Academe takes itself and its hierarchies very seriously, which is why where you go to school matters so much to the trajectory of an academic career (see
Reason 3). The self-regard of institutions and the self-regard of those associated with them tend to go hand-in-hand. In
an uncomfortably honest essay in the
American Scholar, former Yale professor William Deresiewicz offers some indication of just how rigid the hierarchy is: “My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.” And yet smugness is a problem throughout academe, even outside of the elite universities. In particular, there is a tendency among those pursuing or holding an advanced degree to think of themselves as being a cut above. What Deresiewicz says of “an elite education” also applies to graduate school: it “inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”
As Richard Vedder’s discouraging statistics demonstrate, the extreme seriousness with which academe takes itself does not seem to correspond with the actual benefits students acquire from either an
undergraduate or
graduate education. In fact, the terrible job prospects facing graduate students (see Reasons
8 and
55) may actually worsen the problem of smugness by leaving scholars and aspiring scholars with little to cling to beyond their academic credentials (see
Reason 25). If you find yourself in a non-elite graduate program and inclined to look down upon the “less educated,” you should be aware of the low regard in which your Ivy-League competitors hold you. Any time spent in academe will involve unpleasant encounters with smugness, which can take subtle and grating forms. Sometimes it is anything but subtle, as in this
particularly heinous example recently recorded on a commuter train.
