In praise of lameness: A response to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep

In William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, undergraduates at Yale are described as young people who can perform mental tasks astonishingly well. When a Yale professor asked her students to memorize 30 lines of Alexander Pope, every student in the class got every line perfectly right, down to the punctuation marks. ‘Seeing them write out the exercise in class,’ the professor remarks, ‘was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track’ (Deresiewicz, 2014: 13). However, the way these students perform any task is by merely complying with it, like racehorses circling a track. The main point is that such an ‘elite’ education, undertaken merely as a series of tasks excellently complied with, leaves its students with ‘no sense of purpose and, what is worse, no understanding of how to go about finding one’ (Deresiewicz, 2014: 25).

From the point of view of a university lecturer, ‘excellent sheep’ can sound like one of those ‘first world problems.’ Who among us will really sympathize? For most university lecturers, the problem isn’t the excellent mere compliance of their students – it’s their lame noncompliance. Isn’t this more intractable and worse? When my students show up for class without books, when I spot them sneaking pathetic peeks at their phones, when I get pathetically personally offended by these peeks, the emotion I feel about teaching excellent sheep is envy.

For Deresiewicz, ‘elite’ higher education is a disaster. I believe that this argument can only be complete and strong if something can be said in favour of non-‘elite’ higher education. Otherwise, all of it could be a disaster. Are students who do not perform excellently really more likely to have a sense of purpose or the capacity to find one? One could praise teaching young people who don’t have all their rough edges knocked off, viz., in the slog of becoming a person whose profile unlocks admission to the top universities. On the other hand, students who memorize Pope to perfection might be getting an incredible education – if a poem learned by heart, an ‘idiom of notable precision,’ as George Steiner beautifully says, ‘modifies the spaces and constructs of one’s inner being’ (Steiner, 1984: 88) and becomes ‘an agency in our consciousness, a “pace-maker” in the growth and vital complication of our identity’ (Steiner, 1989: 9). And maybe this is true even if that identity starts out as sheep and – stretching further – maybe even if that identity ends up, in a typical Yale way, as investment banker or consultant (the Harvard and Princeton statistics are even worse). ¹

Completing Deresiewicz’s argument requires some serious educational advantage to be found in the opposite of that class in which the students copied out Pope. Ideally, there should be something to praise in an educational situation that is not only non-‘elite’ but downright lame. This is what I will attempt to do, mainly by telling the story of one of the low points in my teaching career. In this story, I angrily try to kick my students out of the classroom for failing to have read Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ poem. Surprisingly, the students refused to leave.

I distinguish my effort from an important defence of an educative kind of student disengagement in which non-conformity belongs to finding a voice (Fulford, 2017). The kind of lameness I have in mind is not in itself meaningful, although (as I will relate) it might become so. My effort may also be considered as part of an inquiry into pedagogy that acknowledges the presence and importance of affects of ‘anxiety, disappointment, and shame for both students and teachers’ in the university classroom (Poletti et al., 2016: 235). Unlike Poletti et al., however, I offer no plan for how to forestall or mitigate these affects. Plans are sensible; but even good ones will fail. My subject concerns what might happen when they do, when negative affects erupt into the classroom, and how this might be of serious value in the course of an education.

The fundamental distinction Deresiewicz is making – between educational excellence as compliance with difficult tasks vs. excellence in the development of a sense of purpose – has a long pedigree. A quick foray into philosophy will show that the excellent sheep problem (or something like it) is recognizable in contexts other than the American Ivy League or of education in a modern, capitalist rat race. It seems to emerge from or correlate with various kinds of cultural success. This helps to suggest why manifest lameness – something no one could interpret at the moment as anything successful – may contain a serious educational advantage.

Looked at through German educational philosophy, Deresiewicz is describing what is effectively Ausbildung in what should be a home for Bildung (the humanities at Yale). Ausbildung is any kind of training; Bildung is an education in which knowledge acquisition is at least partly self-directed and self-constituting (Dolar, 2015: 32). Without this subjective dimension, it is hard to see how higher education could avoid what Adorno calls a web of ‘pseudo-culture [Halbbildung]’ in which ‘the commodified, reified content of culture survives at the expense of its truth content and its vital relation to living subjects’ (1993[1959], 23). The result is ‘specialists without spirit’ (Weber) [Fachmenchen ohne Geist] who acquire culture only as a kind of currency or polish.

