Chapter 8 Chapter 6 Intellectual Life (1)

【the University Given that America is such a young country, there is no hereditary hierarchy, no knighthood, no tradition of royal honors, not even a well-known social ladder to climb up.Americans thus rely more than any other nation on their own university system, looking to this institution to foster snobbery and social hierarchy.In other countries, people don't just rely on universities to achieve social status, there are other traditional avenues.In the United States, especially in this century, only institutions such as colleges and universities can be the source of all the highest honors.In other words, higher education is at least the best way to achieve status.

I once heard of a person who obtained a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a doctor’s degree in a famous school, just for people’s simple sentence in the future: “He learned all the way from Nalu!” Undoubtedly, In the United States, this sentence can indeed make people admire it.In any case, being granted social status is not based on some annoying different standards, but the fruits of human society that have been handed down for thousands of years. Just think of the college stickers on the back windows of cars to see what I mean.As we often see, even lesser-known schools are worth bragging about, as if doing so adds sanctity to their status.The result of this is that the prestige of the university has long been higher than that of the church, since everyone is proud of the institution of higher learning in which he has been educated.For example, no one puts a sticker on his rear window that says "Holy Name Charities, Port Huron, Michigan," or "First Baptist Church, Elmira."When you think about the fact that everyone is emulating this, it goes without saying that you can calculate the accolades enjoyed by colleges and universities and academic institutions today.

But in this way, when any institution wants to make profits, or wants to elevate its social status through crooked ways and deception, it will always pretend to be an academic institution. Not only did the New York Times run every day on noble pedagogy and such, but it also had its "Weekly News Quiz," as if it were actually in the business of education.Other newspapers would also carry the following in all seriousness, as in the November 2, 1982, page of Time Magazine: "An article... on Saturday falsely reported the solution to all possible solutions to the Rubik's Cube. The fact that Above, the correct number for all possibilities of the Rubik's Cube is: 43252003274489856000."

The same goes for brokers, brokers and realtors who also hold so-called "seminars."Even Washington's most blatant lobbyists, despite their notorious practices of bribery and pressure, like to refer to themselves as institutes, as if they were the Institute for Advanced Science at Princeton University, or the Contemporary Art Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. similar.It goes without saying that in Washington, the capital of this country, we also find such institutes as the Tobacco Institute, the Institute of Alcoholic Beverages, the Institute of Pine Oil and Edible Oils, and so on.Some so-called "institutes" even have "chairs" and "professors" in a grand manner, and we occasionally learn, thanks to a statement in a journal by a funder, that an ignorant fellow competes for Holds the title of "Dwight A. Wallace Professor of Communication at the American Enterprise Institute."

Everywhere, in order to improve their social status, all classes cling themselves to universities, academic societies, "science" and so on.Anything like that is fine, but it must not be commercial.Manufacturing and "Markets".For example, in order to attract project funders, the Morgan Library awarded them the title of "Fellows" instead of Donors or Benefactors.And it is also divided into various levels according to the amount of money donated. The highest level is "lifelong researcher" (it seems to mean that you can enjoy the lifelong status of a university professor, or you can receive permanent care in the local cemetery); the next The level is "honorary researcher"; the next level is "perennial researcher"; the last is ordinary "researcher".

American colleges and universities are so honored that they have no room for criticism or neglect, at least since the forties.Because of the GI Act, they were sold to the masses as the highest intellectual part of the post-war public welfare system.In recent years, no one has dared to call out the evils and self-importance of universities, except for a few people like Senator McCarthy in the 1950s and radical students in the 1960s and 1970s.As a result, far from being blamed, this grotesque preference for universities prevails, because no one wants to risk being accused of "anti-intellectualism."Saying this seems to imply that knowledge is just a common commodity like other things, and it should not be owned by only a few institutions of higher learning.There is a special kind of fear and anger that must be aroused when someone tries to actively classify universities.Pointing to the hierarchy in American universities is to many people as irritating as pointing to the hierarchy in everyday life.

