Rachel Toor (Br ’84) responds to William Deresiewicz’s recent widely-read article on the Disadvantages of Elite Education.

She thinks Deresiewicz gets it wrong because he only taught at Yale. He didn’t go there.

With the ongoing admissions frenzy, I, too, have been wondering if people really know what they’re aspiring to. Certainly for less-affluent students, a name-brand college provides access to the power elite. But the costs can include rifts within families and scarring blows to self-confidence. Sure, when you arrive, you’re told you’re the cream of the crop. But you feel like skim milk. Most students, no matter their achievements, think they’re admissions mistakes. They pad insecurities in a blanket of bravado. For legacies, or development admits, a sense of having to prove oneself can lead to a passion to excel or to indecorous behavior. Kids from North Dakota may as well hang a sign that says “geographical distribution” around their neck. Football players — well, they know the score.

Who feels at home in a place like Yale, where your roommate has already published a novel and the person down the hall performed on Broadway? How do you explain that now, when you turn on the television or open a newspaper, you see someone you went to college with? It sounds like bragging.

People who didn’t attend elite schools want to hear about the dummies. They point to certain Yale alumni in high government positions to say, See? These places are overrated. That’s probably true, but unless you were there, it’s hard to know in which ways.

What Deresiewicz gets wrong is that, as a faculty member, he didn’t know what it was like to be a student at Yale, where, I would argue, much of the intellectual exchange and competition goes on in the dining hall or the dorm rooms, not in the classrooms. Students know who the scholars are and revere them. They pay attention to who writes the books, but tend to talk about the authors most often to their friends

They do, however, look for adults to connect with. An acquaintance told me that he had felt most at home at Yale with the librarians behind the checkout desk.

It’s unseemly to ask for sympathy for having survived Yale, but the truth is, I’m still recovering from my experience there. Perhaps only the self-deprecating sense of humor of a Calvin Trillin can get across to the non-Ivied public what it was like without sounding boastful about answered prayers.

There are disadvantages to an elite education; I’m just not sure that they’re the ones that Deresiewicz mentions. When I meet someone who went to Yale, I search for the haunted recognition beyond the Boola Boola. But no one wants to reopen old wounds. When pushed, some of my friends confess that Yale made them feel rotten and insecure, and they continue to judge themselves against the extraordinary achievements of their classmates. Others claim they have spent their lives disappointed to never again find such a rich intellectual environment. …

It’s a chestnut of academe that students get in the way of the faculty’s “real” work, and an even more tired move to complain about the questionable work ethic and values of students. Deresiewicz’s essay, beautifully written and critically smart, flattens the variety of his students’ lives into the kinds of generalizations we try to nudge first-year composition students out of making. When I asked a student now at Yale what he thought of the essay, he said that he agreed with a lot of it, but he felt that it was “sour grapes.” I’d love for Yale to send copies to newly admitted students as a kind of informed consent: This is what the people who will be teaching your classes think of you. Still wanna come?

I didn’t feel overawed by the people I met at Yale personally. In fact, I thought I was in my own personal heaven, reveling in the opportunity to meet so many extraordinarily talented people. But even an egomaniac like me did feel the difference between a provincial background with limited educational opportunity like my own and the kind of college preparation people got at places like Andover and Hotchkiss or Scarsdale High School.

Years later, I read Crossing the Line, the WWII memoir of Yale professor Alvin B. Kernan, followed by his memoir of his academic career, In Plato’s Cave. I hadn’t taken any courses from Kernan, but many people I knew did, and his name was very familiar to me.

I found the academic memoir illuminating. Yale was a very different experience viewed from the everyday working life perspective of the junior faculty member laboriously climbing the academic ladder and commuting to campus from some modest house in a middle class suburb.

I suppose I should not have been totally surprised, particularly on the basis of personal acquaintance with Yale professors who clearly felt the same way, to find that Kernan envied and detested Yale students. From his outsider’s perspective, we were all insiders. He did not recognize the difference between the scholarship student from the working class mill town and the captain of the polo team.

To an associate professor, scraping by to make ends meet and worrying about his chances of ever receiving tenure, all Yale undergraduates seemed like carefree gilded youth, drifting happily between the Fence Club and a Senior Society tomb, having a fine time at college, before moving on to an already-reserved place at the Masters of the Universe table.

Of course, that stereotype was preposterously untrue in the 1960s and the 1970s. I doubt it fit a substantial percentage of the population of 1920s undergraduate Yale either. But some of the faculty really did think that way, and for those, delivering a bad grade seemed sweet revenge. One could see them gloating over every opportunity.

