Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class - Hardcover

Douthat, Ross Gregory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401301126 ISBN 13: 9781401301125

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2005

Synopsis

In the spirit of Scott Turow's One L and David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise, a penetrating critique of elite universities and the culture of privilege they perpetuate, written by a recent Harvard alumnus.

Part memoir, part social critique, Privilege is an absorbing assessment of one of the world's most celebrated universities: Harvard. In this sharp, insightful account, Douthat evaluates his social and academic education -- most notably, his frustrations with pre-established social hierarchies and the trumping of intellectual rigor by political correctness and personal ambition. The book addresses the spectacles of his time there, such as the embezzlement scandal at the Hasty Pudding Theatricals and Professor Cornel West's defection to Princeton. He also chronicles the more commonplace but equally revealing experiences, including social climbing, sexual relations, and job hunting.

While the book's narrative centers on Harvard, its main arguments have a much broader concern: the state of the American college experience. Privilege is a pointed reflection on students, parents, and even administrators and professors who perceive specific schools merely as stepping-stones to high salaries and elite social networks rather than as institutions entrusted with academic excellence.

A book full of insightful perceptions and illuminating detail, Privilege is sure to spark endless debates inside and outside the ivied walls.

About this title

About the Author

While at Harvard, Ross Gregory Douthat wrote a biweekly column for the Harvard Crimson and edited the Harvard Salient. He now works at the Atlantic Monthly and lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

"Harvard is a terrible mess of a place," Douthat writes, "an incubator for an American ruling class that is smug, self-congratulatory, and intellectually adrift." It is also Douthat's beloved alma mater (he was class of 2002), a place where a young man sneered at by the "high school jockacracy" could finally become "cool." Or so he thought. In this memoir–cum–pop-sociological investigation, Douthat reflects on campus academics, diversity, class and sex, "the lunatic schedules and sleepless nights, the angst and the ambition, the protests and résumé -building." He comes down against grade inflation and mourns the "smog of sexual frustration" that floated over Harvard's campus; he reflects longingly (though with mixed feelings) on the tony clubs to which he did not gain entrance; he explains the lack of real diversity on campus (most students are privileged blue-staters, despite differences in race); and he serves up anecdotes about the homeless man masquerading as a Harvard student, the senior who embezzled from the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and his failed trip to Smith College to look for girls. It's an interesting book, if a little self-centered and self-serving (it was "written as much in ambition as in idealism"), and it'll no doubt be read eagerly by Crimson students—at least the ones like Douthat, who are not quite "the privileged among the privileged, the rulers of the ruling class." (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Close on the heels of Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" and the flap surrounding Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, comes this memoir-cum-polemic about Harvard by a 2002 graduate. Douthat critiques his peers' sense of entitlement from the perspective of a cultural conservative, although his high moral tone is somewhat compromised by an eagerness to bolster this account of campus life with salacious anecdotes of debauchery, greed, and snobbery. Douthat skewers the political and sexual shenanigans of his classmates and provides a thoughtful analysis of the prevailing liberal politics of the campus. But his righteous indignation can seem misplaced, when so many of the injustices that exercise him are so petty. It's hard to get really upset about charges of button-stealing in a campus election.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* Its very name a cultural weapon, Harvard arms the fortunate few it admits with such social power that they can "drop the H bomb" on overawed listeners merely by mentioning where they attend school. How this revered institution and its students acquired such daunting social power and whether they still deserve it are the questions at the heart of this incisive critique written from the Right. Douthat offers a withering indictment of Harvard's institutional culture, a culture in which the administration (and not just the president), the faculty, and the students have all drifted into self-congratulatory complacency. In the academic world Douthat describes, professors have long since repudiated traditional moral imperatives and have now distanced themselves from the gauche radicalism of the hard Left, so contenting themselves with the abundance provided by global capitalism and the moral bromides generated by parlor liberalism. Such professors provide little educational guidance to students themselves too smugly impressed with their own achievement in winning admission to the school to worry much about intellectual labors not requisite for careers of affluence and prominence. Douthat recognizes that his own years at Harvard permitted him the luxury of stimulating out-of-class discussions with brilliant fellow students, but those moments of inspiration came in spite of the cozy creed of careerist success that has established itself as the only orthodoxy at the nation's premier university. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1401301126
• ISBN 13: 9781401301125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304