Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently caused a stir when he referred to American universities as “indoctrination mills” and called President Barack Obama a “snob” for encouraging all youth to attend college.
With these comments, he has added to the canon of populist rhetoric against higher education that can be traced all the way back to this country’s inception.
As Duke students, we benefit from of one of the institutions of which Santorum speaks so critically. As such, we are among those who should listen most closely.
We should take away at least two things from Santorum’s comments. By attacking America’s colleges, Santorum is affirming that these institutions are fostering critical thinking in a way that poses a threat to his conservative, anti-intellectual values. This is good, for it means that universities are doing their job well.
But there is also an unfortunate kernel of truth in his comments: While there are many unfounded reasons to attack higher education, universities do play a role in generating these perceptions. At many of America’s top colleges, students are told that they are the “best and brightest,” will attain fame and fortune and that they absolutely deserve to be there.
This is certainly the case at Duke. Consider Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag’s speech at the Freshman Convocation ceremony this past Fall. In it, he told the Class of 2015 that they had beaten out more students for admission than ever before in Duke’s history; said, with a playful smirk and chuckle, that their Nobel prizes and billion-dollar fortunes would “take care of themselves;” and guaranteed that the admissions committee had not erred by admitting any of them.
Guttentag meant well—Duke is home to many exceptional people, and Convocation is supposed to be congratulatory and inspirational. But statements like these are symptomatic of a systematic ill in higher education that is reflective of deeper class divisions: a sense of smugness and entitlement.
At elite colleges across the country, the implicit message is that students there are better and more deserving than students elsewhere. This message is fraught with difficulties. SAT scores, which are heavily weighted in admissions decisions, are strongly correlated with family wealth. More generally, those from the bottom income quartile in the U.S. represent a mere 3 percent of students at the top 150 colleges ranked by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Although affirmative action policies have done much to increase racial diversity at these schools, socioeconomic diversity is still a serious problem.
Many—though certainly not all—of us got into schools like Duke partly because we were born into families and circumstances that advantaged us since birth: private schools, the money to afford SAT tutors, parents who went to college. Nor must we be fooled into thinking that attending these schools and having access to the benefits they provide makes us intrinsically better than anyone else. Intelligence is not correlated with moral superiority.
Our pride should be tempered by the humility that comes with the knowledge that we are, whether you want to admit it or not, lucky to be here and the conviction that our privilege should be used in the service of society. And to those like Santorum, lay off the political rhetoric and work toward productive reform of the college admissions system that encourages greater socioeconomic diversity.
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