i know you're on the edge of your seat . . .

fact: adam gopnik is even more self-conscious and eager to both please everyone and not let on that he cares about pleasing anyone in person than he is in print. i hadn't known it could happen, but there it is.

fact: malcolm gladwell does an adorably awkward and fidgety-teenagerish thing with his right foot when he's forced to stand still while speaking. he's also left-handed. i am incredibly happy about both of these things.

fact*: despite the official call, based on a highly unscientific (and uncounted) show of hands and made by the heavily and unabashedly biased mediator, simon schama, who is a professor at columbia, gladwell made a far better argument, in that he more fully and roundly supported his point: ivy league schools make judgments and awards based on criteria other than academic merit, and this is unacceptable for academic institutions of any standing, but particularly for those of such legendary standing as harvard, yale, and princeton. the problem, i think, was that his well-made point didn't fully support his position, which was that the campuses of harvard, yale, and princeton should be levelled and the land sold for condominium development. i'm not without bias myself, as we all know, but i don't agree with that at all. if the aim is to promote social equality within the confines of the grounds, maybe it would be better to turn the space into a kind of public orchard, to be maintained by the pinko zealots effecting the takeover, using the amassed funds in the schools' current accounts. anyone could come in and pick fruit from the trees and then lounge around on the grass thinking brilliant thoughts for free. all of these schools have large bodies of water nearby for their crew teams, so irrigation wouldn't be too much trouble. we could keep some of the older buildings intact and turn them into hostels and mulch sheds. i guess we could grow other things, maybe tubers and legumes, but i do think the plants should be more utilitarian than decorative. but it would have to be something like that, an open-access venture. if you want to do away with the schools because they bar entry to intelligent and motivated but poorly connected individuals from the lower classes, it makes no sense to turn them into high-end housing that those individuals also couldn't get into. of course malcolm was joking about all of that, but still, hon, make a joke that's in keeping with the theme.

gopnik's primary counterargument was the same one i would have made: if you do away with those three schools, three more will move up to take their place as the most recognizable brands in american higher education. people love status, they love being affiliated with things that convey status, they love bearing brand labels that tell onlookers that their lives are better than the average life. applicants to schools like harvard and yale and princeton know that they're buying into a brand. there aren't any illusions about it; most people understand that they can get the same, if not a better, education at another, less well-known institution. but the names of those institutions don't open as many doors. people think something about you when they see that you're wearing a designer label, and they think something about you when they hear that you graduated from yale. but they think it at the level of the brand, not the faculty or curriculum, and you know when you don the label that you are only attempting to project at the level of the brand. schools like harvard, yale, and princeton—and internationally coveted fashion lines like versace and prada—will exist as long as human beings are human beings. we don't always have the time to tell someone we've just met about all the ways in which we are better than him or her; sometimes we need something small that we can flash quickly, like a handbag or an alma mater, in order to get the job done and be on our way.

and gladwell's rebuttal was the same as mine would have been: the desire for such instant and ultimately meaningless recognition is asinine, and we shouldn't allow or encourage or enable universities to accommodate it. we should enact changes that make the name on the tag irrelevant to the assessment of the product, and those changes have to happen at every level. published school rankings should reflect more meaningful measures, such as what becomes of students once they're enrolled and how many of them go on to do things that strengthen society, and people reviewing or applying to colleges should demand more information on how the school serves its active students, instead of how the name of the school serves its graduates. naturally, right? and yet so not the way things tend to be done.