Interesting is the reaction to Edward B. Fisk's 1982 New York Times Guide to American College Selection, 1982-83.There are more than 2,000 schools in the United States that claim to be four-year education and can award bachelor’s degrees (this is the number when the author republished this book in 1984. According to statistics, there are currently more than 3,000 universities in the United States that can award degrees. A translator’s note), as far as Fiske estimates, anyone with a brain would think that this number is quite watery, and there are not many schools that are as good as they say.In a world where "research institution" loses its meaning, it is an obvious logical corollary that "academy" loses its meaning too.Fiske thus set out to divide the "best and best value" American colleges and concluded that there were only 265 in total.To evaluate the educational quality of these colleges, Fiske proposed a set of rating criteria from five to one star based on the requirements of academic quality, social impact and "quality of life".

Based on this standard, he gave Amherst College a five-star rating.Williams College, Harvard University, Stanford University, Smith College, and a number of other schools whose academic quality is roughly on par with the top three stars of The Gourmet Grove Guide for culinary ratings are comparable in educational quality To achieve the level of "French national best cooking" in cooking.He followed that up with four stars to Bellroy College, Burduin College, the University of Iowa, Vanderbilt University, and others roughly in line with The Gourmet Grove's two-star cooking for "excellent dining tables." Good level of similar schools.He awarded three stars to Mills College, Colby College, the University of New Hampshire and Connecticut College, among others equivalent to one-star dining in the Gourmet Grove Guide for "canonical table" meals.

As he fearlessly dissects the entire American college landscape in comparative terms, what Fisk cannot ignore is that some schools are worse than three-star schools in terms of academic quality.Like any honest critic, he had to judge by other aspects, such as the number of books, or the quality of the school theater, or even the quality of the restaurants on the campus, and he gave the grade according to these judgments.Some two-star colleges include Xavier in New Orleans, Tuskegee, Temple, Seton Hall, Saint Louis University, Rhode Island University, and Ohio Wesleyan University.There are also some universities, such as the University of Tulsa (Tulsa), the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Nebraska, that Fiske found could only give them one star if evaluated on their academic quality.In any case, these universities are able to find something to praise to a certain extent.But we found that Fisk is in all of the following states: Nevada, North and South Dakotas (these two states combined have 20 universities), Wyoming, West Virginia (the state has 17 school candidates), and even one in the academic Qualitatively noteworthy schools were also not found.Likewise, Whittier College in California, where Richard Nixon excelled, and Eureka College in Illinois, Ronald Reagan's alma mater, are equally unremarkable.

Any evaluation of the university, even if it is fair, will cause an angry uproar.We can imagine the governors of Nevada, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and West Virginia ordering an outcry against Fisk's virulent slander, loudly denouncing this bigoted, blind-eyed, maestro, upholding established power on the East Coast Fisk (who is the education editor of The New York Times) has a willful disdain for the West, and a corresponding flaw in his character that makes him simply unsuitable for the critical section of a paper, launching a propaganda campaign in their domain to promote their state , is one of the important tasks of governors for a long time.We should not be surprised to see governors desperately defending the educational honor of their states.However, we can't think of a professor who teaches at a lower-ranking school to launch an attack on Fiske.Because we assume that a professor still understands the nature of criticism, knows that criticism constitutes a point of view, and the more points of view.The more intense and active the better.To be embroiled in a public controversy because your university was downgraded by a newspaper employee shows that you are in the business of public relations rather than knowledge.What's more, it simply implies that you don't have much confidence in the social status of the school you teach.

