Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  But none of this is likely to quiet all those middle- and upper-middle-class parents who are so agitatedly concerned about their children’s education, and from the earliest age. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, getting one’s kids into one of the better private schools begins at preschool. The better private grade and high schools, in the major American cities, are all usually oversubscribed. A lot—from a parent’s point of view, it must sometimes seem everything—is riding on these little acceptances. The latest figure on the cost of such private grade schools in Manhattan was $17,000 a year.

  One sees the fight to gain entrance into what the world reckons the best schools in an upper-middle-class public institution such as New Trier High School on Chicago’s suburban North Shore. Students at New Trier are tracked—that is, placed according to their presumed potential—upon entry as freshmen. They themselves, cheered on, not to say aimed, by their parents, do all they can to achieve success during their four years at the school. And success is measured clearly enough by the schools to which they are accepted. Among the highly motivated at New Trier, the unwritten program is known as Preparation H, standing not for the hemorrhoid relief salve but preparation for acceptance at Harvard. All efforts are bent toward the goal of getting into the superior college: extracurricular activities, summer jobs, charitable works, ambitious reading. One question is behind everything a bright kid at New Trier does: How will this look on my application to Duke (Brown, Princeton, Williams)? Students who put themselves through this torture no doubt emerge more disciplined young men and women, yet it does seem a sad way to surrender one’s adolescence.

  I have seen intensity of this kind in my own family. Without much encouragement from me, my eldest son, at Evanston Township High School, fell in among a group of fast-track academic kids who revved themselves up into a high lather of expectation. I was pleased by my son’s ability to master academic skills: he taught himself to write, got nothing but A’s in Latin, became editor of the high school paper. All the while I said not a word about wanting him to go to any particular university. Senior year he applied to Harvard, Virginia, Stanford, Michigan, and Chicago (the last a backup school, since he wanted to leave the city of Chicago). When his letters came in from the various offices of admission, he was rejected by Harvard, put on a waiting list at Virginia, and accepted by Michigan and Chicago. “You know, Dad,” this then earnest and always good son said to me, “if I have to go to the University of Michigan, I guess my life is effectively over.” “Do you truly feel that way?” I asked. “I do,” he replied without hesitation. “If you do,” I said, “then I think I shall not pay for Michigan, for if your life is effectively over, why waste the money on tuition?” The next week’s mail brought a letter of acceptance from Stanford, which I suppose makes it a story with a happy ending. But the larger meaning of the story is the pressure that children put on themselves.

  I do not know if my son received a good education at Stanford. As someone partially in the business of higher education, I have my doubts: he was able to pass through the place without any foreign language courses; he took no ancient history or philosophy. He did meet some bright kids; he made some good friends; he came out much more worldly than he had gone in. He had a good time. He was elected one of the school’s student-body presidents. Stanford, which has prestige in the state of California, helped him land a job with a large investment firm. It worked; it paid off. Stanford has to have been considered a good deal, worth every dime.

  “Go with the snobbery,” I tell the occasional student who asks me where he or she ought to go to graduate school. “Why go to the Harvard [Law School]?” asks a member of the class of 2001 in a letter in response to an iconoclastic article on that school in Esquire. “It’s the name, stupid!” The world, that great doofus, respects certain schools, even if you, after the experience of having gone there, if you are a person of any critical acumen, will probably learn not to. Still, most people are not going to know how thin it all is. Snobbery, ignorant snobbery, cannot but work to your advantage.

  I have always felt fortunate to have gone to the University of Chicago because, first, it allows me to know with a certainty that I didn’t miss out on anything; and, second, it suggests to people that I am, somehow or other, brilliant for having gone there. I also happen to think it was a better choice for me than Harvard-Yale-Princeton—or, as I think of them in shorthand, Yarvton. At Yarvton I would have been exposed to social snobbery of a kind I might not then have quite grasped, not to speak of possible anti-Semitism, which was freer and easier on the draw at those schools in the middle 1950s. The intellectual snobbery of Chicago was at least based on something real—knowledge, brilliance, erudition—and my being Jewish cost me no discomfort.

  The notion of “hot” colleges had not yet come into being when I was of college age. A hot college is one that suddenly becomes gready desired by the young. In the late 1970s Brown became such a college; in the 1980s Duke became another; and both have remained, in this snobbish sense, hot. Brown seems a case of snobbery combined with a curriculum of such flexibility as almost not to exist. At Brown students needn’t take any mathematics or foreign languages; they can construct a flashy major of their own devising in what is the intellectual equivalent of a salad bar; grades are amorphous, with failure scarcely a possibility. Everything, in short, is arranged around the notion of the student as customer or consumer. To this may be added what might be called a Studio 54 (after the once fashionably excluding dance club) student body, with lots of children of celebrities on campus. John F. Kennedy, Jr., went to Brown; so too did President Carter’s daughter Amy. Diana Ross, Jane Fonda, Jordan’s King Hussein, Calvin Klein, Ringo Starr, Ralph Lauren, Itzhak Perlman, Louis Malle, Giovanni Agnelli, and Marlon Brando sent children to Brown. Hey, yo, go for it!

