Like a little town, any school’s world is a corral, and those within are cattle mooing at or about each other—old beef and young beef. If you are a cow, you can’t see beyond the corral, even if you were out there once, in another life, or yesterday. If you’ve forgotten how to be a free-range cow, you’ll never re-learn.
About schools with real or imagined prestige: How many places outside Wall Street and the Mayo Clinic elevate a pedigree to such dubiously high status?
Well, I guess I do it too. (Therefore, it must not be entirely irrational or elitist . . . ). I’ve conceded to myself that Harvard does pronounce and produce something that Bowling Green State University does not, and my closest friends and I went to the Bowling Greens of the world.
Mind you, none of that means I like these facts about the world or myself. In fact, I’ve gone through periods of collecting coffee mugs, T-shirts, and the like from out-of-the-way places with decidedly un-blue blood: Chadron State, Bloomsburg, Minot State, Centre College (spelling noted). I was 20,000 leagues into reverse elitism.
A year or so ago, I was on the Yale campus, and even as an old fart, I was intimidated. What 18-year-old thinks that he or she belongs at such a place? Is entitled to such a place? Will contribute to such a place? Will not foul the air of such a place? Will not leave such a place all puffed about nothing (or something--puffed is puffed)?
Why don’t those freshmen flee to Morehead State? What Yale professor fails to see through the pretense and pedantry and accomplishment of such a place, where the very stones in the buildings pronounce Pretense, Pedantry, Self-Congratulation. And achievement. And life of the mind.
Oh, the donkeys I have known from the Ivies and their ilk.
Oh, the dingbats I have known from Swampside State and Foothills U.
Recently, my primary care physician referred me to a dermatologist (for a minor problem). The new guy had a Ph.D. as well as an M.D. from, let’s say Cal Tech and Johns Hopkins. It mattered. My doctor's recommendation mattered more, but Dr. Newbie's pedigree also mattered, and I hate that. If it weren’t my body, I’d have wanted him to fail. But of course, it was my body.
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