I know what she meant about friendships with the working staff, too. There was a sweet old lady who commonly occupied the entrance desk at Sterling Library, charged with scrutinizing identity cards for access to the library stacks. She always delivered a friendly greeting to me, in the manner of someone you knew and smiled at daily in your hometown. That kind of less-than-Olympian human contact could be peculiarly comforting to young men far from home.

——————————-

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

BTC Pipeline

I don’t agree with Green with a Gun‘s PC envirnmentalist cant about the people of Great Powers being able “to have more than their fair share of world resources.” Shares of world resources are actually not conventionally exchanged at gun point. Sorry, Marx. We buy them.

Some countries have politically systems providing security of property and the rule of law, and cultural traditions favoring education and hard work. Those countries are consequently more productive, and consequently wealthier, and can afford to buy more of everything than people living in countries where blood feuds and brigandage enjoy greater status than investment banking.

Russia, Lord knows, has more than her fair share of natural resources, but Russia has not been notoriously successful historically in doing anything with them.

Today, Russia would like to use its ability to supply oil and natural gas as a weapon to restore its ability to wield power.

As Green with a Gun aptly puts it:

The Russia energy company Gazprom supplies something like three-quarters of Eastern Europe’s natural gas, and overall about a quarter of the EU’s natural gas. If the EU pisses off Russia, Europeans face a cold winter. Russia has already shown itself ready to turn off the tap, as it did with the Ukraine and Belarus.

You can see, then, that the US and EU are rather keen not to have to rely on Russian goodwill to keep the oil flowing out of Central Asia. If they rely on Russia for oil or for natural gas, then if Russia switches one off it hurts a lot but they can change to the other, but if Russia controls both, they’re stuck. Russia has them not merely by the balls but also the throat. Russia can then dictate not only prices, but to some degree foreign policy. “Yes, dear EU, you can support airstrikes on our friends in Iran, but you will gain a new appreciation of your white Christmas, as you’re walking out in the cold past your unfuelled cars.”

The practical alternative is the BTC Pipeline delivering oil from the Central Asian Republics via Azerbijan and Georgia to Turkey and thence to Europe.

And that’s what Russia’s invasion of Georgia is all about.

There are many ethnic and historical issues behind the Georgia-Russia conflict. The Ossetians feel a kinship with Russia more than with Georgia, Georgia was set for NATO membership next year, putting a NATO country directly on Russia’s border, and Russia has long held sway over the entire Caucasus. And since the West went to war with a Russian ally in Serbia to secure the independence and self-determination of the Kosovar Albanians, they can hardly complain if Russia goes to war with Georgia to secure the same for the Ossetians. But really that is not important: for the world and for Russia it all comes down to energy, to controlling the flow of it. Russia has chosen an effective means of controlling the flow of oil from the Central Asian republics.

Russia has accomplished a strategic coup de main. The aim of most warfare is to present your enemy with a dilemma. For example, achieve air superiority against his land forces, and his forces can either sit still in bunkers and be encircled by your troops, or move and be bombed – either way they’re screwed, it’s a dilemma. Russia has presented the West with a dilemma – do nothing to help Georgia and lose BTC, or go to war against Russia and in the course of the conflict lose BTC.

Checkmate.

Abu Saeed al-Masri aka Mustafa Abu al-Yazid

Reuters reports another leading al Qaeda figure has been put out of the jihad business.

Senior Al Qaeda commander Abu Saeed al-Masri has been killed in recent clashes with Pakistani forces in a Pakistani region near the Afghan border, a security official said on Tuesday.

“He was believed to be among the top leadership of al Qaeda,” the senior security official said on condition of anonymity.

Al-Masri, which means Egyptian, was the most senior al Qaeda operative to have been killed in Pakistan’s tribal belt since the death of his compatriot, Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Qaeda chemical and biological weapons expert, last month.

Television channels identified the dead man as Mustafa Abu al-Yazid and said he was also known as Abu Saeed al-Masri.

He was killed in recent clashes in the Bajaur tribal region, a known sanctuary for al Qaeda operatives on the Afghan border, the security official said.

Yazid, commander of al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan, was an Egyptian who served time in jail with al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

He has been referred to as al Qaeda’s third most senior figure, after the elimination or capture of five earlier occupants of the number three spot since 2001.

Earlier, the September 11 Commission described Yazid as the network’s “chief financial manager”.

Nearly 160 people have been killed in clashes between Pakistani security forces and the militants in Bajaur since last Wednesday.

“There are many foreign elements there, more than local militants,” the security official said.

