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

In Chapter 6 Deresiewicz gives some advice to readers about how to follow their path and choose a life specifically tailored to them. The first half of the chapter addresses how to find direction. Deresiewicz argues it should be a vocation—something one feels compelled to do. Here, he uses George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch as an example. The story of the protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, is exactly what he is talking about: someone not doing what society expects but instead finding her own way. It’s risky and, in fact, turns out to be a mistake but when she gets a second chance, she takes yet another risk rather than play it safe. This time she finds happiness.

One needs moral courage in order to do this, not at least because of the resistance of friends and family. People, Deresiewicz writes, feel threatened when someone follows their inner compass rather than the well-trod paths society places before them. He argues for bringing back the older notion of ideals like “[j]ustice, beauty, goodness, truth—the old moral lodestars” (101). These give a person much courage in the face of resistance and obstacles. He addresses the criticism that it is self-indulgent to follow one’s own path, dismissing it with keen examples like, “It’s considered glamorous now to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker” (96).

Among the personal examples the author shares are his own. He states that he came from a family of scientists, and he followed suit, double majoring in psychology and biology as an undergraduate. By the time he realized he should have been an English major, it was too late to change. After flirting with law school, he studied journalism in graduate school. It was closer to his heart, but journalism was not his true passion. Upon graduating, he worked for a nonprofit—unhappy but under the impression that he had used up all his options. Then, while talking with a friend one day, it suddenly hit him that he needed to return to graduate school for English. It wasn’t easy, but his passion enabled him to overcome obstacles and successfully complete a doctorate.

Deresiewicz next addresses the risk involved in all of this. The fear of failure is so strong in students today that it nearly paralyzes them. Failure seems like the end, but it’s really a beginning. He writes that failure is instructive, and many famous people have proudly recounted their failures as positive steps in their ultimate success. Still, he emphasizes that risk means there’s a chance that things won’t have a happy, Hollywood-like ending. People fear being unsuccessful or losing their status, and following this path means that is a real possibility. The work one chooses must be an end, rather than any benefits that may accrue from it.

Deresiewicz also discusses the role of money, writing that no one should ignore the realities of life—like making a living—while working toward their passion. Everyone’s financial situation is different, and people must figure out for themselves what works and what doesn’t. Finally, Deresiewicz argues that young people need some separation from their parents. In today’s environment, this relationship is often too smothering, and students need to forge independence. Taking time off from studies and life can help. Whether it’s before, during, or after college, time to reflect at a distance from the fray is necessary to creating one’s authentic life.

The final chapter in Part 2 focuses on leadership and what that means. Deresiewicz starts by stating how leadership is envisioned and referred to today by elite colleges is an empty cliché, “essentially devoid of content” (132). To explain this, he uses a passage from Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness describing a manager of the nameless company that had employed the renegade Colonel Kurtz. The description employs all middle-of-the-road vanilla terms. This, Deresiewicz claims, is leadership today: people who don’t make waves and who have no great skill other than “the ability to keep the routine going” (134).

This is the kind of contemporary leader elite colleges foster. In the past, leadership meant something; the difference was an emphasis on serving the greater good, not oneself. It involved courage and integrity, but also humility and responsibility. Instead of leaders, colleges should train citizens—people who can view society with a skeptical eye. Today’s system raises students in an atmosphere valuing harmony and continuous affirmation, which runs counter to a required quality of leaders—the willingness to be unpopular, to speak truth to power, and even to offend. In short, they need to ask questions, even about the groups with which they identify.

Deresiewicz ends the chapter by addressing criticism he often gets about these ideas. He concedes that Millennials seem to be more engaged than students of the 1980s and 1990s but sees their ideas of “making a difference” as falling short and often too peripheral (96). They work within the system, but he posits that the system itself might need changing. Here the first purpose of college plays a role: teaching students to think. Deresiewicz laments that they aren’t more skeptical, noting that all movements require a vanguard of sorts—people like Middlemarch’s Dorothea and even George Eliot herself, who helped foster change by being unafraid to go against the flow.