Elite paradoxes

 I just don't have the blogging bug these days, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I very much appreciate this article about elite education by Jonny Thakkar at Swarthmore. Some choice quotes:

...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.) 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 members are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window dressing.

Everyone in academia agrees that our paramount task is to dismantle power structures. To that end, we will select administrators committed to dismantling power structures, and promote the career advancement of those committed to ending inequality.

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 academe 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 nonelites. 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.

Much like the Keynes quote about "practical men" being slaves of dead economists and philosophers.

Of course, the committed anti-elitists will never leave their elite schools.  Thakkar offers some good reasons why:

In a funny way, though, I actually agree that conservatism is better represented on campus than is often assumed. Those who argued that the Chamberlain Project was antithetical to the college’s history of peace activism, for example, were clearly offering a conservative reason in the form of an appeal to tradition. And lately I’ve been wondering whether the decision to teach at an elite college doesn’t necessarily commit you to respecting a conservative consideration of a different kind, one emphasized by thinkers as disparate as Michael Oakeshott and G. A. Cohen, namely the thought that we have reason to cherish the value that already exists in the world even if the things that bear that value would not exist in a better world.

...

One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware. Each needs to recognize that they are the recipient of a golden ticket, not so they can engage in pointless rituals of self-denunciation but so they can reckon with the question of which responsibilities follow from the privilege that has been unfairly bestowed upon them. What is needed, as conservatives such as Helen Andrews and Ross Douthat have rightly argued, is something like the old ethos of noblesse oblige, according to which a golden ticket comes with the unavoidable obligation to make what Christopher Lasch called “a direct and personal contribution to the public good.” The difficulty is knowing how to teach with this in mind, given that career decisions are generally considered private.

However, he makes one assertion which is common but I have lately heard is contested:

But America will not be just any time soon; even its public-education system devotes vastly greater resources to well-off children than to those from poorer backgrounds.

I have no doubt that spending disparities exist, but I have heard knowledge people contest the magnitude of the alleged disparities. I suspect, however, that affluent districts actually operate with less overhead and more spending on in-the-classroom things, like science equipment and smaller classes and sports facilities and whatnot, i.e. stuff that kids actually see and experience directly. Poorer districts probably have more bureaucracies overseeing the efforts to allegedly help poor kids. Because poor kids allegedly need case managers and assessments and whatnot, instead of, you know, science equipment and small classes and sports facilities and all that.