Author Walter Kirn ’83 appeared on The Colbert Report Tuesday night to promote his latest book, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever. While we certainly don’t shy away from poking fun at this goddamn hell hole (sorry, it’s exam week…err, month), Kirn’s criticisms of Princeton at times bordered on delusional and “WTF?”
Wearing–oddly enough–orange and black, Kirn said that he was miserable and alienated at Princeton. Sure, not everyone is happy here, and there are many things about Princeton that could improve. But then he said things like:
If they put Princeton on the web–if they put those classes on the web–I think people at state schools would feel a little less inferior.
Ouch! Apparently, we’re no better than an online university! So if Princeton and other elite instutions are all scams, what should colleges really teach? Colbert, who pointed out Kirn’s many hypocrises, asked him towards the end, “What do you want your kids to achieve in college?” Kirn’s response:
I’d like them to graduate knowing how to fix an internal combustion engine, get along with people unlike themselves, tell the difference between Iraq and Iran, and understand that the Muslim world is actually divided between Shiites and Sunnis.
First, how many four-year colleges even offer courses in automobile mechanics? Does Kirn want his children to attend vocational school? Why must we all know how to fix cars? Second, while we’re not some utopian vision of diversity and integration, we’re pretty good: 54% of students on need-based financial aid, 32% minorities, and the last time I checked, no riots to report. And this coming from a man who lives in that beacon of diversity, Montana. Third, I’m pretty sure students at Princeton arrive here already knowing the difference between Iraq and Iran. Fourth, we already know about Shiites and Sunnis. You see, we went to this mythical place called “high school,” not to mention that these are things we refer to as “common knowledge.”
See you at Reunions next week?
The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Walter Kirn | ||||
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(image source: amazon.com)
You should read the article that Kirn published in the Atlantic, which the book expands upon; I think that the Colbert segment really doesn’t accurately express the ideas he presented in the article. As to those ideas: I think he’s absolutely right to criticize a university culture that favors bullshit over original thinking, and entitlement and privilege over actually doing any work. As someone who–even as a middle-class white kid–has felt very alienated at this university, I can sympathize a lot with Kirn’s critique of the old boys’ club ethos (yes, it’s changed, but I’d argue that it hasn’t changed enough). In my experience, many Princeton students have a long way to go in terms of learning how to “get along with people unlike themselves.”
Oh, and I don’t know where you went to high school, but at my average public high school in southern California, no one ever taught us the difference between Sunnis and Shiites–and, in fact, I have one particular memory of a history teacher confusing Iraq and Iran in a class discussion. Where I come from, this type of fact is *not* common knowledge–so there’s no need to be condescending. Let’s try not to risk playing any further into the same stereotypes that Kirn is condemning and to which he’s drawing the public’s attention.
Hear, hear!
I second everything Emily says, except that I haven’t encountered an “old-boys’-club ethos” outside a few frats. Princeton students, all too often, are kids who’ve learned how to work the system to their advantage. We’ve got a lot of ambition and not a lot of intellectual curiosity. This is an enormous generalization, of course–I’ve been blessed to find many, many Princeton students with intellectual curiosity in spades. But as a whole, I think Princeton students are much more concerned with being “normal” (read: pop-culture-obsessed, social-hierarchy-obsessed) than students at, say, Yale. Of course, we do have more fun than Yale…