university—what does that teach you? What does that teach the youth of a country—especially the best and the brightest—the ones with the most promise?
We usually think of cynicism as an affliction of the world-weary and the jaded—a malady of people who have lived long enough, and seen enough enough, to be turned into cynics. They’re usually self-aware: They are men and women who have watched their innocence fall by the wayside, milled away over the years by the acts of selfish people—including their own—leaving them thinking that all is done for selfish, base reasons, no matter how seemingly pure the act.
To the cynic, no matter how selfless an action seems, at bottom, it is selfish and base. That’s why a cynic is such a sorry thing: He sees the world in the lonely monochrome of shades of selfishness. To a cynic, all surface hides retchedness and deceit. To a cynic, there is nothing good or decent or wholesome behind any act, no matter how seemingly noble or selfless. Neither love, nor goodness, nor beauty, nor insight can exist to such a worldview—to the cynic, all is selfishness. All is base and without honor or goodness. All is for sale.
One thing people don’t realize about cynics is, they are inherently conservative.
This is key: Cynics don’t believe in anything—nihilism is the nasty undertaste of the cynic’s bitterness. So since they don’t believe in anything, they don’t believe in changing things for the better. To the cynic, there is no “better”—there are only changes as to whose selfish benefit is being affirmed, and whose selfish benefit is being denied.
That’s the terrible worldview of the cynic—a perspective that leads to decay and death, nothing more, because to the cynic, there is nothing to aspire to.
And that is the education that Ivy League freshmen learned, in order to acceed to those ivy-covered towers—that lesson learned has become the necessary fee, to advance to the highest echelons of American society, and power: There is nothing noble and good to aspire to—it is all selfish and base.
At the time that I spoke to Debra, on that bus ride back to Dartmouth, I thought she was so clever, to have maneuvered the system so as to get her way.
But now—as a grown man—I’m fairly horrified by that conversation with Debra: I’m horrified by what it revealed. About her. About the other students on the bus. About all the people percolating up through the Ivy League.
I’m no historian of American higher education: I have no idea when simple academic merit was replaced by this perverse con-game of community service and volunteer work. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was an outgrowth of the student movement of the 1960’s. Did the required do-goodism become necessary for admission in the ‘70’s, or in the ‘80’s? I have no idea—all I know is, when I matriculated at Dartmouth in the fall of 1991, it was the way things were.
And it’s the way things still are, among admissions to the elite schools in the United States: A system that inculcates a core cynicism of frightening power. If anything—because of the cut-throat competition to get into Ivy League schools today—it’s worse than before.
Now, this would all seem to be so academic, this discussion of cynicism among Ivy League students—but it’s not, and for a very simple reason:
These people who have been taught such a powerful lesson in cynicism are the very same people who make up the leadership classes of the United States today.
This sensibility—this cynicism—informs today’s politics. In fact, every political and economic decision we see today is colored by that monochromatic cynicism. In fact I would argue that nothing that America’s leadership does today—in any field—can be understood without realizing that it is coming out of a deep wellspring of cynicism.
A lot of people—thoughtful but marginal people, who have no power in America—are so surprised that Barack Obama seems more concerned with the appearance of progress, change and reform, rather than the actuality of progress, change and reform. Many people—especially non-Establishment center-leftists—seem flummoxed that Obama has continued so many of George W. Bush’s illegal and immoral War On Terror measures; indeed, has not merely continued them, but expanded many of these measures, such as the authority to assassinate American citizens abroad, at the president’s whim. Something not even Nixon dared dream of—yet which Obama’s administration is defending tooth and nail.
Me, I’m not a bit surprised—in fact, I anticipated Obama’s moral timidity insofar as real change and reform on the one hand, and conservatism when it came to continuing Bush administration policies regarding torture and executive power on the other. I’m not psychic—but I did anticipate the half-measures of the Obama administration’s policies. Or rather, I anticipated the superficiality of so many of his “reforms”—be it health-care, financial reform, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on and so forth.
I anticipated them because I know the type: Obama was a type I saw at Dartmouth all over the place. So is Timothy Geithner—Dartmouth class of 1983. So is Ben Bernanke. So are all the people in leadership positions today in America.
You see, the cynic is timid: He can’t go beyond the status quo. He won’t go beyond the status quo, because he doesn’t believe in anything beyond the status quo.
The problem with the United States today is, the status quo is leading the country right off the cliff. Financially, militarily, morally—the status quo is a death sentence, for the United States. America has to change directions now.
But it won’t. Because the leadership class—in politics, the press, business, finance—is made up of these timid cynics that were taught so well in the Ivy League.
The is—of course—a tragedy. A tragedy is sad because you in the audience see how the characters’ actions will lead to their downfall—yet you cannot prevent it. You can only observe.
So we observe.
I mean, Ivy League admissions cant be meritocratic, because there are enough students with perfect everything to overwhelm the spots. Class shibboleths are how every society resolves that.
That isn't true at all. You can do granular enough tests if you want, some countries do, and barring that you can have a lottery, which some countries do, mine among them.
The lottery has not really been a meaningful thing here (at the very top level) for about a decade though now since they increased the number of spots at the medical programmes and also made the test slightly more granular.
I don't see why America couldn't do one of those things. I personally think the runaway competition for those university spots is extremely toxic and would bound the competition for like the top 1-2% (for the top bracket) or so and then have a lottery for them. Picking the lucky seems preferable to torturing your children for some zero-sum competition with no societal gain.
A lottery would be far better than the BS system the US has at the moment. It would also completely destroy the value of the Ivy League as now the people in Harvard aren't on average much (or at all) better than the people going to UPenn, they're just luckier and so the cultural cachet of a Harvard degree goes away almost entirely.
You do know that UPenn is also Ivy League, right?
My apologies, I was going to make a joke about confusing it with Penn State but they have a 50%+ admit rate so nowhere near the same league. An easy enough mistake to make. The names of US universities are very weird and eclectic and hard to remember, you can replace UPenn with Rice and the point would still stand.
The worst offender for an American university name has to be Colgate, to me Colgate is what I brush my teeth with...
It is, in fact, the same Colgate family.
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