Fri 20 Jul 2007
In the aftermath of a spasm of Oberlin-induced rage (and who among us hasn’t had one of those?), Manhattan media gossip site Gawker yesterday proposed to identify America’s Most Annoying Liberal Arts College. The good news? Williams didn’t even make the preliminary list, nor was it written into the final ballot today.
No more write-ins please–sorry, Skidmore! — this is our list and we’re sticking to it. To get you started, we turn to the immortal words of commenter LOLCait, who helpfully defined liberal arts colleges for us: “In the form it’s being used here, it’s a four-year liberal leaning, usually in a small town, college with no grad programs, that rich kids go to feel free and take peyote and wander around campus barefoot and shrieking into the night “I’m a real person!” and then graduate and abandon it all for a good job, only to relive it on screened in porches years later when they find an old joint pressed into a copy of the Stranger, so they toke it even though it’s stale and they remember a little bit but then go to bed and wake up just the same as they were the day before.” All right then! To the colleges!
Wesleyan, Bennington and Hampshire all show up, though. Vote early and often!
July 20th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
From what I can tell, “Most Annoying Liberal Arts Colleges” is another way to say “Colleges Most Full of Rich Kids Who Don’t Want To Admit It.”
It’s strange to see that discredited old Marxist idea of false consciousness pop up on Ephblog.
July 20th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
With all due respects, these barnyard antics belong to those prestigious institutions where their student populations resemble the adolescent peregrinations seeking crass expression. Where the admissions department committees find artless alternatives to difficult choces.
July 20th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Wow, the three colleges my father wouldn’t let me apply to all showed up on the list: Brown (which he graduated from, because, “The administration can’t balance its budget”), Oberlin (”Populated by a bunch of self-righteous Congregationalists”), and Reed (”A bunch of hippie radicals” [this was the 1960s]). Apparently a man ahead of his time.
July 21st, 2007 at 12:06 am
I’m not surprised that Williams did not make the short list. For the most part, it’s alums are highly regarded and well-liked; at least that’s been my experience. I think that Williams has a way of knocking the edges off folks who arrive a little too full of themselves. Obviously, everyone can name exceptions, but I think that Williams often does wonders reshaping the few frosh who arrive as insufferable jerks into pretty likable folks. Being in small, tight-knit community of super-talented– yet generally caring– students can have that effect…then again, maybe it’s just the refreshing mountain air working its magic.
July 21st, 2007 at 12:17 am
Discredited? Oh, Petre! Tamti nenii praavda, ne? Kde, kdo?
In this case, the ideological (supra-structural) expressions would be in line with the class interests of those who hold them, thus, while ‘deceptive’ or ‘illusionary,’ not exactly false in the senses forwarded by Messers. Marx, Engles, … Smith, etc.
Such individuals never having exactly been part of the flock of ‘Marxists,’ of course.
As for ‘discredited…’ in a world where a penny-commodity such as a liter of water can be repackaged and sold at dollars per gallon… where electronics and ceramics and textiles that cost pennies or a few dollars to produce and deliver, can be sold for tens to hundreds to thousands of dollars… where unions and effective guilds and state regulation can raise the cost of a simple addition to a faculty building to half a million, or the cost of a new library and offices to well over a hundred million…
Nothing quite ‘false,’ however, in a ‘class’ of individuals with a narrow band of economic and social privileges, living amid an increasingly hostile world, disguising their true identity… unless, of course, should they…
But as for I, I am for the idea that all consciousness is ‘false,’ illusion, ‘maya,’; just some more illusionary than others.
July 21st, 2007 at 1:57 am
I got the impression, from reading the descriptions of the schools (apart from a friend currently at Bard I don’t have experience with people from any of them), that Williams wasn’t on the list because the students aren’t a bunch of hippies/hippie wannabes.
July 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Mr. Thomas:
Tamti nenii praavda, ne? Kde, kdo?
Charming Ken, how about this:
Penis parlor pumpkin poop, kudoo voodoo psst kamloop
How’s that for literary license?
July 21st, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Very few Williams students would list their occupation as “a carpenter, an east village radio dj, cory arcangel’s assistant, possibly a contemporary art auction house slave and soon to be a street art exhibition curator”. And I say this as a Williams grad living in the east village.
“Shadowy hedge fund or ibank gazillionaire-wannabe” would be more typical of our school.
July 21st, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Ha! Williams name was mentioned in the comments section of the original post. And trust me, Williams is not as well liked as you’d like to think. I’ve seen comments threads on other blogs dedicated to how much people don’t like Williams. Still, assuming that we’re well-liked is very Williams of you.
July 21st, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Gotta agree that it’s no surprise that Ephs don’t appear on this list. After recruiting for my firm at Amherst, Middlebury and Williams, I can attest that Williams alums are generally as personable as they are accomplished. In terms of personal appeal, the Middlebury crowd would be second, followed by the Lord Jeffs.
It appears that a factor nominating many of these schools is a lack of regard for the quality of their intellectual capacity, in additional to a high degree of pretentiousness. When pollees adopt those standards, you won’t be seeing Williams on that list.
Now, don’t ask me about the occasional Trinity stooge, whom Daddy’s connections has managed to squeeze in the door for a prelim look-over…now those guys are annoying by dint of their sheer stupidity and sense of entitlement. A “Trinity” has a certain unfortunate connotation, not only in my office, but in many others in my field here in NYC.
