Feeling Sheepish?

In his book, Excellent Sheep, former Yale English Professor William Deresiewicz recounts when “a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.”

For this Pomona student, it was not just that a lack of complete success in a course was conceivable but undesirable; such a scenario was entirely inconceivable. She has what one may call the Sheep Mentality of today’s college students: Any path that strays from the social script for college students who are shepherded by a culture of meritocratic entitlement is considered nonviable, and the risks that it brings are averted. That is, students like the girl from Pomona are bred and reared by a college system that inculcates adolescent timidity.

The Sheep Mentality understands success as absolute achievement (e.g. “getting an A in every class”), while failure is considered not to be the absence of a passing grade but the absence of a perfect grade. It is all As or nothing at all. Any class that could be a middle ground has no extra gold star to offer for the résumé and is therefore abandoned. As one of the herd, I can testify that the Sheep Mentality consists in a strong aversion to risk derived from a deep fear of what is perceived to be failure. One may dabble in a class on the Roman plays of Shakespeare, but major in English? As Gene Wilder replies to the Zero Mostel in Mel Brooks’s 1968 film, The Producers: “That, sir, is the ultimate extent of my criminal life.” The pressure to be the CEO of an organization pervades the college environment, in the classroom and beyond it. The average undergraduate has so clustered her schedule that she, Terry Castle writes, “has morphed into a sort of lean, glossy, turbocharged superhamster: Look in the cage and all you see, where the treadmill should be, is a beautiful blur.”

Obviously no student is a tabula rasa absorbing the frenetic culture around her. But a specific social script shows only one path to success (whatever path reaps financial success) and falsely conveys that the means to the good life is nothing other than guaranteed success. When an incoming freshman class is told that it is “the best and the brightest,” the students are provided with a meritocratic expectation of guaranteed success simply because they are there. And the university’s duty is to ensure that success. As Deresiewicz says, “Higher education increasingly resembles any other business now.” Universities provide a lifestyle that extends adolescence without the demand of growing up, and part of growing up means not getting what one wants—perhaps even failing a class.

Surely some level of comfort is necessary for a liberal education (clean libraries, for instance). But the excess of leisure explains much of the collegiate entitlement culture. Consider the speech codes: They prevent students from being offended and made uncomfortable. This leisure owes partially to the fact that college students today are “bred” beyond the “at least modest comfort” level that the Port Huron Statement mentions. They are part of a new upper class in which the university functions as a business for a lifestyle of both complete leisure and complete pressure to succeed. From childhood, helicopter parents assume (as Peggy Orenstein says) that “we can protect them from pain or failure or sadness. We can make them perfect and, in the process, prove ourselves beyond reproach.” College generally continues this culture of meritocratic entitlement—a student is so fragile that she must be protected from the pains, failures, and sadness inherent to life. While this language may seem hyperbolic, consider a recent piece in Slate by Eric Posner: while critics “complain that universities are treating adults like children,” as seen in cases involving speech codes protecting some students from “offensive” language, the real “problem is that universities have been treating children like adults.” Because the brain is not fully formed until 25, Posner reasons, college students are still children. That he thinks he is saying something controversial only betrays the fact that colleges now extend adolescence and further delay maturity.

(Now one understands what Jonathan Chait calls “the culture of taking offense that pervades the campus.” By disinviting commencement speakers and through its speech codes, the university acts as if students have a right not to be offended. If the university is a business, it must be profitable. And a profitable business caters to the sensibilities of its customers. So if something offends a customer, well, the college student is always right.)

The meritocratic collegiate class has a sense of entitlement that distances its members from even the WASP aristocracy that dominated the elite universities prior to the 60s. They at least believed in character development and that the students could fail a class, let alone be kicked out of college. The children of the new meritocrats instead are groomed for their parents’ lifestyle. Hence Charles Murray warns (in his book, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead) young readers not to take summer internships since “internships are affirmative action for the advantaged.” He instead tells students to get summer jobs that would burst their social bubbles. As Deresiewicz writes, the disadvantage “of an elite education is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t exactly like you, for the simple reason that you never meet any.”

This disconnection between superhamster students and the middle American culture outside their college bubble provides a space for the ambitions and timidities of the Sheep Mentality to develop among the self-assured young meritocrats. The fear of failure, owing to perfectionism at home and adulthood-prevention at college, prolongs an adolescent timidity. Obviously anyone can complain of the young students in every generation. Samuel Johnson satirizes in The Rambler the young’s “murmurs at uneasiness which only vacancy and suspicion expose them to feel, and complaints of distresses which it is in their own power to remove.” But as Johnson notes, the man who does not try the path that causes uneasiness and complaint will have “missed the victory.” I feel sheepish in saying that we are being ill-prepared for victory hard fought and hard won.