I am referring here to Mr. David H. Bennett, Professor of History at Syracuse Univereity.Undoubtedly, he hoped that the university he taught was rated as five stars or at least four stars in terms of academic quality, but he was shocked to find that Fiske only gave Syracuse University two stars.This level is based partly on questionnaires completed by the students and partly based on personal interviews with the students.Based on information provided by students, Fiske writes: "The liberal arts and sciences courses in the liberal arts college ... are disjointed," "classes are large and inappropriate," "registration is a mess," "libraries...are inadequate," "admission Standards don't appear to be stringent," and "varsity sports teams are unusually large."At the same time, Fiske found that most of the teaching work was done by graduate teaching assistants.The students interviewed had little sense of morality. They told Fiske, "Whoever it is, anyone can come in if they pay the tuition." Faced with such poor survey results, Fiske gave the university two stars.Instead, however, Professor Bennett's response was not to correct these deficiencies, such as cleaning up the registration mess, or reforming the teaching assistant's curriculum (a disgraceful phenomenon common across the United States), but to blame Fiske for exposing the school's ills, And scoff at the man who he sees as nothing more than a bearer of bad news.He wrote a letter to the boss of the "bad news bearer," New York Times publisher Thur Orchers Salsberg, complaining that "one of the world's most respected newspapers is Cultural authority" was abused by Fiske's "questionable ambitions."He continued in his letter to Solsberg: "...if it hadn't been for your paper's name, The New York Times College Selection Guide would have been dismissed as a nasty joke." As for this incident concerning the reputation of Syracuse University, and at the same time involving such major issues as the degree of harm to the University obtained by Edward Fisk through investigation, Arthur Ochs Solsberg explained own point of view.He hastily assured Professor Bennett that Fisk's book had been revised, and the revised content would be reflected in the latest edition immediately.In his reply, however, Solsberger went on to praise Fiske and his associates, drawing attention to a fair and truthful report that reflected a large number of career inquiries, and he concluded by noting that he nevertheless A decision was made to no longer use the New York Times name for Fiske's book "future reprints and reprints."I suspect that Solsberg's statement that he would decouple newspapers and book titles in the future is a sure sign that it is professionally unlikely for one "high" cultural institution to criticize another "high" cultural institution. The whole incident makes one understand how great honor and position academic institutions have acquired, their sensitivity to slights or criticism, their almost jealous thirst for honor, their extreme sensitivity to degradation, It just shows that the university is the class of our era that has replaced the knights and even gentlemen in the past.The really irritating thing about Fiske is his use of the word "choice," which he mocks when it's a mild-mannered thing, as if anything that says it's a college or a university is really yes.The trouble he's gotten into shows that the phrase "he's a college graduate" may have carried a lot of weight many years ago, but it has little meaning today.In fact, things changed in the 1950s.The phenomenon of people rushing to college in search of social status overwhelms the concept of "money". The word "money" hasn't changed much, and reality has changed dramatically. An assumption woven into American mythology is that "having a college degree" means success of some kind, regardless of which school it was obtained from.This myth is hard to dispel, not even when it collides with the complex hierarchy of American higher education.For example, as late as 1959, Vance Packard, in his book Status Seekers, still believed in the idea that the phrase "a college degree" was significant enough to indicate that someone Belonging to the "diploma elite" class.In fact, it is not true.If you want to express this thing more accurately, you must design an "elite diploma elite" class, because you have an Amherst College and a Williams College.A diploma from Harvard, or Naruto, should never be confused with one from Eastern Kentucky University.A degree from Hawaii Pacific College, Arkansas State University, or Bobby Jones College.When Packard said, "A college-educated