the ivy league

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200503/douthat
"The Truth about Harvard"
by Ross Douthat
March 2005
The Atlantic

"Harvard never attempted to answer that question [which classes to take]—perhaps the most important question facing any incoming freshman. I chose my classes as much by accident as by design. There were times when some of them mattered to me, and even moments when I was intoxicated. But achieving those moments required pulling myself away from Harvard's other demands, whether social, extracurricular, or pre-professional, which took far more discipline than I was usually able to exert."

Basically, the author discusses the forces that have led to grade inflation and lax academic standards at Harvard. While a truly great education is available, the forces of the modern meritocracy (that success depends on GPA, and no longer on merely being born into the upper class) have led to Harvard no longer giving a shit about pushing one on its students.

Consider also this article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/kirn
"Lost in the Meritocracy"
by Walter Kirn
January / February 2005
The Atlantic

The author complains a lot about how his education at Princeton was all about blather and faking it and going to exclusive parties for rich kids (which he couldn't afford) and how he didn't learn a damn thing.

While the tone of the second is definitely a lot whinier than the first, both authors, in a way, suffered from the same problem: they didn't drive themselves. There was an education, right there, staring them in the face; yet somehow they didn't see it, or didn't see its value, and didn't make it for themselves. And now they complain about the system - which is right, if we're in a position of deciding what the system should be like, but wrong, if we're in the position of undergraduates subject to it.

-------------------------------------------

There are some other things to be said about the first article.

" If I am right, some areas of academic life aren't vulnerable to this crisis of confidence in the importance of one's work. Scientists can rest secure in the knowledge that their labors will help shove along the modern project of advancing health—and wealth. Abstruse genomic work could one day yield in utero engineering; mucking around with chemicals could produce a cure for AIDS, or the next Viagra.

...


The humanities have no such reservoirs of confidence. And attempts by humanities professors to ape the rigor of their scientific colleagues have led to a decades-long wade in the marshes of postmodern academic theory, where canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed, and willfully obscure writing is championed over accessible prose. All this has merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results. Far from making the humanities scientific, postmodernism has made them irrelevant.
The retreat into irrelevance is visible all across the humanities curriculum. Philosophy departments have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists..."

The first, most minor, thing: philosophy departments have not purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists.

The second, and more important thing: it is interesting that the author never mentions the state of mathematics. This, I suspect, is because it does not really fit into his scheme. On the one hand, abstract mathematics has almost nothing to do with anything. On the other hand, it has not fallen into postmodernism and lax standards. I will say that this is because mathematicians believe in something eternal. They're operating outside the capitalist paradigm - consider the case of Paul Erdős, whose life exemplifies a certain vision of mathematics.

And I think that academics in many disciplines do, or at least can, see themselves in a similar way. It is the world of ideas they live in, where success is not defined by money, but by acuity. (In other words, the authors' own values and concerns have warped their visions of others - because the author believed in bullshit, he only sees bullshit and a yearning to be rich in philosophers, rather than what may, in fact, be at work).