In Greek philosophy, human aretē (ethical or intellectual virtue) is seen as irreducible to technē (a received body of practical knowledge required to make something). In eras of exploding technical knowledge (such as classical Athens and our own), it becomes difficult to understand how something else could even count as knowledge. So Plato’s Socrates is always working his interlocutors through technical analogies for virtue-education with the point, as I understand it, being that these analogies fail. Excellent sheep are what you get when aretē is treated as technē. Complying with a series of tasks set out in detail by others, proving that you can do these tasks, is how technical education works. But no one actually becomes good this way; what they become is capable of more good or bad. ² As in Deresiewicz, one of Plato’s themes is how little this is understood by the recognized educational authorities of his time (the sophists). Another of his themes is how little people really wanted the alternative, i.e., philosophy, and least of all the talented, beautiful, and rich people. It was all well and good to spend some time with Socrates. But to start following him around at the expense of taking the lead in society … only the weirdos did that; that is, the ones who no one would follow anyway.

The comparison of excellent young people to Thoroughbreds dovetails nicely with a passage from Plato’s Apology in which Socrates explicitly raises and rejects the analogy of teacher as horse trainer. Quoting loosely: ‘If your son were a colt,’ says Socrates to a concerned but confused father, ‘we would get him an expert horse trainer. But since he’s actually a human being, who are we going to find for him?’ Thoroughbred excellence is running fast under the direction of a rider. That doesn’t sound like human excellence to most of us (for who would be the rider? and what does he want?). But then it isn’t obvious what human excellence is, so it’s not obvious what excellent human education consists in or who can provide it. Rather than say that he’s the one who provides it, the truly best horse-trainer, Socrates describes himself as the horse fly whose annoying biting keeps the well-born but lazy steed of Athens from sleeping all day long. The excellent sheep-cum-Thoroughbreds may reject the analogy, countering that they are anything but lazy. From a Socratic point of view, however, performing a series of difficult tasks may also be a kind of sleep – a very un-restful form of sleepwalking through life.

To conclude this quick and incomplete survey, perhaps Kierkegaard captured something very close to the excellent sheep problem when he discussed being a Christian in Christendom. ³ For Kierkegaard, being a Christian is not a status one can acquire by checking boxes in a list: ‘Believes Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior?’ Check. ‘Has been baptized?’ Check. The checkmarks are insufficient because being a Christian involves subjective truth. Furthermore, the subjective state of being a Christian is partly constituted by humble self-questioning. That is, part of what it means to be a Christian is to wonder about whether one really understands what being a Christian means. All of this makes the task of being a Christian an especially difficult one in ‘Christendom.’ In Christendom, the possibility of asking the necessary, deep, and humble question ‘Am I a Christian?’ is blocked by a ready answer: ‘How could I not be? I live in Demark, a Christian country, I’ve been baptized, and I go to church every Sunday along with everyone I know. See, I even gave that beggar there a little money …’

Like a Christian in Christendom, the possibility for an ‘elite’ student to ask the necessary, deep, and humble question ‘Am I being educated?’, to take on the task of education in a personal way, is effectively blocked by the ready answer: ‘How could I not be? I’m getting “A’s” at Yale.’ Even worse, most Yale students get ‘A’s’ in most of their classes, just as most Christians in Christendom are ‘saved,’ as they suppose.

