I’m tempted.

Rambling, generally badly written essay - D+ quality.

article turns on a “false equivalence.”

“College” is at best poorly defined as “anecdotal experience(s) of the author’s at Chicago in the ’70s.”

I thought it was rather disappointing.

“For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago — as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992,”

Otherwise, anecdotal nature of evidence noted.

my apologies for assuming this windbag was a boomer.

I looked at the essay again and I agree with the above comments … all the more reason for current Ephs to pen a rebuttal, as I imagine plenty could write something more compelling.

that he isn’t a boomer makes it all the worse.

Had he read even a single book about the history of colleges, thought why the common application might be a good thing (for applicants not astute on how to play the admissions game, it’s much better), or an ethnography of college done even before his time in college, perhaps he wouldn’t have written such a poor essay with a flawed premise.

At least a boomer would have been excused for his/her nostalgia for the 60s…but who really wishes they were back in 88-92?

Dana Carvey.

… and M.C. Hammer

What a windbag! I kept waiting for it to end.

If the Times really wants to get submissions, they should offer a scholarship for the strongest essay. Replying to this sort of messy opinion piece just isn’t worth the time of most students — unless they are so heavily interested in the history and philosophy of education that they find they can’t keep their keyboards silent.

“Chicago is replacing its idiosyncratic “Uncommon Application”…(The new one would never have caught Doug Mitchell in its net: there is no space for listing favorite books.)”

When I applied to Chicago with the Uncommon App there was nothing about a reading list. Although for Davidson I had to provide one as a supplement to the Common App.

There was such a question on the application in ‘88 (UChic was among my choices). The essay’s description of life at Chicago seems a little overwrought and overdone, as well as inaccurate, “if I may say so.”

“Despite its many flaws–” including being almost entirely stuck in the United States, and an odd imaginary and wish-full re-visioning of the 60s onto ‘88-’92– and perhaps as function of those flaws– the essay “seems to me” to characterize some of our period’s defining characteristics, even if the overall thesis fails.

Wishing to be Berkeley in the 60s, in fact…

The essay also provides the ego-affirming indication that there may be worse windbags than I…

The overall thesis of the essay does not fail. It did not take long for the non conformism found on college campuses to become ‘marketalized’; unfortunately with this it also lost its intellectual founding.

http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/

‘anon’:

The overall thesis of the essay does not fail.

Well, insomuch as the essay fails to define an overall thesis, I suppose you are correct.

However, there is a strong flirtation with something like, “college should be more or less like my personal experience of the University of Chicago from ‘88-’92, as I have embellished it in the years since, …, and which conforms to the Ideal of Liberal Berkeley in the 60s as the ad-hoc, definitional foundation of everything good in the world.”

This trope, while in its variations quite common throughout the academy, is largely invalidated by any reference to what are commonly known as ‘facts,’ although, admittedly, a large proportion of subscribers to the trope except themselves from “reality testing” with phrases such as “I study texts, not events.”

It did not take long for the non conformism found on college campuses to become ‘marketalized’; unfortunately with this it also lost its intellectual founding.

There are at least two premises from the article within the above; depending on how one phrases them, …

In the 50s often I and many others just plain goofed off, but we didn’t try to glorify or justify it as anything other than what it was - namely, undisciplined, aimless, lazy hedonism.

“Undisciplined, aimless, lazy hedonism!” Perhaps a new slogan for EphBlog!

‘Marketalized’?

Hello unnecessary neologize much?

The Essay is like a stereotyped demonstration of the defects of the vague left- it doesn’t offer firm prescriptions (or even descriptions), just a vague indictment of how inadequate the present day is for a lack of ’spirit’ or something similar. Ugh.

I’m the deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine responsible for this essay contest. I really hope you will take your arguments with Rick Perlstein to the next step and submit an essay in response. The deadline is Aug. 6. No, we’re not giving out a scholarship to the winner. But the best essay will be published in our Sept. 30th issue, and the runners-up online. Any of you who are aspiring writers can, I think, see the value even at this late date in history of being published in The New York Times Magazine. All the details are at http://nytimes.com/essay/.