Opinion Climbing the Ivy League

Santorum’s remarks have been widely,and justly,rebutted. Yet defenders of college should do more than respond to its critics with reciprocal contempt. We should seize the opportunity for introspection. Why does the anti-college mantra still touch a nerve among so many Americans? Some of the reasons are doubtless ugly (sheer envy) or unfounded (fear of exposing one’s children to moral corruption). But it is also true that our colleges — especially the most selective and prestigious — bear some responsibility for the perception that Santorum and others have expressed and exploited.

Consider the fact that SAT scores correlate closely with family wealth. The total average SAT score of students from families earning more than $100,000 per year is more than 100 points higher than for students in the income range of $50,000 to $60,000. Or consider that a mere 3 per cent of students in the top 150 colleges,as defined by The Chronicle of Higher Education,come from families in the bottom income quartile of American society. Only a very dogmatic Social Darwinist would conclude from these facts that intelligence closely tracks how much money one’s parents make. A better explanation is that students from affluent families have many advantages .

Yet once the beneficiaries arrive at college,what do they learn about themselves? It’s a good bet that the dean or president will greet them with congratulations for being the best and brightest to walk through the gates. A few years ago,the critic and essayist William Deresiewicz,who went to Columbia and taught at Yale,wrote that his Ivy education taught him to believe that those who didn’t attend “an Ivy League or equivalent school” were “beneath” him. The charge that elite college culture encourages smugness and self-satisfaction contains,like Santorum’s outburst,a germ of truth.

Our oldest and most prestigious colleges are losing touch with the spirit in which they were founded. I agree with Santorum that the colleges could use a little more of their own old-time religion — not in any doctrinal sense,but in the sense of taking seriously the Christian virtues of humility and charity. In secular terms,this means recognising that people with good prospects owe much to their good fortune — and to fellow citizens less fortunate than themselves.

Perhaps if our leading colleges encouraged more humility and less hubris,college-bashing would go out of style and we could get on with the urgent business of providing the best education for as many Americans as possible.

ANDREW DELBANCO,director of American studies at Columbia University,is the author of the forthcoming book “College: What It Was,Is,and Should Be”