Deresiewicz suggests the ‘second-tier – not second-rate – [American] liberal arts colleges’ as the best alternative to excellent sheep and the institutions they inhabit, ‘schools that, instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, have retained their allegiance to real educational values’ (Deresiewicz, 2014: 154). This is sanguine. No doubt the excellent sheep problem is concentrated in the prestige institutions. But education as very good, pretty good, fair, or poor mere compliance with assigned tasks are also problems. If students as Thoroughbreds circling a challenging track is the problem, the answer can’t be trotters circling a shorter track more slowly. While the problem is worse for the Thoroughbreds, the trotters also have it. Deresiewicz suggests that the educations at first-tier Yale and second-tier Kenyon (this author’s alma mater!), for example, are so different as to be animated by different values. Are they? In the final section of this essay, I will return to the question of whether and how institutions or systems of higher education should react to the problem embodied by – but surely not limited to – Harvard and Yale.

It could be that the ‘excellent sheep’ problem is so deep that there is no formal educational answer to it, i.e., no way to institutionalize Bildung, Socratic inquiry, or the humble self-reflexive questioning Kierkegaard thought being a Christian required. Socrates seems to have believed that even learning from books was problematic because a book says the same thing to whosoever reads it (Phaedrus, 277c) while education needs to be like medicine; you get the prescription you need only after a personal examination. Or perhaps for the development of a ‘sense of purpose’ or the capacity to find one, nothing less than pure experiences of finding for oneself will do. But even in the best of classrooms a student is

… like a stallèd ox debarred

From touch of growing grass, that may not taste

A flower till it have yielded up its sweets

A prelibation to the mower’s scythe. (Wordsworth, The Prelude V.242-5)

Wordsworth would have been horrified that I had served up his poetry to the students in my ‘Introduction to Poetry’ class – but then perhaps not displeased at the unexpected results.

In 2009, ‘Introduction to Poetry’ was small enough to be held as a conversation around a table in my office, and a number of smart students who I already knew and liked had signed up for it. About midway into the semester, the assignment for the day was William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ poem. Because it happens to relate to my theme, I will summarize the poem.

Wordsworth has returned to look out upon a landscape that, five years ago, he found to be amazingly inspirational. Now he’s back, looks out and feels … not much. Has something changed out there in the natural vista, he wonders, or is he the one who’s changed and not for the better? What Wordsworth registers that he doesn’t feel threatens to be a soul-crushing disappointment. The drama of the poem is Wordsworth wrestling with this threat.

If you know the poem, you also know that there is a surprise near the end. All along, we seem to be reading something like a transcript of Wordsworth’s solitary thoughts, a well-established convention of lyric poetry. When this poem is almost over, we are surprised to find that this is not a solitary mediation at all. Wordsworth suddenly addresses a ‘dear, dear Friend’ who is ‘with me here upon the banks of this fair river.’ The friend is revealed to be his younger sister (Dorothy). William exclaims:

Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister!

Dorothy Wordsworth is ‘now,’ in the poem’s present tense, experiencing nature wildly, ecstatically – as William used to experience it. Somehow Dorothy’s presence ups the stakes tremendously. It also provides the way out of a trap of personal sulking when William feels compelled to take on a teacher’s role. Should he try to disabuse Dorothy of an enthusiasm that has come to seem empty to him? No, he feels that would be too awful. But if William knows it would be awful, then he knows he must still see some value in nature even if he does not presently feel its intoxicating pull.

As I said, the only task for the day was to discuss this poem. Early in the session, it became clear (I’m not sure how) that the students hadn’t read it. As a rule, I never call students out on not having done the reading. When a student can’t refer to the text, I try to charitably interpret what’s happening as a failure of comprehension rather than a lack of basic effort. While I know that this charity may not be deserved, it seems necessary in order that my classroom have a healthy atmosphere.

But this time I was angry. I had assigned a single poem for class – one – and not a single student had read it? I went around the table in my office, asking every student the specific question: ‘Who does Wordsworth address at the end of the poem?’ No one knew enough to say ‘His sister.’ One student acknowledged that he hadn’t read the poem … and then dared to try to justify the fact. He had read the first few lines and decided that it was boring. It was therefore his ‘right,’ he declared, to stop reading.

