On Oct 14, 2011, at 10:01 AM, Jim Devine wrote: > The usual critique of the ivies (and I went to one, BTW)
So did I - same one you did - and I'm very glad I did. It was a great experience. Terrific students, professors, physical plant, etc. Plus it instills you with a confidence towards the world that sticks with you for a lifetime. I went to what is now called a "public Ivy" - the University of Virginia - for graduate school, and the contrast was pretty strong. I was at Yale from 1971 to 1975 when the English department was really cooking - Bloom, Hartman, de Man, Derrida sometimes. You may find that gang to be full of it - I didn't, and still don't - but it was intellectually very alive. And so were conversations over lunch. I was at Virginia from 1976 to 1979, and though the English dept. was ranked very highly at the time, is was torpid by comparison. And the students were OK, but really no match. Something I noticed when I got to Virginia was that you could tell what kind of college people went to by how they addressed the teaching staff. People who went to elite colleges called them either "Mr" or "Ms" or by their first names. People who went to nonelite colleges called them "Doctor" and "Professor." The confidence thing. Yeah, I know that places like Yale are stinking rich in a time when public universities don't have a dime to spare, and that they reproduce a ruling class (and, not unimportantly, recruit the upwardly mobile to the elite). But there's no denying that they're an excellent experience for the lucky and/or privileged. To quote Terry Moe, the right-wing education reformer whom I interviewed during my Hoover Institution fellowship last May, "Everything is better when you're an elite." Doug _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