  Then there is New York University, good always new NYU, to which one’s children go for theatrical, film, and other less than sobering studies. Holding classes in a number of midrise buildings in and around Washington Square, it has been able to attract a glittering faculty because of its location in Manhattan. NYU has an oddly ambiguous status. It’s all right for one’s kids to go there, though it’s understood that it is nowhere near so presentable as Yarvton. NYU has somehow brilliantly positioned itself outside the mainstream in American high education, and yet it remains cozily in the snobbery rivulet by offering itself as something resembling an advance-guard institution. “Versace University,” after the expensive and deliberately outré designer, I have heard it called, which, for accuracy, isn’t too far off.

  None of this is to say that there aren’t superior teachers in all these various universities—I think of the historian of early America Gordon S. Wood at Brown and the literary critic and scholar Denis Donoghue at NYU, to name two teachers at the schools I have just mocked—but such teachers are isolated, seem almost accidental figures. Outside science and mathematics, good departments and solid liberal arts programs are rare to the point of being nonexistent. One hears that Carleton College still offers a strong education, or that Kenyon College, which has a bookstore that stays open twenty-four hours, is a serious place, but who really knows? Best, I think, to judge all contemporary American universities, with the exception of Cal Tech and MIT, as shoddy until proven good.

  I have a friend, a political philosopher, who spent a year as a visiting professor at Harvard. “What was it like teaching there?” I asked him. “The students prefer you to be amusing and, if possible, brilliant, rather like a good movie,” he said. “But both they and I know that main event in their lives has already taken place—that is, they were accepted at Harvard.”

  The journalist Murray Kempton long ago said that intellectual contentment in America consists of not giving a damn about Harvard. I would extend it to Yarvton generally and toss in the so-called hot colleges. But most university teachers never come close to achieving contentment on this point. For the snobbery at universities is not restricted to students and their pare
nts and an outside world that doesn’t know any better. I know this from teaching at Northwestern University, a school, as I think of it, at the crossroads of snobbery.

  In the perfectly unpersuasive U.S. News & World Report surveys on higher education, Northwestern usually comes in fifteenth or sixteenth—close, you might say, but no cigar. A preponderance of its faculty has at one time or another studied at Yarvton or, on the West Coast, at Berkford (Berkeley-Stanford). I have always thought that, with the appropriate stationery from these schools, I could write letters offering Northwestern’s teachers jobs and clear the joint of faculty in under a week’s time. Apotheosis for the vast majority of Northwestern’s nonscientific faculty would come with a beseeching letter offering a job at Yarvton. At Nortwestern there was a teacher locally reverenced because, mirabile dictu, he actually turned down an offer from Harvard. Snobbery of the kind that goes on in universities allows for no loyalties, to either colleagues or institutions. You take the better offer and—not exactly run—prance.

  I once had a student tell me that he was the only one among his acquaintances who was happy to be at Northwestern. Everyone else he knew had hoped for Yarvton or Brown or Duke, with Northwestern as the fallback school. Not a great high school student, he felt himself lucky to have been admitted and seemed to have made the most of it. But the larger point is that it is impossible to be unaware of the intricate hierarchy of colleges and universities and the snobbish ranking that results from this hierarchy. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who sees society as an organized competition in which status is the main prize, has always considered universities as decisive in this competition.

  Tell me that you went to the University of California at Santa Barbara, and while envying you the lovely scenery upon which you were permitted to gaze for four years, I also note that you apparently weren’t good enough to get into the University of California at Berkeley. Pity. Tell me you went to Michigan State, I think much the same about your not being able to cut it at Michigan in Ann Arbor. Of course, if you’re at Michigan, why weren’t you good enough for dear old Yarvton? More’s the pity. It’s a mug’s game, really.

  Snobbery often resides most comfortably where substance is absent, and for a long while now snobbery has deeply infected higher education, among faculty and students and parents alike. In its way the university scene may be the place where snobbery is more pervasive than anywhere else. One of the lessons of a fundamentally sound undergraduate education, one might have thought, would be to tell the difference between appearance and reality. In American higher education, it doesn’t quite work that way. As in snobbery, so in education: appearance is reality. Like the man said, “It’s the name, stupid.”

  14

  Unclubbable

  IF I AM CORRECT about the degraded quality of American colleges and universities, they should probably, with a few exceptions, be considered as clubs of a sort, the more highly regarded among them being expensive, difficult to join, and exclusive (which is also of course to say, excluding), as the best clubs always have been. Like clubs, too, some are better than others: Harvard is a better club than the University of Minnesota, Princeton than Purdue, Stanford than Maryland.

  Clubs are as much about keeping people out as joining them together, which is why they have always had a central place in the history of snobbery. Tocqueville early caught the force and significance of what he called voluntary associations in America, that vast variety of groups from citizen-run fire departments to professional organizations, but that youthful genius failed to stress that many of these, in their exclusionary function, also entailed compulsory disassociation.

  In the old days of service clubs—when every town of ten thousand or more had a Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, Elks, Moose, and the rest—there was an unspoken hierarchy, with one of these clubs having a higher standing than the others. College fraternities and sororities operated on the same principle—the principle, that is, of attempting to establish superiority over others in the field. Kappa Kappa Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta, Pi Beta Phi—and it didn’t take a young woman at any college in America long to know which was the best, the most desirable sorority, though these would vary somewhat from campus to campus.

