Schooled in elitism
Why are otherwise egalitarian people so obsessed with college hierarchy?
Mani Shankar Aiyar’s now-famous diss of his colleague Ajay Maken being merely “BA Pass from Hansraj College” drew so much attention only because school snobbery is all around us,but rarely so visible and audible,and rarely wielded as calculated insult.
In India,people who would never dream of talking about how big their house is or how much their car cost,or even people explicitly committed to egalitarian ideals,think it’s perfectly acceptable to brag about their schools. It might look like affection and team spirit,but school talk is often just an oblique way of hinting at pedigree.
We know this is a credential-mongering country. In every new social interaction,you can see the antennae quivering,alert for status signals. We sort people by class,last name,neighbourhood,accent,and whatever other subtle codes govern our little social groupings. Like George Orwell,who (sardonically) pinpointed his own status as “lower-upper-middle class” in pre-war England,most Indians are hyper-conscious of the many fine lines that separate us from them. And while preps and toffs are at least mildly comic elsewhere,in India privilege seems wholly admirable. Ascribed status is still valued as much as,if not more than,achieved status.
At the same time,conditioned by decades of discomfort with money and flash,education was the obvious arena where you could preen and compete. College sweatshirts and keychains and car stickers used to be coveted items. There was dignity in a battered old car,if adorned with the sticker of a prestigious university.
So if the grip of the old school tie seems as tight as ever,it has everything to do with class — the having of it,the vaunting of it. There is a particular class fraction,of academics and journalists and information workers,which may lack the money,but has strong ideas about culture and refinement. The books they have read and the music lessons they had matter so terribly much,because that is all they have to communicate their distinction.
Of course,it’s not only in India that much worldly happiness hinges on where you went to school. Getting a job is much easier,anywhere in the world,if you have a strong network of weak ties (best forged in school),which can tip you off about ideas and openings. Ivy Leaguers may not talk about their experience incessantly,and long into their adult lives like we do,but it does confer a certain entitlement,a discreet privilege that follows you around through life. Even in the US,where class is by and large an embarrassing “we don’t do that here” subject,Paul Fussell has written of how academic snobbery still thrives,how someone could be thought very fine for being “Yale all the way” (BA,MA,PhD).
Within a small social fishbowl,bringing up school is a bid for recognition. You hear people announcing tribal loyalties to Mayo and Sanawar,or Woodstock and Rishi Valley,as though it says something essential about them. But nothing compares to the St Stephen’s supremacists,who think that everything about college makes for national conversation. After all,to go to St Stephen’s is inevitably to have friends in high places,and the number of politicians,civil servants,academics and journalists who are old college chums should convince anyone of the glory of the institution. And so,the rest of us watch with polite bemusement as our talking heads and columnists draw large lessons from what mince cutlets cost in college,back in the day. Of course,even to criticise Stephen’s and its outsized influence is just another way of sneakily bringing it up and entrenching the idea.
But sadly for them,“when my grandfather was at Cambridge” doesn’t have the same cachet now. Successful CEOs speak English with their own unapologetic accents. Fancy schools are still fetishised,but more and more people know how to get there. Even St Stephens and Doon School are a world away from what they were in the 1950s and 1960s.
Besides,in the real world,there’s only a slippery,tenuous connection between schooling and smarts. This is a clearly observable fact. The big-name schools are largely about signalling — if you can crack the competitive admissions,you can prove you’re minimally driven and clever (though legacy admissions,the family free pass,still exist in many fancy American schools,and even in St Stephen’s). You can be learned in a narrow way,you can carry off book chat with aplomb,perhaps,but you can still be blindsided by a self-taught dropout or a Tier-2 student. If you’ve met people who are clearly uncomfortable in school,have been misunderstood by school,and are ragingly intelligent,you know what I’m talking about.
As the essayist William Deresiewicz wrote in a beautiful 2008 piece on the disadvantages of an elite education,one of its chief errors is that it makes you think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of greater worth or value. And as he perceptively noted about “Ivy retardation” — “the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy.”
amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com
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