girl is six times more likely to marry a college-educated husband than a non-college-educated girl." The mistake is that it ignores the reality that it's almost impossible for a guy who graduated from Dartmouth to marry a guy who graduated from Nova College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. girl.Even in 1972, Packard was talking about the equality ideas he reveled in, and he was making the same mistakes.In "The Country of Strangers", he said happily: "In 1940, about 13 percent of school-age youths entered college; by 1970, the number of school-age youths had reached 40 percent." Three.” Actually, that’s not the case at all.The proportion of people who go to college is still about 13%, and the other 30% go to a place that is called a university.These poor children and their parents have been performing the eternal American pursuit, but what they pursue is not knowledge, but respect and social status.Edward Fiske's message of "choice" suggests precisely that the number of young people who actually go to college will always remain around 12 percent, with the rest seeking higher social status. When we place ourselves in the context of American higher education, we immediately see that Vance Packard was not the only one who was duped by deceptive semantics; dupes are everywhere.John Brooks, in his book, American Splendor, agrees with that more comfortable statement.He draws "two basic classes of Americans: the college-educated and the non-college-educated." But in today's higher education field, only the distinction between college graduates and so-called "college" graduates makes sense.Richard Bernard and David Savaccio, in their insightful 1981 Local Grading Yearbook, said of a high school: "It's no big deal that most of the senior high school class go to college. Worth watching. The key question is: what schools did they get accepted into? Was it the top universities and colleges? The 30% who tried their best to "go to university" in the 1960s. Although they thought they had entered university, they found that their low social status had not been fundamentally improved, not only in knowledge, art or society, And the same is true of financial income. In "The Social Standpoint of America," Coleman and Rinewalt found that getting into a good college, or, as I call it, a real college, can make a person's life easier. Fifty-two percent increase in income, and you can add another 32 percent on top of that by going to a real five-star college like the one Fisk picked. But they found that if you graduate The "non-selectable" college, one of the remaining 1,782 schools that Fisk politely didn't mention, then you get a "no-income advantage." No income advantage at all. At some point both the middle class and the poor see through the academy's deceit (forgive me for saying this), but often too late.I know a woman who graduated from an academically undemanding university with above-average grades.When she started working in this competitive place in New York, all she received was rough treatment from colleagues who "didn't take it seriously".She mustered up the courage (I call it valor) to write a letter to the president of her university, complaining bitterly about the injustice she had suffered.However, even when people understand the great "college and social status" fraud, they usually don't say it.It's a deep-seated pain that feels like something is wrong but doesn't know where it is, and it usually hurts deeply.As one man told Coleman and Reinwalt, getting into some obscure school was a testament to the fact that "the purpose of going to college was to be respected," and after four years there he found he hadn't been respected at all. More respect, because he went to an obscure university.Although the door to college is open, the truth, as Paul Bloomberg observes, is that "the existing educational system has succeeded in gaining favor with the An instrument of equality.” One reason is that unprecedented proportions of upper-class kids are going to college, and they must be going to good colleges.For example, they go to Swarthmore College (swarth-more, a famous four-year college in the United States. -Translator's Note), while the children of the poor class go to Carrow College in Pittsburgh.The result is that what is commonplace to the upper-middle class stunns the middle and poor. "Those newcomers, energetic and progressive," wrote Leonard Weisman, "had sweated their way up the social ladder, and were suddenly startled to discover that the path to the upper echelons The door to full recognition and acceptance by society