I’m not sure what I’ve done to cause Robert Stacy McCain to call me a “wretched leftist scumbag,” and I don’t share his disdain for “elite institutions of higher education.” I think there are some problems with our elite universities, but I mainly hold them in high regard. I have tremendous respect for both their student bodies and their faculties. Mr. McCain nonetheless has some good points, some of which I agree with completely and others only partially. I agree, for example, that it’s hard to be “the poorest person at Yale” and that this isn’t something you necessarily should want for your child. I agree that trying to get your kids into the Ivies can easily become a form of parental abuse. I partially agree that Ivy culture can tend towards elitist and snobbish attitudes that you shouldn’t encourage in your children.
But the thing is, McCain is actually opposed to the values these institutions try to instill. This is why he brings up Marxism and Women’s Studies majors. He’s not objecting to the elitism so much…
I have no problem with rich people sending their overprivileged kids to elite schools. My problem is with middle-class parents who think they’re doing their kids a favor by spending money they can’t afford to send their kids to schools that teach them to emulate the fashionable attitudes of the decadent rich.
…as he’s objecting to the do-gooder liberal education these kids are getting. Rich kids who care about social justice or climate change are decadent.
Mr. McCain argues that his objections go beyond “vulgar populism,” but I don’t think they really do. He looks down on these kids and the education they are receiving both because he senses that they think they are better than him and because he thinks they are being taught liberal values.
McCain’s populism comes from his hostility to snobbish elites, but his vulgarity comes from his hostility to liberal values, including the stuff we like to call “facts.”
Now, we can have a discussion about noblesse oblige, but the fundamental thing here is that McCain really doesn’t have a problem with the noblesse, it’s just that he thinks there should be no oblige.
Or maybe the noblesse are annoyingly arrogant, but taxing them is Marxist, so Ivy League professors should be put up against the wall.
She worked her way through school as a Pizza Hut waitress
When? Like 30 years ago?
Also, I have a minor in women’s studies (coupled with my engineering major) and I got it from a state college. What does that have anything to do with Yale et al?
RSM is a white supremacist who associates with The League of the South. Of course he’s opposed to liberal values.
The women’s studies crack is just shorthand for giving a shit about anyone other than yourself. This is basically what the Ivies are all about. They want to take privileged young adults and instill in them the belief that they have an obligation to lead and to care for those who are less fortunate. But McCain thinks this is just decadence.
Further, because it’s not a ‘bankable major’, it’s shorthand for caring about things that cannot be bought or sold, and for acknowledging a life beyond naked acquisitiveness.
Which is heresy.
Anything that is, can be bought or sold.
Anything that cannot be bought or sold, is not.
Getting and gaining is man’s purpose on this earth.
Alternative viewpoints are not to be tolerated.
And feminists. Enough said. (I had the same reading that you did, Davis)
It distresses me when even the president takes shots at ‘art history majors’…
yes, I was surprised and disappointed by that. and history of art – to which Boo responded
It distresses me when even the honorable Davis X Machina can repeat a ridiculous manufactured controversy.
Why an apology if there was no offense?
That McCain’s screed and underlying anti-intellectualism is an instance of “people voting against their own interests” – writing off good academic institutions and the education they can provide is the proverbial cutting off one’s nose etc.
Not quite – it’s a “if I can’t have it I resent anyone who does” kind of attitude. In a dog-eat-dog world, the greatest threat is a neighbour who has a slightly bigger dog.
This McCain guy is an ass but many of his points are good. The ivy league is a crock. I didn’t go to an ivy. I attended Johns Hopkins. Stupidest decision of my life. Got to walk on marble floors and look out through stained glass windows but the place was bland beyond bland and insular beyond insular. There was nothing that warranted the tuition I paid and that was a fraction of what they’re charging today.
All the B.S. about making connections is nonsense. Sure, there are rich kids from rich families. Their friends will be other rich kids from rich families. I encouraged both my children not to worry about elite colleges. I told them to do reasonably well in high school (“A”s and “B”s), study hard for the SAT but don’t go insane over it, and then go to a state school.
My daughter went to the University of Arizona and then on to NYU law. She also got into Columbia (actually 6 of the top 10) but found the kids there too weird. My son went to the University of Washington and then Western Washington University. He dropped out to get a job as a computer engineer. Without a degree, his first job was with Amazon and paid $45 an hour.
Most important, each of them is following his/her heart. Princeton is an unbelievably surreal place. The campus is like a walk back in time to the middle ages. If one could get in without ruining one’s life or bankrupting oneself or one’s family, great. But to jump through the many hoops required would be idiotic (let alone paying the insane tuition). So, in essence, I agree with most of McCain’s points.
I went to four schools.
In the 1960s, I started in physics at Clemson and ran afoul of my poor high school math preparation and the inflexibility of the faculty to scheduling conflicts in their honors courses–honors calculus and honors physics scheduled at the same hour. The civil rights movement also began changing my views to the point that I wanted to get out of South Carolina for a while. And the jock racism character of a nearly all-male (9 women students my sophomore year) formerly military (mandatory 2-year ROTC without grants-in-aid) college was in conflict with my growing uneasiness about the Vietnam War.
