By William Deresiewicz
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
I taught English at Yale University for
ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students—people who went on to write
novels, devote themselves to their church, or just wander the world for a few
years. But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”
These students were excellent, technically
speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.
But they were also sheep: stunted in their
sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.
I was so struck by this—that our “best and
brightest” students are so often as helpless as children—that I wrote a book
about it. It came out in 2014, not long before my former colleague Nicholas
Christakis was surrounded and browbeaten by a crowd of undergraduates for failing to make them feel coddled
and safe—an early indication of the rise of what we now call wokeness.
How to reconcile the two phenomena, I
started to wonder. Does wokeness, with its protests and pugnacity, represent an
end to sheephood, a new birth of independence and self-assertion, of
countercultural revolt? To listen to its radical-sounding sloganeering—about
tearing down systems and doing away with anyone and anything deemed
incorrect—it sure sounded like it.
But indications suggest otherwise. Elite
college graduates are still herding toward the same five vocational
destinations—law, medicine, finance, consulting, and tech—in overwhelming
numbers. High-achieving high school students, equally woke, are still crowding
toward the same 12 or 20 schools, whose application numbers continue to rise.
This year, for example, Yale received some 50,000 applications, more than twice as many as 10 years
ago, of which the university accepted less
than 4.5%.
Eventually, I recognized the deeper
continuities at work. Excellent sheephood, like wokeness, is a species of
conformity. As a friend who works at an elite private university recently
remarked, if the kids who get into such schools are experts at anything, it is,
as he put it, “hacking the meritocracy.” The process is imitative: You do what
you see the adults you aspire to be like doing. If that means making woke-talk
(on your college application; in class, so professors will like you), then that
is what you do.
But wokeness also serves a deeper psychic
purpose. Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive. Its purpose is to vault
you into the ranks of society’s winners, to make sure that you end up with more
stuff—more wealth, status, power, access, comfort, freedom—than most other
people. This is not a pretty project, when you look it in the face. Wokeness
functions as an alibi, a moral fig leaf. If you can tell yourself that you are
really doing it to “make the world a better place” (the ubiquitous campus
cliché), then the whole thing goes down a lot easier.
All this helps explain the conspicuous
absence of protest against what seem like obviously outrageous facts of life on
campus these days: the continuing increases to already stratospheric tuition,
the insulting wages paid to adjunct professors, universities’ investment in
China (possibly the most problematic country on earth), the draconian
restrictions implemented during the pandemic.
Yes, there have been plenty of protests,
under the aegis of wokeness, in recent years: against statues, speakers, emails
about Halloween costumes, dining hall banh mi. But those, of course, have been
anything but countercultural. Students have merely been expressing more extreme
versions of the views their elders share. In fact, of the views that their
elders have taught them: in the private and upscale public high schools that
have long been dominated by the new religion, in courses in gender studies,
African-American studies, sociology, English lit.
In that sense, the protesters have only
been demonstrating what apt pupils they are. Which is why their institutions
have responded, by and large, with pats on the head. After the Christakis
incident, two of the students who had most flagrantly attacked the
professor went on to be given awards (for “provid[ing] exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or
ethnic relations at Yale College”) when they graduated two years later.
The truth is that campus protests, not
just in recent years but going back for decades now, bear only a cosmetic
resemblance to those of the 1960s. The latter represented a rejection of the authority
of adults. They challenged the very legitimacy of the institutions at which
they were directed, and which they sought to utterly remake. They were
undertaken, at a time when colleges and universities were still regarded as
acting in loco parentis, by students who insisted on being treated as adults,
as equals. Who rejected the forms of life that society had put on offer. Who
were engaged, at considerable risk—to their financial prospects, often to their
physical safety—in a project of self-authoring.
I was involved in the anti-apartheid
protests at Columbia in 1985. Already, by then, the actions had an edge of
unreality, of play, as if the situation were surrounded by quotation marks. It
was, in other words, a kind of reenactment. Student protest had achieved the
status of convention, something that you understood you were supposed to do, on
your way to the things that you’d already planned to do, like going to Wall
Street. It was clear that no adverse consequences would be suffered for defying
the administration, nor were any genuinely risked. Instead of occupying
Hamilton Hall, the main college classroom building, as students had in 1968, we
blocked the front door. Students were able to get to their classes the back
way, and most of them did (including me and, I would venture to say, most of
those who joined the protests). “We’ll get B’s!” our charismatic leader
reassured us, and himself—meaning, don’t worry, we’ll wrap this up in time for
finals (which is exactly what happened). The first time as tragedy, the second
time as farce.
And so it’s been since then: the third,
fourth, tenth, fiftieth time. In a recent column, Freddie deBoer remarked, in a different context, that for the young
progressive elite, “raised in comfortable and affluent homes by helicopter
parents,” “[t]here was always some authority they could demand justice from.”
That is the precise form that campus protests have taken in the age of woke: appeals
to authority, not defiance of it. Today’s elite college students still regard
themselves as children, and are still treated as such. The most infamous moment
to emerge from the Christakis incident, captured on a video the world would
later see, exemplifies this perfectly. Christakis’s job as the head of a
residential college, a young woman (one could more justly say, a girl) shriek-cried at him, “is not about creating an intellectual
space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating
a home!”
We are back to in loco parentis, in fact
if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the
first of adulthood. But one of the pitfalls of regarding college as the last
stage of childhood is that if you do so then it very well might not be. The
nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole
phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of
contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow
up—not financially, not psychologically, not morally.
The problem, at least with respect to the
last two, stems from the nature of the authority, parental as well as
institutional, that the young are now facing. It is an authority that does not
believe in authority, that does not believe in itself. That wants to be liked,
that wants to be your friend, that wants to be thought of as cool. That will
never draw a line, that will always ultimately yield.
Children can’t be children if adults are
not adults, but children also can’t become adults. They need something solid:
to lean on when they’re young, to define themselves against as they grow older.
Children become adults—autonomous individuals—by separating from their parents:
by rebelling, by rejecting, by, at the very least, asserting. But how do you
rebel against parents who regard themselves as rebels? How do you reject them
when they accept your rejection, understand it, sympathize with it, join it?
The 1960s broke authority, and it has
never been repaired. It discredited adulthood, and adulthood has never
recovered. The attributes of adulthood—responsibility, maturity,
self-sacrifice, self-control—are no longer valued, and frequently no longer
modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know
how. They want to be adults, but it’s easier to remain children. Like children,
they can only play at being adults.
So here is my commencement message to the
class of 2022. Beware of prepackaged rebellions; that protest march that you’re
about to join may be a herd. Your parents aren’t your friends; be skeptical of
any authority that claims to have your interests at heart. Your friends may
turn out to be your enemies; as one of mine once said, the worst thing you can
do to friends is not be the person they want you to be. Self-authoring is hard.
If it isn’t uncomfortable, it isn’t independence. Childhood is
over. Dare to grow up.
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