remains closed." Of course, the cynic will say that the purpose of this system is to stabilize the harsh lines between classes under the beautiful guise of opening higher education to all. How was such a blatant social class deception accomplished?Was it deliberate or accidental?This happened basically during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.The irony is that what we call deception thrives under the guise of cheering "open educational opportunity."The scheme will succeed if an item is in plentiful supply and can be purchased by simply paying for it.Unfortunately, knowledge, learning, and curiosity are much rarer than you might think, and you can't easily get someone to actually communicate with you by simply declaring, "You're communicating with me." The opening of "educational opportunities" relies on a process of language expansion, a method of "upgrading", that is, countless ordinary schools, teacher training colleges, and local theological colleges.trade school.The name and status of commercial schools and secretarial schools have been raised to "universities", and they have been given a status, but in fact they do not have the conditions to run universities at all, and they don't even know how to do it.The process is not dissimilar to how high school graduates end up being crammed into college.These two methods can be collectively referred to as "natural promotion method". Everything that happened in the 1960s was simply a process of exacerbation, expansion, grandiosity, and hubris that is common in this country.This is clearly expressed in the overjoyed expression of one citizen in the 1970s: "There are two universities in England, four in France, ten in Prussia, and thirty-seven in the single state of Ohio." Everyone wants to be a university, just like every employee wants to be a "manager" and every manager wants to be a vice president. The results of it?State colleges and normal schools all over the country were called universities at once, and they set about with the best motive in the world to get rid of poverty.Southern Illinois University is a great example.Although it is located in Carbondale, Illinois, a backwater with neither academic influence nor cultural traditions, it used to be nothing more than a teacher's college, but it now enrolls 26,000 students, and It also has its own "University Press".The truth is that the vast majority of students who earn a bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois State University are still working in "education," an all-too-definite sign of what used to be a teacher-training school.The same goes for hundreds of other places like Bell State, Kent State, Wright State (in Dayton, Ohio) and Northern Iowa University.Like me, many television viewers who watched the most recent National Basketball Championship game must have wondered as much about the identity of "James Madison University" as they played against the University of North Carolina.The school in Harrisonburg, Virginia, was not so long ago Madison College, a mediocre normal school that now sounds as if it has been raised to a level comparable to Oxford in England and Thorburn in France (University of Paris). One of the best schools among the branch schools. One Translator's Note) is on an equal footing, but its majors are still concentrated in elementary education, and the language proficiency scores of its freshmen in the SAT are among the average for college entrance examinations. Below the score line, 455 points for boys and 463 points for girls.Check out colleges that don't play in the National Basketball Game, and you might, incidentally (not entirely implausible), come up with a guide to schools with high academic quality.At the very least, it might be possible to draw the opposite conclusion by tracking teams that consistently show up in big games: Dayton, DePaul, Virginia Tech, Wyoming (remember Fisk's findings on Wyoming? ), Seton Hall, and Bradley.Sports commentators refer to these colleges as "schools" (they say "so-and-so is a great basketball school"), which is generally a much more accurate term for such institutions than state governments (which state their university status).As for private schools, we have Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.It was a two-year college until the 1940s, and after the introduction of the GI Bill, it was greatly stimulated by veterans' money.Furthermore, a business school in Seattle went from college to university status in just nine years.Founded in 1972 as "City College", it was announced in 1982 that it had grown into a university.Sadly, there