Law School

"Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely?indeed increasingly?homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate."

"But it isn?t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn?t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren?t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were ?the best and the brightest,? as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic ?Oh,? when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I?d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say ?in Boston? when I was asked where I went to school?the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don?t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don?t go to college at all."

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"But if you?re afraid to fail, you?re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren?t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don?t they work harder than anyone else?indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework."

Deresiewicz's article is most relevant for law schools at recruiting season. After all, once someone is hired, they are typically signed up for life. The last paragraph quoted is followed by a description of elite school students that portrays them as the rough the equivalents of grade grubbing drones. My sense is that this is a relatively recent thing. At some point in time, attending an elite school could contribute to the development of real intellectual curiosity and a love for ideas. I am sure that still holds for many graduates of elite schools today but that is more a testament to their resistance to the elite education than anything else.

From my perspective, and it is an admittedly narrow one, I am surprised at how anti intellectual newer -- last 15-20 years -- elite grads are, especially the double elites. In fact, in many instances they seem to have little or no knowledge of history, philosophy, art, etc. Nor do they find much that is interesting outside of their personal niche. Instead of ideas it is about gaming the system. They may boast about getting good placements for article not because of the substance but because of the "form" the work in is, the names dropped, and connections. It is not about the what is intriguing or important, but numbers of lines on a resume.

I know that correlation is not the same as causation but if legal education has taken an anti intellectual turn, how can it not be traced to the backgrounds of those who dominate faculties?

Full post as published by MoneyLaw on September 26, 2008 (boomark / email).