Elite Education

Once I went to a debate at the Oxford Union on the proposition that “the future is blue”—by which they meant Tory. This was the height of the Blair years, probably 2002 or 2003, and I remember looking around and wondering how death could have undone so many. It’s hard to describe the horror of the Union to someone who hasn’t seen it. It’s a private club that you have to pay to join, but most people I knew didn’t want to miss out: this was the place where future politicians from across the world, people like Benazir Bhutto and Ted Heath, had first locked horns in debate. By the time I got there, the Union was dominated by a strange species that you might call politicians without purpose. Strutting around in black tie and ball gowns, they advertised themselves for election to offices within the Union. Since these offices carried no real power beyond the right to organize parties and hobnob with famous speakers, they served mostly as a record of one’s capacity to get elected independently of a meaningful platform, but to say that they were desperately sought would be an understatement: every election seemed to end with a tribunal for malpractice, often covered in the national press. (It might not surprise you to learn that Boris Johnson cut his political teeth in this environment, aided and abetted by Michael Gove and Frank Luntz.) The day of that debate, filled with disgust, I fantasized about standing up and asking the house to open its eyes. If the future was Tory, and these egomaniacs were the future of the Tories, then surely we were all damned. How could the future not be red?

How wrong I was. Not only has Britain been blue since 2010, but my generation of Union hacks didn’t even go into politics. In hindsight this was Thatcherism working itself out over the generations. As Boris Johnson has discovered, a life in politics involves financial sacrifice; it remains a form of public service, no matter how egoistic you are. The smart play for the modern Union president is to skip all of that and instead leverage your arts of persuasion, not to mention your contacts, in the service of founding your own start-up or venture-capital firm. Another thing I now realize, though, is that feeling alienated by a social world is just another way of belonging to it. What could be more Oxford than the self-righteous anger of my disappointed idealism? What could be more Oxford, moreover, than the career paths of my own college friends, into law, consultancy, journalism, think tanks, academia? There were different types of people at Oxford, no doubt, but what they had in common was that they were all part of a nascent elite. Elite colleges produce elites. Sociologically speaking, that is their function.

This makes it hard to imagine how a college like Swarthmore could ever be a powerful vehicle for social justice. A study conducted in 2013 found that 41 percent of its students came from families sitting in the top 5 percent of the U.S. income distribution, and despite recent efforts to broaden access it remains the case that, financially speaking, the student population is nowhere near representative of American society.1 Even if that were to change, however, a deeper point would remain, namely that Swarthmore educates around 1,600 students per year at a cost of something like $110,000 per student. (I find it hard to believe it could be so expensive, but the figures are what they are and apparently the explanation is just that the facilities and support services are first-class, the faculty are well paid and the student-faculty ratio is extremely low.2) By comparison, the annual per-student spending of Southern Connecticut State University is about $13,000. Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

This makes faculty radicalism at elite colleges largely phantasmagoric. Professors campaigning for something like divestment from fossil fuels typically take themselves to be fighting the man in the form of an inscrutable board of managers—or should that be board of donors?—whom they picture as bourgeois reactionaries. But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window-dressing. (They may not be completely pointless, but then nor are Nike’s anti-racism messages.) Something similar goes for the common demand—made once again during the student strike at Swarthmore last fall—that colleges respond to injustices visited upon a given population within American society by “lifting up” those who belong to that group on campus, for example by creating special facilities or scholarships accessible only to them or by generating academic offerings more responsive to their supposed interests. Such initiatives can be worthwhile for making those students from underrepresented backgrounds feel more welcome on campus, but the notion that they will automatically make the wider world any more just fails to take into account the divide that inevitably opens up between those students and the communities they’ve left behind in order to receive the massive privilege of a Swarthmore education.

In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think. One of the dogmas of contemporary academia is that history gets made from below and that any attempt to argue otherwise robs ordinary people of their agency. But it is true by definition, or near enough, that elites have more power than non-elites. It follows that what elites think and do should be of concern to everybody, and hence that a society should care a great deal about the political education its elites receive.