A Commencement Message to Very Excellent Sheep.
Common Sense |William Deresiewicz
An excellent piece by former Yale University professor and author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite— ”Here is my commencement message… Beware of prepackaged rebellions; that protest march that you’re about to join may be a herd. Your parents aren’t your friends; be skeptical of any authority that claims to have your interests at heart. Your friends may turn out to be your enemies; as one of mine once said, the worst thing you can do to friends is not be the person they want you to be. Self-authoring is hard. If it isn’t uncomfortable, it isn’t independence. Childhood is over. Dare to grow up.”
As graduation ceremonies cap the accomplishments of students nationwide, former Yale professor Deresiewicz reflects on the type of college student he began to encounter years ago: “These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working. But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.”
With “wokeness,” he wondered if things were changing; instead, he realized, no, it was a continuum. “I recognized the deeper continuities at work. Excellent sheephood, like wokeness, is a species of conformity.”
“But wokeness also serves a deeper psychic purpose,” he explains. “Excellent sheephood is inherently competitive. Its purpose is to vault you into the ranks of society’s winners, to make sure that you end up with more stuff—more wealth, status, power, access, comfort, freedom—than most other people.”
Instead of being rebels, Deresiewicz describes a generation of pleasers and conformists. Today’s “protests,” he explains, “have been anything but countercultural. Students have merely been expressing more extreme versions of the views their elders share. In fact, of the views that their elders have taught them… In that sense, the protesters have only been demonstrating what apt pupils they are…[their protests are] appeals to authority, not defiance of it.”
“Today’s elite college students still regard themselves as children, and are still treated as such,” he explains, exploring the difference between today and the 1960s generation.
Deresiewicz ends with challenge, and, therefore, some optimism—his commencement message to the Class of 2022 is one we hope that every high school, college and graduate school student reads and considers.
Related:
Harvard Students are Covid Sheep (Julie Hartman, WSJ, 2/22/22)
I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead (Emma Camp, NYT, 3/7/22); Why My NYT Article Inspired So Much Fury (Emma Camp, Persuasion, 4/13/22)
Joe Lonsdale on the Problem with Higher Education (All-In Podcast, 6/2/22)