are many innocent people in the world who would really believe this school is a university. Sometimes these schools are born and recognized by reasoning as follows: If universities in other parts of the world are named after their locations, like Oxford and Cambridge, if there are such universities as Paris and London institutions, why can't we put our own schools on the map?Inventing institutions like Southwell, Dallas, Houston, or Louisville, and pompously granting them the same status?What does it matter if there is no spirit of learning in a place?People don't know what the relationship between curiosity and research is?What is the use of the seriousness and deep thought of the intellectual if they can only arouse the uneasiness of others? Elevating "college" to "university" is quite consistent with the long-standing habit of Americans, that is, people are accustomed to "elevating" the description of a thing by adding syllables to words.For example, college has only two syllables, and seminary has only four syllables.But university (univereity) has five syllables, plus the name of distinction, and we have the following: University of Montevallo, Alabama Samford University, Alabama California West Coast University (West coast University, Carlifornia) Woodbury University, California (Woodbury University, carlifornia) Upper Iowa University Transylvania University, Kentucky Shaw University, North Carolina Cameron University, Oklahoma Phillips University, Oklahoma (Phillips University, city, Oklahom) Midwesiem University, Texas Pan American University, Texas The above examples are just scratching the surface.Many of these schools started out as small church schools named after the evangelist, then elevated themselves to a seminary, and then conferred the name "university."Of course, these schools are far from the worst, and there are plenty of things that are lower than this kind of school, and they are the real bottom.People there have never heard of a university, only know about blatant deception, paying for a fake "PhD" diploma and "resume", since it is so easy to run a university in this country, customers must always be on high alert Only then.Even in the capital, Washington, DC, there is a school called the Maharishi International University School of Natural Law.In fact the rich are just as gullible as the poor.I recently saw a Northeastern university that I had never heard of academically.Its tuition fee is $7100 per year (1980), and it ranks among the top ten most expensive schools in the United States.Schools such as MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard are neck and neck. It is not too difficult to figure out how these little-known schools took root and how they became famous.Not far from where I live, there is a large piece of land that has somehow escaped the fate of building a large "garden apartment" on it, and except for a few buildings in the middle, much of it has been empty so far.Years ago, there was a sign on the side of the road stating that the buildings belonged to "Father Consorata."A few years later, a large brick building with a vaulted roof began to rise, joining an adjoining building in what appeared to be a "student housing complex".The sign now reads "Consolata Mission Society".There are fears that another big move is coming soon.This is how I foresee what's going to happen next, and it will be fast: several more buildings will be completed, and a magnificent gate will appear, with a big book on it: "Consorata College".In a few years, with more buildings, the sign will be renamed "Consolata University" overnight.Now, the institution can prove that its title is well-deserved, because it has its own famous football team, drum band, and group gymnastics team.There are wheelchair ramps everywhere and special courses for the disabled.Then there will be a wide variety of overseas courses: Consolata Palermo, Consolata Cusadice, Consolata Hyderabad.Then, before you've even heard of it, you'll see Consolata University Press books in the New York Review of Books, with Structuralism and the George Eliot Paradox, and Titles like The Missing Marxist Dimension in the Writings of Samuel Jonson.Then Consolata University will be as serious as any other university, so no one will take it as a passing joke anymore. The growing number of dubiously low-ranking universities makes the ranking of academic institutions all the more necessary and valuable by a handful of top schools.They are a minority in the university as a whole, and their curriculum follows the principle of academic freedom, so they are more reassuring