just to be up front, i'll tell you that i applied and was accepted to an ivy league school (not one of the three mentioned above) but decided not to attend it because i was offended by its graduation requirements. specifically, i would have had to pass a swim test in order to receive my degree. this was a common requirement at a number of schools until around 1980, when most places began to realize how goofy and unnecessary it was. the current holdouts include cornell, columbia, notre dame, dartmouth, and swarthmore. i can swim just fine, but it bothered me, and continues to bother me, that whether or not i graduated could hinge on something that was 100 percent nonacademic. i think the requirement's aquatic nature got under my skin, too. there's something about water and the gilded upper crust in my mind—the newport oceanfront mansions, sculling, gatsby's pool, i don't know. i kept thinking of those 1980s movies where the rich preppy in his tennis whites finishes waxing his yacht in preparation for the regatta and then goes over and kicks sand on the poor townie schlub who really, really, really needs the prize money but will never win (or so everyone assumes) because he can't already afford a killer boat. but a school that doesn't accept students purely on the strength of their academic merits can't be expected to graduate them that way. i went to a private non-ivy college, spent two miserable years there, and then transferred to the state college down the street. the main building of that college had once been a public high school and still had lockers on its ground floor. there were never more than thirty students in a class, the professors were supportive and always accessible, i was able to pay my entire tuition in cash, and i learned approximately eighty-three times more in a semester than i had at my first school. when it comes to basic undergraduate education, failure should be an impossibility for a student who wants and is trying to succeed. if the school provides access to the proper resources, it is impossible. at my state school, there was a very high degree of support for students in terms of assistance outside of the classroom, arrangements made for students who had to hold jobs, flexible scheduling, etc. at the private institution, where i was paying fifteen times the tuition, those things were not really available. of the twenty or so people i became friendly with during my freshman orientation, all incredibly bright and driven kids who'd been near the tops of their high school classes, only about half graduated on time, and some never graduated at all. do i think this means all state schools are boffo? absolutely not. nor do i think all private or top-tier institutions are full of crap. what i think is that you can find outstanding colleges, and lousy ones, at every level of the current ranking system, and i can't help but think that that must mean the current ranking system is pretty full of crap. so i agreed with malcolm before he said anything. what, are you shocked? like that never happens.

i agreed with gopnik, though, too, to a tiny degree, in that it makes less sense to get rid of elite institutions than it does to attempt to reform their operations or enlighten the public so that they can, i guess, demand reformed operations. but he didn't offer any suggestions as to how we might do that. he didn't offer any suggestions at all, really. what he did was call malcolm the pol pot of parchment (at least three times); compare the grouping of harvard, yale, and princeton to the factitious but catchy "axis of evil" triad; insist that the ivy league provides tremendous opportunity without referencing anything even resembling a fact in support of that statement (and even then he was talking about opportunity for its students, or maybe just its graduates, when the problem is that it is denying opportunities to deserving applicants based on snooty, capricious whims); and closed with the warning that a vote for malcolm gladwell's america is a vote for george bush's america, but a vote for gopnik's america is a ballot cast in obama-esque optimism. a gimmicky and failed (and sort of rovian) presentation, i thought, which was too bad, because if he'd tried he could maybe have gone somewhere with the original idea. or maybe that was the best he could do, i don't know. on the quasi-upside, i have decided that his smugness is affected rather than intrinsic. i'm having some trouble figuring out why anyone would choose to project smugness. it could be a defensive posture (new york in the 1980s was a rather fierce place), or perhaps it's the result of parisian influence. i really can't say, never having lived in either place, and especially never having been a short canadian man in either place. i do not like him more, exactly, but i am infuriated by him less. and that's the best i can do. there was no ass-rolling, anyway. sorry to disappoint, kids, i know some of you were keeping your fingers crossed for an old-school rumble, but he was so sweaty and ill at ease up there under those bright lights (which only he had to speak under, weirdly; when malcolm was talking the hall was dimmed. does anyone know what that was about? it was so odd) with his shirt collar open, trying to look so smooth, grasping at liberal straws, that even i would have felt too mean to end it all by letting his sizable audience watch him get beat up by a girl. he and i both know the truth, and that's enough for me.

it was all pretty light, as it should have been, because in the end there's just nothing to it. if we all agree that there are excellent schools that are more willing to accept funny-looking students with no legacies or trust funds than the ivy league schools are, then we could probably agree that those students should attend those schools instead of harvard, yale, or princeton, since they'll probably have a better time somewhere else, anyway. it's an undeniable irritation that someone who went to harvard can simply say "i went to harvard" and be greeted with more and better job or postgraduate offers, despite his high-C average, than a student who maintained an A average at the university of virginia. but the things that need to happen in order to change that can either be brought about now, with schools operating as they already do, or not at all. we have to change our priorities. razing a few lecture halls won't help with that. refusing to pay top dollar and beyond for a designer logo might help that. but that isn't really the american way.




* fact: i really do say "fact" in this way when i'm speaking out loud. it's one of my less endearing conversational traits, right after my unfortunate air-quotes affliction, but you're here for the real me, right? and that's what you're getting.