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Notes -
The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
I went to a normal but good public high school like @BahRamYou (please don't ram me), and understood from the get-go that an elite college was out of reach. I thought it was incredibly silly that anyone even countenanced elite college from this background, though some did, and the wokest ones got in. I don't resent it, because I understood that the elite colleges are for the upper class and people the upper class has pity on. I'm middle class, have always been middle class, and I followed the middle class path.
A "good school" to my class is a state school, a "bad school" is a private school, because the only private schools any of my peers were likely to get into would just be tens of thousands more a semester for no extra signaling benefit. Nobody in my class had a stone's chance in hell of getting into any school the upper-middle class would consider "good" unless they were some kind of minority. Getting in-state tuition at a flagship state school was the goal.
My peers are, generally, doing okay. Lots of people working in IT, office jobs, computer programming, nursing, teaching, medical tech, even a couple doctors if I recall correctly. Lots of people having cute babies and building lives together. Some aren't doing well, but that's true for any population of people. Not going to an elite college didn't destroy everyone's ability to live a good and happy life. It destroyed their chance of becoming elite, but they didn't have that expectation anyway. I'm going to teach my children that there's no way on earth they're going to be President or have an elite role, but there's every chance in the world they're going to have a meaningful, fulfilling life if they focus on living according to their values and focusing on the content of their friends' and partners' character instead of their status.
I don't understand the obsession with it, either. Not everyone in society is going to be elite. Some people are going to be normies. The struggle is to identify areas of economic need and study those. Blue collar work is in demand, and we desperately need conscientious people with integrity in these roles that are undervalued for status reasons. White collar jobs still exist.
When people describe all these expectations, all these extracurriculars, all this stress about test scores and good schools and networking and "don't you dare make a mistake"... it sounds so unbelievably suffocating that it's yet another non-miracle to me that so many preppy professional people have concluded our society is deeply oppressive. Because for them, it is.
It is totally fascinating to me that the upper-middle class folks typically hold an ideology that talks a lot about human equality, and says people don't choose their life outcomes, and we need to be respectful of people's different lifestyles, and yada yada yada, but also thinks mediocrity is a terrible life outcome, and you better go to an elite school and have an elite job! The intense pressure I see some people describe is totally alien to me. Sometimes I have to do a double-take, because it sounds like people are describing China and not America.
Isn't that going too far? The reality is that there is a small but real chance that your children actually are going to attain elite status in society. I don't see the benefit of trying to train them to not have outrageous-level ambition.
I think it makes sense to teach children not to put all their hopes in life on becoming NBA players, famous actors, or elite politicians. But I wouldn't want to train them to think that they have literally no chance of becoming elite.
For some people that is just the reality. They don't have the family background, connections, money, time or resources to white-knuckle their way into the elite. If they get involved in politics, they may become relatively important at a local level. Much less chance they'll be important nationally, and replicating Obama's success at "I went from the log cabin to the White House" is impossible. As it was for Obama, he most certainly was not from the log cabin background, and it's probably important to note that the first African-American president wasn't the typical, even upper-class, African-American.
They can do well, of course, which is what urquan is saying. But unless they're unusually talented, they are not going to be the next Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, to take examples. They're not going to get into the Ivies, they are not going to be hob-nobbing with the movers and shakers except on a local level, and that's perfectly fine because you don't have to agonise over being one of the 1% or 10% to have a good life.
Wanting to be rich and famous, when there isn't a realistic chance of that, is just going to make you unhappy. How many complaints do we see of the "I was told 'just be yourself' and that would get me a girlfriend, this was all lies" type? We'll see the same over "I was told 'you can be anything' but that was all lies" if you sell your ordinary kid the American Dream of being extraordinary. The American Dream is "you can make it", but it's "even a poor serf or peasant like you from the Old Country can make it, because the circumstances holding you down there don't apply here". It wasn't "Marco Abramohvic can be president fresh off the boat", it was "Marco Abramohvic, fresh off the boat, can work his way up to owning his own small shop selling cheese without being taxed out the door by the local squire, duke, or pogrom".
Now if Marco establishes a cheese empire, maybe his grand-kids who have changed their name to Abrams can get into the Ivies and be part of the elite, because rising up into the gentry class is a thing that happens. But if they're still Abramohvic with the small cheese shop, no. That's the reality that urquan is talking about. And it's not a bad life, either.
What is bad is the messaging that unless you scrabble your way into the elite, you are a loser in life, even if you have a normal, ordinary, decent life. That's harmful. If you don't go to Harvard, you are missing out! In fact, you are being denied! Discriminated against! It is your right to go to Harvard! Well, are you good enough to go to Harvard in the first place? If you are, and you are being hampered by deliberate obstacles set in your path, then go ahead and fight for your rights, and I'll support you. But if the answer is no, I'm smaller university if university at all level, then you are not being denied anything and the life you can get is not a bad life.
RDS is a national level politician and he came from a blue collar background.
DeSantis claims to have a working class background, but as far as I can tell it's largely fictional. His parents were more-or-less working-class, but he went straight from high school to Yale, was briefly a teacher, and then went to Harvard Law School. He then into the US Navy as an officer. DeSantis himself has never had a blue-collar job.
There's a point where "my father once had a job where he worked with his hands" doesn't count for that much.
Being born to a working class family is a working class background no matter how many scholarships you get.
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Huh? I’m not disputing that RDS went to Yale and Harvard. I’m saying he didn’t grow up elite which is what OP suggested.
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