So I transferred to an international relations curriculum, which meant at the time transferring to some elite school or another. I wound up at Johns Hopkins, starting as a junior, and I finished on time despite my change in majors.
Like Parallax, I found the culture insular. And I made efforts to work the networks, which provided me with some insights into the reality of international relations. A dining hall buddy was the son of a former Pakistani ambassador to the UN; from him, I learned the limits of accuracy of UN statistics on nations. (The nations provide the statistics after all.) I had the experience of riding to the Baltimore docks with the son of the Liberian ambassador to the US and seeing the new black Mercedes for the embassy of this developing country; one must put on appearances to be taken seriously. And learned a lot about Liberian politics and then-President William Tubman. From a Greek engineering student, I learned about censorship during the Papadopolous dictatorship. From my courses, I learned the contents of the foreign service examination. And next to nothing about diplomacy, treaty-making, or Vietnam. As of 1968, there was no course in the curriculum covering the history of Vietnam or the Vietnam war. And the department in retrospect seemed less about education and more about screening candidates for the intelligence community.
The one “elite institution” experience that was valuable was an impromptu conversation with the last of the walk-around college presidents, Milton Eisenhower, and a bunch of students about foreign policy in general.
I have zero network with folks from Hopkins; it was that insular.
I spent a year in graduate school at Northwestern during the Kent State year. Vietnam had overwhelmed education. If I had pursued an academic career, I likely would have kept closer to this network.
The education that provided the credentials that made me employable (the 1970s were replete with recessions) was from a North Carolina community college that charged at the time $51 a quarter plus the cost of books (in the 1980s around $200 a quarter). I highly recommend this route for the “core curriculum” requirements for more expensive schools. These days your reading in the liberal arts outside of textbooks will be your own choices anyway; no one can completely read everything on an elite college syllabus. And then transfer to wherever.
My daughters chose their own lists of schools. One went to a state 4-year liberal arts campus in fine arts and photography; she the Navy vet. Another went to a very fine Middle West liberal arts college, where she got into a network of intellectually curious people; she’s doing part-time environmental education and full-time mom. The third went to a series of community colleges as she moved around. She finally settled on a health career and without completing college is a hospital operating room technician. They all have remained intellectually curious, which to my mind is the importance of an education.
Elite schools make sense only if one is aiming for an elite-level career and have the social skills or overwhelming intellectual firepower to break into the elite networks.
For me the value of my time at Johns Hopkins was allowing the grandson of a tenant cotton farmer the view of what the elite looks like and how it operates. And that was at a time when the elites in the US were at the top of their game to all appearances.
Today, my advice for employability is to become a plumber who actually knows how to install and fix plumbing and build an independent practice in which you charge what the chains charge but without the overhead. Those jobs are not yet exportable even though they are subject to competition from immigrant entrepreneurs.
So cool that you were at Hopkins at a time when one could sit down with the president one-on-one. Eisenhower was brother of the POTUS too, so doubly cool from a name-dropping standpoint. My understanding is that in those days, if the president’s house porch light was on, a student could ring the bell and would be invited in.
When I attended, our ass wipe president was Stephen Muller. Steve didn’t reside in the president’s house on campus. He hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. Students would see him twice. Once on the day you arrived and second on the day you graduated, when he’d shake paws and hand over your piece of paper.
My faculty adviser wasn’t present on the day I arrived. When I made a sarcastic comment about it being nice to see the commitment to undergrad education, his grad student began screaming at me, “He has better things to do than hold hands with whiny undergrads like you.”
While Harvard and Princeton might do a better job than Hopkins at polishing the undergrad penny, they’re equally full of shit. Such school are about grad programs, research, military contracts and enhancing the status of the institution, full stop.
Wear the title with pride. Consider the source.
…credibility with his readership.
From the Wikipedia:
Apparently, he’s from the “liberal fascism” grift part of the conservative movement. His next move was to the Washington Times.
It’s not you, BooMan. He can’t quote any liberal or progressive without the gratuitous swipe just to let his readers know he’s not getting soft on Communism.
Robert Stacy McCain is a racist, which is a shameful thing to be. He’s also a pustulent syphillitic peehole.
Scumbag maybe, wretched not so much. 😉
Being called a “wretched leftist scumbag” by a racist fuck like McCain is a badge of honor.
You say “scumbag” like its an insult or something.
As someone who spent 6 years in the development department of the Houston Symphony, scumbag is a step up.
It is apparent that Mr. McCain feels threatened by any and all that have worked hard to gain as much knowledge as they can. Maybe it is because he himself does not have the drive to better himself, or he just prefers ignorance.
At the bottom of his update, McCain writes:
“If my well-adjusted kids get rich, I hope they’ll send my grandchildren to the best university in the world.
Roll, Tide!”
He should also hope his grandchildren can all throw a perfect spiral 60 yards. Otherwise, his preferred university won’t lend much shine to the career prospects of the little McCains.
Well getting slammed by a low rent Eric son of Eric imitator is a sort of back-handed compliment, except to those who actually fall for their particular style of grift.