Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation, Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, Madison Marino Doan, Encounter Books, pp. 184, $25.00 softcover.
In the early talkie They Had to See Paris (1929), Pike Peters (Will Rogers) plays an already prosperous Oklahoma garage owner who strikes it rich in oil. It’s like Cyndi Lauper says, money changes everything. His wife Idy (Irene Rich) soon decides the family needs a healthy dose of culture, how else will nouveau riche bumpkins make it in high society? When she insists on a sojourn to gay Paree, Pike is less than keen on the idea. This exchange follows:
Pike: “You know Idy, you and I have seen some pretty hard times together, and I’m never gonna deny you a thing. If you wanna take the children to Paris, why, you go ahead and take them.”
Idy: “Oh, but you’re the one who needs it most. You’ve got to go too.”
Pike: “Me? I can’t. I’ve got to stay here and take care of this business. And, besides Ross, Ross he’s got to go back to the university.”
Idy: “Ross will learn more in one year in Paris than he would in four years at the university.”
Pike: “That’s just exactly what I’m scared of.”
Ross (Owen Davis Jr.) and Opal (Marguerite Churchill) are the Peters progeny making their way into early adulthood. Once abroad, and living the high life, Pike’s fears are soon realized. Ross shacks up with an artist’s model and Opal becomes engaged to a titled fortune hunter.
Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation, by Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan, shows that the route to pretentious ruin has been shortened by nearly 3,000 miles and an ocean. The book doesn’t make the claim there’s nothing to gain at the university circuit known by its football conference name. It does say however, that ways exist to get degrees from those places without becoming cerebrally better off, and very possibly worse off, than when you started.
The study begins with the youngest sibling of the Ivy family, Cornell. Teenagers take Latin and calculus, burn midnight oil, go extracurricular, join junior versions of adult clubs and fight tooth and nail to gain acceptance into high-brow institutions. What they do, once there, gets less scrutiny. Looking over some of the credit options at Cornell, you might ask what it was all for:
“Cultural Studies: Comics and Graphic Medicine” asks, “How does the medium of comic books allow authors to craft new stories about health and illness.” For its part, “Sensational Feminism” takes as truth that “the body is always politicized” and then asks, “How does the body feel when politicized.” This course is the only option if a Big Red student wants to read “transgender animal studies.”
The “body” is not neglected in other courses. In “Sounds, Sense and Ideas: Who Runs the World? Girls—Pop Music, Gender and Media,” another cosmic question is addressed: “Is Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP video an empowering anthem or an objectifying spectacle?” The question of finding the “P” of “WAP” on the body of a stallion must be pedantic.
Cornell hasn’t abandoned The Odyssey, Dante, Aristotle, and classics generally. It’s just that you can substitute focus with Beyonce, Bad Bunny, Madonna, Lil Nas X, Britney Spears and the gamut of pop schlock and still arrive as a scholastic aristocrat in urban professionalism. It gets tedious going over the range of options like “Videogames in East and Southeast Asia.” A fair accounting of the class work that covers oppression, inequality, and Western depravity at Cornell alone would take thousands of words.
Harvard offers a history course on the twists and turns in the evolution of Mexican food. Another, “Moctezuma’s Mexico Then and Now: Ancient Empires, Race Mixture, and Finding Latinx,” leaves out human sacrifice. That omission is a convenient sidestepping of unwoke details. A big omission is the way in which Cortez defeated the Aztec empire. It couldn’t have been done with his 600 men. There were about six million Aztecs. Europhobic narratives of Spanish arrival in the New World tend to be foggy on how rule from Tenochtitlan was overcome—by mustering their longtime neighbors. Taking the regime on, as Hernando suggested, was the best idea they’d heard in centuries. A big reason for that gets back to historical cuisine. A famous pre-Columbian dish, now known as a hangover cure, was Pozole. The original protein in it wasn’t pork but the un-white meat readily available in the neighborhood, pre-Eurotrash interference, known as “long pork.” Taking note of such trivia is, of course, oppressive.
At Princeton you get stuff like: “Shoes.” This narrow course teaches how “shoes have refocused our attention on issues of ethics and morality. Shoes are a window into our personal and collective history and future.”
If Princetonians who earned degrees in courses like this end up hoofing it in Antonio Vietri, Stefano Ricci, or Allen Edmonds, while a first-rate carpenter, plumber, or mason buys their footwear at Marshall’s, there is no justice in this world. What this country needs is more housing, fashionistas in charge are largely responsible for the shortage.
A course at Yale helps students shield themselves from the oppressions and micro-aggressions of people like the late Charlie Kirk: “I Don’t Like to Argue: The Styles and Politics of Humility” is the ultimate safe space, where argument itself is avoided for its “power relations and tonal effects” and students instead experiment with “alternative styles of knowing,” or, to put it differently, not knowing any more than you already do.
Another offering to Yalies is: “Nighttime: The Night in History tells the story of discrimination against nighttime, examining the roots of prejudice against darkness, the “reasons why we fear the night,” and the “process of commercialization and even politicization of nocturnal spaces.”
Are they delving deeper into nightly perils with: “Drink Culture: The History, Ethics and Aesthetics of Cocktails” examines “how drink culture itself is bound up with colonialism, imperialism, the rise of science, and the commodification of art.”
Haven’t you always wondered if Yakub was lit up when he invented whitey on Patmos?
The biggest surprise in the book comes from Columbia:
Columbia University’s century-strong core curriculum is not, for the most part, a smorgasbord of courses set on a table of distribution requirements. It is a “communal learning experience that cultivates community-wide discourse and deliberate contemplation around seminal works, contemporary issues, and humanity’s most enduring questions.”
The list of questionable course material is shorter there than at any other institution covered. In conclusion the authors say: “There is no room for slackers at Columbia … compared to the rest of the Ivy League, the college curriculum at Columbia University stands out.” It’d be interesting to learn how much influence, if any, this erudition has on a Columbia graduate’s world views as compared to an Ivy sibling’s.
That question brings me back to Will Rogers, much as I loathe words with this many syllables, that Indian-cowpoke-comedian is still viewed by many as the quintessential twentieth century American. What can the Ivies do with him? He was a Native American born in the Cherokee Nation. His mother, Mary, had relatives expelled from Georgia in The Trail of Tears. But his father was a Confederate officer in the Civil War who inherited two slaves. The very idea of William Penn Adair Rogers confronts the pretentious “morality” of woke original sin with shattering force.
It’s difficult to say exactly where Roger’s would stand on the many outré questions the woker-than-thous pose for society. It is easily doubtful he’d still be a Democrat. It’s a certainty he’d be more scared of junior in the clutches of elite American education than he would be of sending him abroad.
Tim Hartnett was born and lives in Alexandria, Va. His work has appeared in The American Spectator, lewrockwell.com, The Mises Institute, The Agonist Journal and elsewhere. He covers media criticism, education, the arts, and American justice.
Photo by Frances Gunn on Unsplash