Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

This economic downturn began in 2008 and its effects were felt strongly for the next several years—particularly regarding unemployment and home foreclosures. It also influenced students, many who had large student loan debt, who graduated from college and were unable to find work. Its cause can be traced to the bursting of the housing bubble in the United States and the crisis caused by defaults on subprime mortgages—a type of mortgage aggressively marketed to people considered financially risky.

Deresiewicz uses this acronym to refer to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford Universities. They represent the crème de la crème of elite institutions.

Eight elite private universities belong to the Ivy League: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. Technically, it refers to the athletic league to which these schools belong, but the term is used in a general sense to mean the most selective, highly prestigious institutions of higher education in America.

This term can be confusing because the two words, when used individually, have different meanings. Deresiewicz writes that they have nothing to do with liberal in the political sense of left-wing, nor are they composed only of subjects associated with the word “art,” like the visual and performing arts. He defines them at the beginning of Chapter 8: “They are those disciplines in which the pursuit of knowledge is conducted for its own sake” (149). This includes the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences. Deresiewicz argues that a meaningful college education is centered on the liberal arts and that small, traditionally liberal arts colleges may be a smarter choice for many students than the more prestigious Ivies.

MOOC stands for “massive open online course.” MOOCs became popular in the early 2010s when several organizations, such as edX and Coursera, began offering them. They make use of the internet to share courses free of charge, often from top universities, to students around the world. They have been touted as expanding opportunities for students with limited resources and at a geographical disadvantage. Deresiewicz is critical of them for various reasons, writing that they are of little more use than a textbook is by itself.

This was a series of protests, starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, in response to the Great Recession that resulted from the 2008 economic crisis. In part because the large banks and corporations were bailed out (considered “too big to fail”) and none were punished for their role in precipitating the crisis, the protests focused on the power of these organizations and their role in furthering inequality and weakening democracy. Like the Arab Spring, this movement is raised in the chapter that discusses leadership.

A nonprofit organization founded by Wendy Kopp in 1989, Teach for America places recent college graduates as teachers in low-income, underserved communities. It is discussed in the context of leadership. Deresiewicz states that people sometimes offer this program as an example that students do act in selfless ways exhibiting leadership. His response is that this serves as a resume-builder and a condescending form of charity: “You swoop down and rescue them with your awesome wisdom and virtue. You do acknowledge their existence, but in a fashion that maintains your sense of superiority—indeed, that reinforces it” (216).

This term was used in a 2011 book by Amy Chua called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It refers to a mother who uses a strict, demanding form of parenting to propel her children through the elite system and into an elite college (preferably one of the Ivies). Chua is of Chinese heritage, and the term is generally taken to mean someone of Asian background who prefers Asian values and standards to the laxer American ones. Deresiewicz says this kind of parenting “is simply an extreme version of upper-middle-class practice” (46) and denounces it as a cruel “reign of terror” (47).