Disgusted, I dismissed the class. More precisely, I told them to ‘go away.’ Instead of leaving, they froze in silence. I told them again to ‘go away’ and ‘get out of here – this is my office.’ Again: no motion. I believe that my ‘Get out of here’ even became ‘Get the hell out of here.’ What I was telling them, and what I genuinely felt in that moment, was that I didn’t want to be their teacher anymore. What they were telling me by not moving, I believe, is that they didn’t accept that. There were minutes of painful silence. Everyone’s head hung down – my own too, eventually, when I was through glaring. Finally, I told them to go away today … and that we would try again with Wordsworth next time. This was acceptable and they left the room.

The next class on Wordsworth was a great one, the best class of the year. At the time, I was ecstatic: we were back on track and better than ever! But now that I reflect on it, surely the more important educational experience was the negative one, the one involving anger, shame, and disappointment on both our parts.

This brings me back to Deresiewicz and the problem of excellent sheep. When education is something other than a series of tasks the students comply with, the teacher is never free from the anxiety that no one in the room could care less about what he or she cares passionately about. And the student is never free from the anxiety of feeling like a shallow, stupid, or otherwise worthless person. ⁴ Student and teacher are bound together in mutual vulnerability. These are not uncommon experiences in education, although they seldom erupt into the open as they did on the day I tried to teach ‘Tintern Abbey.’

Could it be that teachers and students at ‘elite’ institutions are simply more successful than most at colluding with each other to conceal such negative emotions and experiences, in something like the way Kierkegaard suggests that clergy and parishioners collude with each other in Christendom? I don’t know. But I would bet that much of the persistent, irrational enthusiasm for online education has this secret source, i.e., no one feels anger, shame, or disappointment behind the safety of a computer screen.

My ‘Tintern Abbey’ day really did feel awful for everyone. When things we care about go badly, we pay an awful price in feelings of anger, shame, or disappointment. But sometimes it’s through feelings of anger, shame, or disappointment that one finds out that one actually does care, and that caring can even mean respecting the value of something one does not, in the present moment, actually feel. When students merely comply, perhaps they might also ask themselves whether they (really) care; when they excellently comply, it is much, much harder for this question to arise because everything appears to be working exactly as it should.

The same thing is true for the teacher. When students excellently comply with the tasks I assign, it is very hard for me to wonder whether my own teaching springs from care and for what. In my story, because of my anger I was willing to express to my students that ‘I didn’t want to be their teacher anymore.’ I wouldn’t have been able to follow through on this in the sense of walking away from my job. But I could very well have followed through in the sense of teaching the rest of the semester in a spirit of mere compliance with my assigned tasks. My ‘Introduction to Poetry’ students probably saved me from this fate by refusing to leave the room when I ordered them out. They also gave me food for future years by pushing me towards a more humble questioning about what it means to be a teacher.

For both students and teachers, then, powerful negative experiences may turn out to be quite important ones in the course of education. That’s something Wordsworth learned when he went back to see Tintern Abbey, and also something I learned from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey,’ and also something I learned from trying to teach it years ago, and also something I learned from trying to reflect upon this disappointing experience after reading Excellent Sheep. Apparently some lessons can only be re-learned and this, too, involves some shame.

It’s awful to feel shame. Who can stay there for long? When I look back on ‘Introduction to Poetry’ in my idle imagination, I prefer to see myself and my students as we were when we were all cooking with Wordsworth, the second time around – running free, manes streaming, or (to further jumble my metaphors) every one of us a Dorothy in the woods. You know, there was quite a lot of natural talent in that group!

This essay has been an effort to complete Deresiewicz’s case against ‘excellent sheep’ by finding some serious advantage in an educational situation that is not only non-‘elite’ but even lame. I described this advantage as the discovery of care. In my story, care is grasped from the jaws of carelessness precisely because the negative affects that lurk beneath many classroom experiences – feelings of anger, shame, or disappointment – exploded into the open.

Although the story may be somewhat unusual, is there anything very remarkable about the substance? For example, care (as the development of ‘new feelings, interests, or values’) is the fifth of six categories in L. Dee Fink’s taxonomy of ‘significant learning experiences’ (Fink, 2013: 36). My excellent follow-up class on Wordsworth also demonstrated Fink’s claim that ‘achieving any one kind of learning simultaneously enhances the possibility of achieving the other kinds of learning as well’ (Fink, 2013: 37) because new caring opened the possibility of serious learning about ‘Tintern Abbey,’ about poetry more generally, and most importantly about the human things that Wordsworth cared about in composing his poetry. Probably some students also learned how to learn (the sixth category in Fink’s taxonomy) insofar as they saw that if they could move past their initial boredom, they might find genuine interest in a text or artwork.

