From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
The Overclass Under Duress
Ross Douthat has written a flawed but lyrical Harvard memoir.
During his junior year at Harvard, in 2001, Ross Douthat was taking a final exam with 200 fellow students when a madman burst into the room. Declaring war on the U.S., the intruder shouted: "If anyone tries to leave, I'll set off my bomb!" Mr. Douthat notes: "It would be nice to say, at this point in the story, that a heroic Harvard student leaped up . . . and perhaps defused his bomb." Instead, he recalls, the entire room stampeded for the exits, leaving the professor and a lone graduate student to confront the attacker, who eventually surrendered. So much for the chivalry of the ruling class.
Variations on this lament are at the heart of Mr. Douthat's "Privilege." It's a story about coming of age in the Ivy League and a social critique--a modern "This Side of Paradise" had F. Scott Fitzgerald aspired to punditry, not art. Mr. Douthat doesn't like Harvard much, or the people it educates. I can sympathize, even though I am one of those people. I attended school with Mr. Douthat and knew him at a distance.
Mr. Douthat justifiably highlights the absurdity of campus political life, dominated by "street liberals" who clamor to their causes--Mumia, "queer" rights, opposing violence against women--in a rotating cycle of outrage. And he makes some fair points about the conceit of "diversity" at a place where most undergraduates, of all races, are children of privilege. Most important to a broader audience are his revelations about the erosion of educational rigor on all college campuses.
Especially damning, and entertaining, is Mr. Douthat's account of the final paper he wrote in a course about the American West. His professor asked the class to compose 10 pages about period objects from Harvard's museum of archaeology, but without using secondary sources. Mr. Douthat marvels at his own useless effort to riff on a revolver and an Indian war club. His paper included such observations as: "The gun is displayed by not being displayed." He got an A.
Certainly not enough has been written about the decline of standards at elite universities, and Mr. Douthat's observations are shrewd. Unfortunately, his focus is elsewhere most of the time. He is mostly concerned with the social mores of Harvard students and his own place in the campus culture. He tells us that he arrived at college having spent most of his childhood cultivating a "resentful disdain for my more popular classmates." Like Tom Wolfe's Charlotte Simmons, he imagined that the Ivy League would be a refuge where his intellectual talents would finally be appreciated. He is appalled to find that the Groton boys stick together, women still love athletes and the in-crowd is still off-limits.
This realization hit Mr. Douthat hardest during his unsuccessful effort to join one of Harvard's private "final clubs." These institutions, really glorified fraternities, are indeed elitist and can be cruel to outsiders. But they signify nothing larger than a truism--spoiled brats behave like spoiled brats. One wants to take Mr. Douthat aside and explain that such clubs are not worth his attention.
One also wants to explain to him that his own romantic misadventures do not compel the rest of us to see a "smog of sexual frustration" hanging over the Harvard campus. During his freshman year, Mr. Douthat fell into a confusing, one-sided love affair with a girl who refused to kiss him. One day she announced that she could see herself marrying him. The next, she had run off with someone else. It is a sad story, with rather too much excruciating detail, but it is hardly representative.
Mr. Douthat saves his greatest ire for Harvard's culture of "striving selfishness." He writes, not inaccurately, of peers motivated by "boundless ambitions," caught up in a frenzied race "for power, for petty perks and résumé-padding titles." He even goes so far as to suggest that Suzanne Pomey, a Harvard student convicted in 2002 of embezzling nearly $100,000 from a student organization, is the inevitable product of a sick community that prizes fame and riches. He notes: "Every society gets the sociopath it deserves."
Maybe so, and maybe meritocracy does breed an unhealthy competitive spirit. But only heirs and ascetics can afford to spend their youths unbothered by the demands of the post-graduation rat race. What Mr. Douthat would prefer even he admits is impossible: "A return to the past, but a past stripped of its squalor and brutality, with only the finer, higher things remaining." It sounds lovely, but it bears no relation to the life that most people--outside those "final clubs"--must face.
It should be said that Mr. Douthat writes beautifully, with a rare lyricism. But when he strives for a closing flourish--akin to Amory Blaine's "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" in Fitzgerald's novel--he come up with: "We have dropped the old ideals, but we still must believe in something, and so we believe in success. And God knows, nothing succeeds quite like it."
This is too easy. Mr. Douthat forgets that all the silly striving yields silly jobs. And those silly jobs make it possible to afford quiet family dinners and white picket fences and, if we are lucky, time to contemplate the finer, higher things.
It has been only a few years since Mr. Douthat received his diploma, and I wonder whether his classmates might now pleasantly surprise him, having mellowed in the years after college. Perhaps Mr. Douthat judged too soon, eager to get his first book on the market. Blame it on boundless ambition.
Mr. Oppenheim is a television producer in New York. You can buy "Privilege" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