  One joins a club for fellowship, but one of its perks is, inevitably, the quiet pleasure of knowing—or at least hoping—that not only can’t everyone join, but one’s own club is just a touch better than others of its kind. Even with the best intentions and histories of good works behind them, clubs are snobbery organized. Create a concept and reality leaves the room; create a club and pretensions to democracy disappear. It was ever thus; it can never be otherwise.

  I grew up in clubbish surroundings, and superficial though I know them to be, I have never quite got over them. Not always but often enough when I encounter a public figure, I measure him by my old high school standards. When I see Senator Joseph Lieberman on television, for example, I say he looks to me no better than a Gargoyle, a member of a club of reasonably high-achieving Jewish boys who weren’t good athletes, hadn’t much style, were untouched by strong humor or brilliance. And please understand, I don’t dislike Joseph Lieberman. This may be a stronger judgment on me than on him, but there it is, and I seem to be stuck with it.

  The most famous remark about clubs is Groucho Marx’s: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Amusing as it is, containing a grain of insight as it does—how good, after all, can any club be that would accept so obvious a schlepper as deep down I know myself to be?—its truth quotient isn’t finally all that high. However low our opinion of ourselves, most of us nonetheless would be pleased to have been found acceptable in certain quarters. Although I don’t go to Paris, or play golf, or travel much to England, still, if money weren’t a concern, I would accept membership if offered in the aristocratic Jockey Club in Paris, the tony Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, the Atheneum on Pall Mall. “F’y suis, j’y suis,” gleefully wrote the young Henry James to his family when accepted as a member of the Reform Club in London. I am here, I have arrived, I am established, he was saying. And being there, having a sense of arrival, of establishment, is of course the principal lure of clubs.

  I belong to only one club, the Tavern Club in Chicago, a dining club with a fine view of the city. A generous reader of mine arranged to have me accepted as an honorary member. (I was asked to undergo an interview with two older members, perhaps to show that I wore no ponytail and ate with a knife and fork.) Honorary membership means not having to pay monthly dues, which is pleasing. (I do pay for my and my guests’ food and drink.) The Tavern Club was founded, in the 1920s, by a few Chicago drama critics and architects, though its membership today is made up more and more of lawyers and various corporation characters. I go there for convenience, not for prestige. Near its entrance is a photograph of Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright, former members. “Note that photograph,” I sometimes say to people I take to the Tavern Club. “Just goes to show the joint wasn’t very distinguished in the past, either.” I hope they realize I’m not kidding^. I do not use this club very often—perhaps five or six times a year—and suspect that if I had to pay the monthly dues of $150,1 should probably drop out.

  A friend some while ago offered to put me up for an out-of-town membership in the Century Club of New York. I demurred. I take pleasure in the look and feel of the Century Club, with its grand Stanford White building on Forty-third Street, off Fifth Avenue. I’ve been taken to it many times by friends, and an editorial board on which I sat for many years had its biannual meetings and dinners there. Two of the most pleasant intellectual meetings I have known—with the novelist Ralph Ellison and with the journalist Joseph Mitchell—took place there and make it the setting of delightful memories for me.

  A swell place, the Century Club, but I get to New York too seldom to make the fees for an out-of-town membership—$1,000 for entrance, $895 annually—worth it. The club has no sleeping rooms, so my membership would wind up costing me roughly $450 p
er meal. (The nice thing about this kind of math is that it allows me to know with some precision how much the kind of prestige of belonging to particular clubs is worth to me, which usually turns out to be not very much.) There is the additional problem that, though once mildly pleased to encounter famous people from the arts, publishing, journalism, and government among its members, I now find I’d rather not see most of them. (“Joe, you know Edward Albee, don’t you?” Groan.) The personal moral of the story is not the Grouchoesque one that I wouldn’t care to join any club that will accept me as a member, but instead that when it becomes possible for me to join such clubs, my interest seems long since to have departed.

  My first memory of clubs is of a certain plushness. Neither golfers nor athletic in any way, my parents had no interest in city or country clubs, and their joining one was never a real possibility. The first club I was taken to was a country club north of Chicago called (with no sensitivity to cliché whatsoever) Green Acres. I was sixteen. The father of a friend of mine belonged, a physician who golfed and whose medical specialty I once cited as real estate. It was exclusively Jewish, and its membership was made up of physicians, lawyers, owners of car agencies, borax men, and other nouveau riche- making businesses.

  My memory here is of heavyset men freshly emergent from showers and the shvitz, beclogged, swathed in thick towels, eating blood-red watermelon and playing gin rummy while young Filipinos, a cadre of valets in white shirts and blue pants with a gold stripe along the outer leg, rushed about seeing to the small comforts of these men. In the dining room a buffet served the pinkest beef, the largest prawns, and fruits of Edenic quality. The overwhelming impression was of opulence unrestrained by any foreign (or domestic) notions of elegance, which was, as we used to say in Chicago in those days, fine by me.