Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.97 (671 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1401307558 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-05-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Alan L. Chase said Review of. The timing of my reading this book was fortuitous. I finished the book within a few days of my very moving experience of being at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the tribute to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.[]That event, in my opinion, represented Harvard at its best. Ross Gregory Douthat's moving memoir of his four years as an undergraduate student at the Ivy League's flagship institution paints a more complex and ambivalent picture of the university. There can be no doubt that Douthat loves his alma mater, but it clearly has been a tempestuous affair. I view this book. R P said Insightful and moving too. I read this book over the past weekend and it gets my absolute highest, six star recommendation. I am sure it will wind up as one of my favorite one or two books of the year. Don't think of it as some dry tome giving postmodernism a kick. It's not that. It's really a fun, current, personal and thoughtful college memoir with terrific writing. Think of it as the best Ivy League memoir since Prozac Nation (though actually, it's much better than Prozac Nation).The book kind of has two aspects. First, the book is about the culture of the modern university. So it involves political dialogue . "Enormous change" according to William M. Doolittle. This book is either wrong or things have changed a great deal since I was a student at Harvard, 50 years ago. The author contends that the Final Clubs are the center of social ife at Harvard in this new century. I was a clubbie there and knew then that the final clubs were marginal and none of friends had even heard of them. My, how things appear to have changed, if the author is to be believed.
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
Instead, he found himself in a school rife with elitism and moneyed excess, an incubator for the grasping and ambitious, a college seduced by the religion of success. Instead, he was immersed in the culture of America's ever-swelling ruling class--a culture of privilege, of ambition and entitlement, in which a vast network of elite schools are viewed by students, parents, administrators, and professors more as stepping-stones to high salaries and coveted social networks than as institutions entrusted with academic excellence.Privilege is a powerfully rendered portrait of a young manhood, a pointed social critique of this country's most esteemed institutions, and an exploration of issues such as affirmative action, grade inflation, political correctness, and curriculum reform.. But the Harvard of his dreams, an institution fueled by intellectual curiosity and entrusted with the keys to liberal education, never materialized. So Douthat was educated at Harvard, but what Harvard taught him was not what he had gone there to learn. Now in paperback, the penetrating critique of elite universities and the culture of privilege they perpetuate Ross Gregory Douthat arrived at Harvard Universi