Yazid gave a rare interview to Pakistan’s private Geo Television, aired last month, in which said a suicide bomber who carried out an attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad in June came from the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Mahmood Shah, a former security chief of Pakistan’s northwestern ethnic Pastun tribal areas, said al-Masri and Yazid appeared to be the same person.

The NBC Olympic web-site is making videos of all events available on-line.

To view them, you will first have to allow Microsoft to install its Silverlight plugin, then restart the browser.

Here is the Equestrian events video page.

Now that is convenient.

This crazy.

That little Obama endorsement video was a comedy satire, but this moonbat is completely in earnest.

Blake Fleetwood, at Huffington Post, thinks Dick Cheney and Karl Rove persuaded Georgia to provoke war with Russia to help John McCain win the US presidential election.

He just needs to get some of his ultra-left blogger friends to repeat this nonsense a few times, and my college classmates will become believers. The same process worked with “Bush went to war with Iraq to avenge the assassination attempt on his father” story and the ever-popular “We invaded Iraq to steal the oil” theory.

Angelina Jolie is keeping an open mind, Wiltshire & Washington reports.

In June, when Entertainment Weekly asked her whether she talked politics with Clint Eastwood, a longtime Republican, on the set of the upcoming movie, “The Changeling,” she said, “Actually, we don’t disagree as much as you’d think. I think people assume I’m a Democrat. But I’m registered independent and I’m still undecided. So I’m looking at McCain as well as Obama.”

A couple of YouTube 19 year old comedians satirize youth for Obama. They were sufficiently persuasive that some angry Hillaryites at Larry Johnson’s blog took this for a real endorsement.

3:55 video

Yahoo Sports explains that, though fireworks were actually used at the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremonies, the astonishing display broadcast around the world on television was faked, combining computer generated images with prerecorded shots of fireworks.

The Cornered Cat has a lot to say about firearms choice, ownership, and use from the female perspective.

Villa Leopolda, Villefranche-sur-Mer

Charles Bremmer reports from Paris, in the London Times, that Russians are not only gobbling up real estate in the Republic of Georgia. Let’s hope they overpay just as much for that Caucasian real estate.

A mysterious Russian billionaire has trumped his big-spending rivals and broken a world record by splashing out €500 million (£392 million) on one of the most sumptuous villas on the French Riviera.

The price of the Villa Leopolda, a Belle Époque mansion on the heights of Villefrance, has amazed estate agents but fuelled local worries that the invasion of Russian money on the Côte d’Azur is getting out of hand.

Since the early 1990s, Russian oligarchs, drawn by memories of the Riviera-mad old Russian aristocracy, have been piling into seaside properties at Cap Ferrat, Cap d’Antibes, Saint-Tropez and the other great playgrounds.

None, however, has come near the price with which the unnamed Russian clinched the Leopolda deal with Lily Safra, the widow of Edmond Safra, a Lebanese banker who was killed by an arsonist’s fire in Switzerland in 2003.

Mrs Safra was said to have held out for months as the buyer raised his bid for the villa, between Nice and Monaco, which King Leopold II of Belgium acquired in 1902.

The previous record for a house was said to be the £57 (JDZ: reported as £117) million that Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, paid for a property in Kensington Palace Gardens in 2004. The macho spending contest by Russian oligarchs. …

Russian excess is feeding discontent among poorer people. Pierrette, a housekeeper for one Russian, said: “I attended a party where the guests had fun throwing burning €500 notes into the air while everyone split their sides laughing. The domestic staff were later told to collect the ashes. It was sickening.”

House photos.

Ross Douthat, in the Atlantic, is less than sympathetic.

You stay classy, John Edwards:

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Also, he made a point of telling Woodruff that he remained the son of a mill worker throughout the entire affair.

It looks like they won’t have Flem Snopes to kick around anymore.

——————————–

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

K2 – More Dangerous than Everest

Freddie Wilkinson, in HuffPo of all places, gives a climber’s inside perspective on the recent K2 tragedy, critiquing some mainstream media accounts in places like the New York Times and National Geographic.

Roughly thirty people left the high camp in the predawn hours on Friday, August 1st, bound for the summit. The climbers were counting on the use of fixed ropes, set by an advance team of climbers. Delays quickly ensued when they realized that the fixed ropes weren’t strategically placed in the most difficult sections of the climb; more ropes needed to be leapfrogged from below. A Serb climber fell to his death and an aborted body recovery cost more time and took the life of a Pakistani porter. While some decided to return to high camp, as many as 17 climbers summited. The catastrophic serac avalanche caught the first climbers descending from the summit, sweeping several more climbers (the exact number has been variously reported as 3 or 4) to their deaths. Five to six more climbers perished who were stranded above the Bottleneck couloir at the time of the avalanche.