Fink’s view is that these significant educational experiences should be planned for. For this view, the significance of manifest lameness in my story has to be troubling. It would be bizarre to court negative feelings for the sake of the possibility of a redemptive moment, as it would be bizarre to press harder drugs on addicts in order to get them more quickly to rock bottom and so realize the necessity of personal change. From a systemic or institutional point of view, the proper concern is to set conditions that keep anger, shame, and disappointment at bay. This shows that there are limits to addressing the excellent sheep problem on the level of systems, tiers, or institutions. I tried to suggest this by appealing to Kierkegaard, for whom the institutionalized success of Christianity is itself a huge problem for Christians. Fink’s taxonomy is terrific … and if it were culturally ascendant, it would face an excellent sheep problem with a new generation of Finkian Thoroughbreds performing grand gestures of care.

As I mentioned, Deresiewicz follows his trenchant critique of the top institutions by taking one (baby?) step down the ladder, recommending the ‘second-tier – not second-rate – [American] liberal arts colleges’ as the best alternative to excellent sheep and the institutions they inhabit (Deresiewicz, 2014: 154). If the moral of my story were generalized, I seem to recommend going to the very bottom of the institutional heap or to wherever the classes are likely to be the lamest. But that’s not right. And Kierkegaard did not think that the solution to the problem of Christendom is that Christians should face lions.

In my story, I said that a number of students ‘who I already knew and liked had signed up’ for my poetry class. And when I got angry at their lameness, both my anger and their response to it were markedly personal. I felt that ‘I didn’t want to be their teacher anymore. What they were telling me by not moving, I believe, is that they didn’t accept that.’ If we want learning to be taken on in a personal way by students, if it is this above all that makes the difference between care and mere compliance, then the best condition for this is when the teacher is also present as a person – a personal (not necessarily personable!) person, so to speak, rather than a representative of a profession. When more than one person is present, you have the conditions for a relationship. The leadership of my institution consciously fostered this in a countercultural way. For example, at the beginning of the year, students and faculty went on a hiking excursion together … an overnight excursion in which faculty also stayed in the hostel! As you would expect, some faculty detested this.

In my hypothesis, the students refuse to leave my office because we have a relationship and it hurts them that I want to break it. The institution set favourable conditions for a relationship, but what ultimately happened was up to the persons in the room. When I told them to get the hell out of my office, some might have happily walked over to the pub; others to the library to do work that mattered more to their grades; others to the administration building to complain about my ‘verbal abuse.’ In the last situation, it would be important to have institutional leadership with some better idea of faculty-student relations than that the customer is always right. Nothing about second-tier, liberal arts institutions per se inoculates against any of these possibilities. Neither does anything about third, fourth, fifth, etc. tiers.

Within the classroom, the conditions that best favour education taken on in personal way are the ones that acknowledge the presence of persons within the education. For example, I write final essay questions quite late in the term in order to take account of what the persons taking the module seemed to care about, and especially anything that they and I cared about together. The institution needs to permit these late-appearing final questions. I must also ward off the students (often the ‘excellent’ ones) who clamour for the questions weeks in advance. Naturally, when education is experienced as a series of tasks to be complied with, students want to know the tasks as soon as possible. In response, I offer that they are collaborating in the formation of their own education and that each iteration of this module is different, as would be expected if persons mattered in education. Here is an example of one of these final questions, from a module I recently taught on the concept of love:

In this module, this lecturer found it striking that a number of students strongly identified respect with love. The students suggested not only that it was necessary to respect one’s beloved in order to then love him or her, as a kind of prerequisite, but that love and respect were intertwined or perhaps even identical. With reference to two or more of the texts and artworks we considered this semester, what is your view?