The Cult of the Good School, Again

I have had something to say on this blog about what I call the "Cult of the Good School," and it seems to me appropriate to revisit that theme now given how much fire the "good schools" are coming under, and the general sense of siege one gets looking at the situation of American higher education as it stands in relation to the rest of society. Lest it need saying: so far as I am concerned the principal reason for the political side of the attack, at least, which I am sure also lies behind many of the other criticisms we see in the press (for instance, the matter of "value for the money") is the perception of many on the right that higher education, and especially its foremost institutions, are bastions of the left. Lest it need be said: so far as I am concerned their view is totally false, with this demonstrably not the case in areas such as economics, where the most prestigious collegesy are bastions of right-wing dogma, all as the notion that the postmodernist dogma of many a humanities or social science department is, no matter how much the political hacks of the right say otherwise, not a matter of leftist ideas but the espousal of the extreme opposite, of right-wing Counter-Enlightenment philosophy in a form that was weaponized against the left in the Cold War. To insist otherwise is to confess profound philosophical, political and even print illiteracy --with all that says about the quality of our mainstream "thought-leaders" today, especially those so relentlessly platformed by the profoundly anti-democratic Mainstream Media.

My criticisms of the "Cult" have nothing to do with the fever dream that those who park their car in Harvard yard are subject to indoctrination by "cultural Marxists" and other such phantoms of the Neo-Nazi imagination. Rather what I have criticized is the irrationality of the hierarchy of schools--the worship of brand names that has nothing to do with value, let alone a clear, rigorously tested measure of value (and indeed, when and where people have attempted to assess the financial value of a college education, at least, often flies in the face of it). This would not matter so much were it not for the brutal competition to get into such places forced on so many of the young that makes the precious years of youth a more grinding, miserable, thing than it needs to be; and the parasitism of a disgusting college placement industry that sells advantage to the rich in a way that makes so much of that grinding struggle pointless, all as the really rich buy their worthless offspring their places in them.

My criticisms of the "Cult" have also been of the way in which the inequality among schools is bound up with inequality generally, and indeed the defense of inequality in its most pernicious forms. There is the idiotic insistence that meritocracy is not an ideal but something we are actually living in, without any thought of how remote twenty-first century America is from any meritocratic ideal of "equality of opportunity" really letting "I.Q.+hard work" get their full due, or for that matter, just how cruel and unsustainable a truly thoroughgoing meritocracy really would be. (Indeed, I suspect that very few of those who so cheerfully throw around that word "meritocracy" have ever read the book by Michael Young, let alone understood it. Or any book and understood it.) There is the offspring of this meritocratic pretension and social reality, the passing off of social snobbery as respect for "merit" and "achievement," with the celebrated names of particular educational institutions endlessly used to justify the status, power, wealth of so many of the elite, in desperate need of such justification precisely because the "power elite" that centrist idiots hail as the "best and brightest" endlessly prove themselves (as C. Wright Mills warned everyone they were) vicious mediocrities leading the world down the road to ruin). There is the way those names are so often used to likewise buttress the authority of the elite's "experts" as they pass off that aforementioned self-serving dogma as science, the more in as this hierarchy helps to give a very few schools, the ones most connected with the elite, an extremely disproportionate part in the training of faculty, the publication of scholarship and the general research agenda, and the making of the conventional wisdom--stultifying our intellectual and cultural and political life, and betraying their duty to a complex society genuinely in need of expertise. (Indeed, while the aforementioned schools have had a great many worthy scholars on their faculties--I note the names of their institutions all the time as I cite them in my research--there is no denying the amount of sheer dreck in their faculty lounges--as I also note when, in the course of the same research, seeing their nauseating work, which is far, far more likely to get them a media platform.)

Altogether it is one super-grift, entirely connected with, supportive of, representative of, the general unhingedness of much of the absolute worst in life in America today, just like the state of our decrepit higher education more broadly, which requires young people to sell themselves into debt slavery so that they can graduate illiterate, and expected to face an ever more desperate job market armed with degrees that can seem just another asset overvalued to the point of obscenity in the neoliberal bubble economy gone mad--even before the prospect of artificial intelligence making them superfluous came to be something people talked about on the nightly news.