Pruning the Ivy: Why I don't believe in the tyranny of elite universities

I’ve met plenty of arrogant, entitled people—and I make no apology for my cordial detestation of them—in the decade I’ve spent at two Ivy League universities (Princeton, Columbia). When people generalize about the Ivy League as an institution, it seems to me, they’re actually expressing their perceptions, right and wrong, of the people who have attended Ivy League universities. But when you consider the fact that there are nasty people in every walk of life and in every organization, blaming elite universities for having a percentage of unpleasant people is unfair. It cannot be an admissions office’s job to figure out whether someone is a nice person or not.

The conversation about the role of elite universities in American life yields no middle ground. On one side are the people who honestly believe that the universities in the Ivy League (eight old, private institutions on the East Coast that happened to have football teams in the 1930s) are the points of a golden compass keeping America on its bearings and producing the only people really worth talking to. The other side argues that the leafy campuses are bastions of privilege and represent the worst of our society, the preserve of a self-perpetuating elite that is responsible for American arrogance abroad, the collapse of our financial system at home and general mediocrity. Many of the fiercest critics themselves went to an Ivy League university and were horrified by some of their boorish classmates.

Trains! Death! Moral Philosophy!

The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment created by the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot in the context of the ethics of abortion. Until recently I had never heard of it even though it's well-known among philosophers. This month, the BBC World Service devoted an entire documentary to it called “Would You Kill the Big Guy?” Despite some hokey production choices (including a philosophy-themed gameshow), the two-part series is well worth a listen. I would have been happy to leave the Trolley Problem to professional philosophers except that as I thought about it, I realized that it's not an exaggeration to call it one of the best tools for moral thinking that we have.

The most basic version of the Trolley Problem is this: There is a runaway train hurtling down a track and five unsuspecting workmen are about to be flattened. You notice a junction that could shunt the train onto another track where there is only a single worker. The lever that operates the junction is right next to you. What do you do? Do you allow fate to take its course and the five to die, or do you intervene, pulling the lever and saving the five but directly causing the death of the one? (We assume that there are no other solutions, such as shouting a warning. Since this is a thought experiment, there is no need to add endless extraneous details such as that the workers can’t hear you because they’re listening to their iPods.)

The battle of the novel and the physics textbook

Why study the humanities, stated with a burning conviction by Rabindranath Tagore:

The real truth is that science is not man’s nature, it is mere knowledge and training. By knowing the laws of the material universe you do not change your deeper humanity. You can borrow knowledge, but you cannot borrow temperament.

Of course we all like suspension bridges, antibiotics and computers, but our technical mastery over the world will be as pathetic as Ozymandias if we lose what makes us human, namely what Tagore calls "temperament" (I'm not sure what word he uses in Bengali).

Death over Smolensk

After the crash that killed the President of Poland, most of the top officials in government, and several Solidarity-era heroes, I am reminded of a few lines by Jan Kochanowski (1530-84),  "the Polish Shakespeare":

Jedenże tylko sposób człowiekowi
Jest urodzić się, a zginąć tak wiele
Dróg jest, że tego niepodobno zgadnąć.

There is only one way for a person
to be born, but so many roads lead
to death, that you can never even guess.

Pitch perfect: A couple of lines from Faiz

A friend of mine recently reacquainted me with a couplet by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84):

nahiin nigah mein manzil to justajuu hii sahii
nahiin visaal muyassar to aarzuu hii sahii


Literally:
If I can't get a glance [of my beloved] then at least I have the search itself,
If union [with my beloved] is impossible then at least I have desire itself.

To have and have not

For months now, American politics has had the inertia of a banana republic's government with endless machinations that led to no real policy. So today healthcare has been voted on for what feels like the forty-seventh time, and finally, for better or for worse, our government has managed to accomplish something sweeping. I had a taste of two different political worlds today: one in first class on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago and the second in a Chicago cab with a chatty driver.

The Tragical History of Sullivan Hyder

Three years ago in the British Library, I came across a remarkable set of letters scattered across the East India Company records having to do with the Company's training policies. The dozen or so letters that piqued my interest deal with Sullivan Hyder, a mixed-race boy born in England in 1811 who became a printer's apprentice and eventually had to leave England because there was no prospect of his finding work there.

I wanted to write an academic article about the status of Indian language teachers in the early nineteenth-century using the documents concerning his family, but unfortunately Professor Michael Fisher beat me to it in his Counterflows to Colonialism. Since Professor Fisher had followed the documentary evidence as far as it would go, I put the story of Sullivan Hyder away. Recently though, as I started planning a historical novel that I am nowhere near ready to write, it occurred to me that Sullivan could be a faithful friend to me if he were the main character in a short story. With Sullivan's help, I can find the right voice for my novel before I start it.