I just read an excellent essay entitled “The Organization Kid,” by David Brooks (The Atlantic Monthly, April 2001; you can find it through the university’s library website, but not Google). It is an exploration of the mindset of the modern high-achieving Ivy-Leaguer. Brooks visits Princeton University to get a sense for what the future leaders of the nation are up to. Happily, he find that the hard-charging Princetonians are extremely intelligent, studious, hard-working, well-organized, energetic, and responsible — at first glance, precisely the sort of people that you would want filling the ranks of the nation’s business and political elite.
But there is a dark underside to the Ivy League mentality. The students, Brooks observes, lack a strong moral compass. They are not immoral, per se, and they are certainly not bad people (a lot of them do community service, for example), but they are not animated by any kind of overarching moral vision. When he tries to discuss morality with the students, they evade his questions. One student offers his opinion that all wrongdoing can be purged from the human race within a few generations, leading to a perfect world where government, laws, and punishment will be basically unnecessary. Another student at the table, a conservative Christian, agrees with him. “Apparently the doctrine of original sin had not left much of a mark on her,” Brooks comments.
Brooks attributes this rather breezy worldview to the fact that the current generation of students does not have (or does not feel that it has) much to fight for. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the intellectual elite was engaged in a constant war against the established order, fighting everything from capitalism to colonialism to racism to Vietnam; even conservatives fought the established order (the liberal one). By 2001, it seemed as if all that fighting had become pretty much obsolete. The great ideological battles of the twentieth century had been waged and concluded. The world was, it seemed, vastly more just and harmonious than it had been only forty years ago. Things were going very well for America, and, it was believed, for the world at large. From the perspective of the average Ivy League student, who had grown up in unprecedented prosperity and privilege and had never lived through the national trauma of a major war or economic depression, the world seemed like a very reasonable, equitable, fair and orderly place. Just work hard, play by the rules and be pleasant and open-minded — and see what happens: you’ll have a wonderful time at a prestigious college, and a whole range of exciting, high-paying careers at investment banks and consulting firms will be open to you after you graduate. The world is yours; and what a wonderful world it is.
I hope I am not the only person (besides Brooks) who finds this attitude a little repugnant. It is, at any rate, a radical departure from what prior generations of Ivy Leaguers apparently believed. Brooks quotes an address by John Hibbens, the president of Princeton University, to the graduating students of 1913:
You, enlightened, self-sufficient, self-governed, endowed with gifts above your fellows, the world expects you to produce as well as to consume, to add to and not to subtract from its store of good, to build up and not tear down, to ennoble and not to degrade. It commands you to take your place and to fight your fight in the name of honor and of chivalry, against the powers of organized evil and of commercialized vice, against the poverty, disease, and death which follow fast in the wake of sin and ignorance, against all the innumerable forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man, and unleash the passions of the beast.
As Brooks points out, educators at the time felt comfortable talking about evil, sin, and God. They did not see anything unusual about conceiving life as an epic battle between vast forces of good and evil. They saw it as the mission of the university to instill students with nobility and virtue, not merely to “educate” them and prepare them for lucrative careers. Above all, they tried to impress upon students the reality that within every human heart is a perpetual struggle between good and evil, and that it is the duty of every individual to fight the evil with every ounce of their moral, intellectual, and even physical strength.
How things have changed. Brooks makes it clear that the Ivy League universities were, in some respects, much worse places to be back in 1913 than they are now. However, when I look around at the shallow, insipid careerists that are spawned by our meritocratic university system, I find the conservative (or is the radical?) within me wishing for an injection of the old values, to stir things up a little, and shatter the boredom of this place.
Interesting post. I actually wrote two different essays about Brooks’ article during my time at Cornell. Of course, I was coming from a liberal perspective…
As for lectures about the forces of good and evil in the world, look no further than Jeff Lehman’s final commencement speech. While it was painfully wrapped within odd cultural references to The Simpsons, Thomas Pynchon, and Star Wars, his underlying message was very good.