They aren’t doing this to themselves.
This week, articles in the New York Times and The Atlantic pointed to the extraordinary toxicity of Ivy league institutions, namely Yale. These stories illustrate a culture poisoning us all.
In The Atlantic, Yale junior Rachel Shin writes of the absurd competitiveness of extracurriculars at Yale and other elite universities. Students who have spent eighteen years hacking away at themselves and their peers to fight their way in now find they have to complete 10-page applications and multiple rounds of auditions and interviews just to volunteer or talk about politics or magic with friends. And the vast majority fail to get in.
University administrators are confused about how to stop this, Shin writes. After all, they said they’ve repeatedly asked students to relax their standards and be kinder to themselves and each other. But those requests fall on deaf ears.
“The students,” Shin argues, “are doing this to themselves.” By which she means they’re doing what the system has taught them to do. “Students, fueled by insecurity, feel the need to over-justify their worthiness,” she continues. “And so they impose endless hierarchies on one another.”
Which is why, as a former professor myself, I find the protests from administrators appalling. Feigning confusion or blaming students deflects from the culture of scarcity, competition, aggression, and self-mutilation students have been socialized into. The culture that drives the entire American meritocracy, in which institutions like Yale play a decisive role.
As if to punctuate the point, the next day, the New York Times reported on a class action lawsuit, also at Yale, forcing the university to take students’ mental health seriously. Before, students with significant mental illnesses had withdraw and reapply—and risk losing health insurance and their future—instead of having the option to take mental health leave or study part-time.
Or to put it more plainly, elite schools benefit from having carefully curated and self-pruning bouquets of ultra-high achievers, yet become flummoxed and cruelly inflexible when those same young people collapse under the very pressure the schools have created.
This problem isn't confined to Yale or other elite schools. Because those young people graduate, taking their unresolved trauma with them into positions of leadership where they recreate the violence. Because schools and organizations throughout American society and across the world emulate the culture of "excellence" elites set.
Is it any wonder why we’re all burned out?
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