and their academic standards are more secure.It is precisely because of their stubborn and uncompromising character that they stand up to comparison.This can be corroborated by a saying you often say in New England and the eastern states: "He didn't go to an Ivy League school." (The Ivy League is composed of eight prestigious universities in the Northeastern United States, including Harvard, Yale , Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth, and later became synonymous with famous American universities. -Translator's Note) But the top class is generally outside the university, because they don't need this Rank Badges.We can say that their expectations of their children are like those of Douglas Sutherland's English gentleman, whose children "are expected to behave in all respects, and academic excellence is not usually regarded as a criterion of distinction. This attitude is completely compatible with the aloofness of this class who never try to make money, they just like to do things as amateurs.” It is disgraceful to do any professional work.Thus, says Sutherland, "a gentleman never looks under his dashboard in a car, because he knows nothing about engines." For countless reasons, the invisible top and upper classes often put their Children are sent to dubious academies, partly out of willing knowing, partly on the defensive knowing their children won't get into good schools, and partly out of smug eccentricity and stubbornness.Cornelius Wanderbilt Whitney confirmed this example again.His daughter and her friends didn't go to Vassar College or Wellesley College, near Boston. Note), not even Northeastern or Wheaton, but Boca Raton college in Florida.And he didn't find it unusual, and he made it clear that he and his wife enjoyed hanging out at Embury-Riddle Aeronautical University. "I got an honorary doctorate there last December," he went on to report, over lunch there, "and people referred to us as Dr. Whitney and Dr. Whitney, the latter It means my wife Marie, who has been awarded a Ph.D. in Humanities by the Ainerican UniVersity in Résing, Switzerland." On the other hand, good schools with a long history, like Princeton and Naru, are often referred to as Scott Fitzgerald (a famous American novelist. A translator's note) and John O'Hara (American novelist). A translator’s note) such typical upper-middle-class and middle-class Americans are used as a sign and proof of social status.Neither of them graduated from the top college of their choice, and O'Hara didn't even go to Naru, where he could have gone, and spent his life poring over the school yearbook of the class of 1924 to haunt it.Both of these men consecrate their colleges, or see them as a sacred society that can redeem themselves through a sense of belonging, and both certainly have their most revered school logos plastered on the back windows of their cars.Like most members of the middle class, they are both "team players" (meaning people who are cooperative and depend on the team. A translator's note), unless they belong to a certain group, it is difficult for them to imagine their own identities . 好学校所包含的社会影响力，在菲利普·罗思的《再见，哥伦布》（1959）中有很好的记述。书中的主人公在回忆时，对比了贫困的纽沃克的街道和中上阶层聚居的绍特黑尔的街道，后者都是根据名校的名字命名的，像阿姆赫斯特。贝都因、康奈尔，达特茅斯，哈佛等等。《社会名流纪事》杂志发现，由于如此经常地提到同样的那些学院，为了方便工作，以致不得不使用一张缩写字母表。常青藤联会的学校当然都在上面，不过也有霍巴尔德学院。里亥大学，纽约市立学院，兰斯里尔综合技术学院，以及拉特格斯大学。可以确信，如果不是中上层和中产阶级的顽强记忆，常青藤学校的荣誉早就在普通大众中销声匿迹了。如果今天有两条船来往于旧金山和洛杉矶之间，经营它们的公司不太可能像半个世纪以前那样，用耶鲁或哈佛来为船命名以便使它们更上档次。 可是，常青藤学校对中上层阶级依然发挥着一种不可抗拒的号召力，如果你没能去读它们，最好是“远离”它们，而且要有相当的距离，除非你碰巧就住在坎布里奇（哈佛大学所在地。－译者注）、纽黑文（耶鲁大学所在地。－译者注）、普林斯顿、普罗维登斯（布朗大学所在地。一译者注）、汉诺维尔（达特茅思学院所在地。一译者注）一类的地方就另当别论了。但是那些推迟了上常青藤学校雄心壮志的人，正是居于更上层的阶级。正如里特·米尔观察到的情况，“去读哈佛或那鲁或普林斯顿已经不算什么了，只有去读那些排外的寄宿制预科学校才真正算数……”除非一个人上过哈奇基斯、戈罗顿、黑尔、圣马可、安多维尔、伊克塞特，或者米尔顿（均为美国以收费昂贵著称的预科寄宿学校。－译者注）等预科学校，不然整个拼命往常青藤学校里钻的做法从社会角度讲都像是一种浪费，因为他们还是取得不了上等人的地位。独具慧眼的《大学预科生手册》知道，上一所好的预科学校有多么重要，特别是一所有实力把学生“喂”进常青藤的预科学校。选择正确的学校是关键，因为“你打算……尽可能上最好的（学校），那样，你就可以在挥动手帕告别或拍打着胸膛唱某首歌的最后一节之后一劳永逸了。”“仅有成功还不够，”戈尔·维达尔说，“还必须有人失败。”光有一个威廉姆斯学院还不够，还必须有一个南密西西比大学来衬托前者的价值，这样，双方才能在伟大的美国高校等级体系中扮演各自的角色。 很猾稽是不是？无可置疑，美国人为了令人厌倦的地位竞争目的，必须依赖高等教育体系。同样滑稽的是，为了维护这一目的，必须有像贝内特教授之流的人跳出来保卫中上层阶级的尊严和荣誉，使其免遭揭露和低毁。如果这类事还带有喜剧性，那么还有其他一些事情一点也不滑稽。由于这些大学在分配社会荣誉上拥有不同凡响的力量，为了获得社会地位而进行的旷日持久的厮杀，给人造成了巨大的心理伤害。为了社会地位而碰得头破血流希望破灭的人，在高校校园里比比皆是，可能比在任何其他地方都多得多。不光是那些有进取心的学生，也包括那些本来计划要进哥伦比亚大学，到头来却被俄亥俄韦斯莱安录取了的孩子们。 甚至教授们也是如此。我虽然从来没听说过有哪个教授，由于没能在“最优选择”的大学执教而被迫去了一个“高优选择”或仅仅是“值得选择”的学校，因而为失去社会地位而自杀或杀人的。但我却知道有许多大学教师，被羞愧和对自己无能的负咎所摧垮，并且从那时起，怀着苦涩的心情把他们的一生倾注到对社会地位的忌恨上，而不是用在培养智慧和做学问上。无论对于学生还是老师，美国的大学和学院就是贵族沙龙、王室接见会、封建朝廷的现代翻版。任何不明白这一点的人，都应该更努力地研究研究这一现象。实际情况是，尽管根据宪法这个国家没有哪一个机构有权授予贵族头衔，但大学似乎是个例外。或者它们干的很像这类事。