July 21st, 2007 at 8:55 pm
No, the reason you won’t be seeing Williams on the list is because it isn’t filled with enough “hipsters” who grow up and move to Williamsburg. The reason why these schools are considered annoying according to the Gawker readership is because they tend to think they’re the shit because the they went to X school.
Williams and Amherst were listed in the original comments several times because they are both filled with people who think they’re the shit because they went to Williams or Amherst. Swarthmore made the final list for reasons that are beyond me and the only thing sparing Williams and Amherst from making the list is Wesleyan having more hipster/hippie types to our preppies.
If this contest was run again and the criteria involved the perception of pretentious people thinking they are better than everyone else, I’m sure that Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, Trinity and even Wesleyan would make that list.
Most of the people voting didn’t go to any of the schools nominated nor spent any significant amount of time at the schools, it’s all based on perception and I’m sorry to say, Williams sometimes has the perception of being filled with smart-jock-rich-preppy jackasses.
July 21st, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Dear EphAlum:
Perhaps in New England the Middle Atlantic States, and knowledgeable admissions counsellors of upper tier high schools throughout the US, but in the rest of the country, it’s another community college.
It is not well known enough to be annoying. In other words, familiarity breeds contempt.
July 21st, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Dear X,
You do realize that Gawker is a primarily Manhattan tabloid blog and that most of the readership is from the East Coast, right? And yeah, since I’m not from the East Coast, I’m well aware of how few people know jack about Williams. You could actually say the same thing about Wesleyan, Oberlin, Reed, Bennington, and every other school that made that list. So, really, your point about Williams isn’t really unique to us.
July 21st, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Ken:
I think that “false consciousness” is an appropriate term. That is, essentially, the charge being leveled against all of these “annoying” schools. It’s the force behind the term “Trustafarian.” What outrages the “average Joe” about such places is that people are thinking themselves to be something that they are not.
This isn’t limited to grungy second-hand attire - the students at several of these schools are criticized (moreso in the comments section) for engaging in demonstrations for leftist causes. Your average socialist revolution would, one thinks, run counter to the “class interests” of these students, yet they may support one anyway. Labeling schools as “annoying” for being rife with such activities is akin to labeling them “annoying” for having the wrong understanding of their social situation.
This is “annoying” in a way that Williams is not. Williams students, by and large, fail to question the bases of their social good fortune in even the most superficial manner. The contempt I have heard openly expressed for the surrounding communities - North Adams especially - goes beyond the bounds of good taste. Is it annoying? I think it’s fucking outrageous. But at least it’s not “false consciousness” - and that, I believe, is the reason Williams is not on the list.
We’re obnoxious, smug bastards, but at least we’re smug about our wealth, rather than our striving for subculture hipness.
July 21st, 2007 at 11:51 pm
“at least we’re smug about our wealth”
And the half that aren’t (because they don’t have any) are typically unassuming and somewhat self-deprecating.
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:31 am
“How’s that for literary license?”
anonymous @ 3:18: Apparently, you’re not familiar with the Russian language (I doubt that EphBlog is set up for posts in Cyrillic).
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:54 am
Noons,
LOL at that. I wasn’t being entirely serious, but appreciate the serious response. I hope you’ll allow me to beat around the bush a bit, as I have nothing better to offer — WARNING about long-winded rambling pre-attached…
First, there’s something particularly odd and insular about the ‘village’ mentality of Williams– a phenotype of arrogance, if you will, in relation to a variety of issues and topics, that has a tendency to emerge only in the most provincial of situations. Which is to say something like, in the example of contempt you mention above, –and of course in much more– Williams manages to be one of the most ignorant places I’ve been on the face of the earth.
In fact, occasional moments of Williams’ blindness and darkness dismay me as much as much as the darkness and ignorance that still thrives in the US South, though this isn’t the time to begin an exploration of specifics or to spin the fiction of their common socio/historical roots.
Neither is it likely useful to go over any history of ‘false consciousness’ and parallel concepts… except to say that the traditionally ‘Marxist’ version is a ’self-conception’ which betrays one’s own interest. In the 18th Brumaire and elsewhere, Marx … well, I might say, spins a political tale that is all-to-relevant for our time… in which consciousness and representation and the course of state, are all-too-easily distorted and corrupted by seeming ’self-interest’ until … there’s nothing left.
‘Trustafarians’ are indeed “annoying”… I’m thinking of the specific sense of being annoyed by the young Marin-county kids in $500 ripped jeans on Telegraph in Berkeley, hitting me up for money as I walked to teach my 8am section. (I also remember one Williams woman, not on financial aid, who took one summer to live homeless in People’s Park).
This is “false” in the sense of a pretension– I might mention the left-leaning graduate students and professors who style themselves as working class– but not immediately a “false consciousness” in the ‘pop-culture’ sense of the term as a ’self-consciousness,’ where said consciousness ‘betrays’ the ‘actual’ interest of a ‘class’ such as the poor, women, blacks, or in Fanon’s phrase, ‘the Wretched of the Earth…’
Not that this quite rises to Fanon’s level. But in fact, I think there is a sort of deceptive falseness in the left-professoriate: a belief that ‘the system’ is corrupt, that institutions of power and wealth are equally ‘evil,’ and that rejecting them, in a sort of monasticism, is a sort of salvation.
The belief in the corrupt nature of institutions and authority is in itself fundamentally false, and contains two contradictions: generally, according to their view of political economy, the professoriate serves the political-economic regime which they imagine; moreover, they abandon the classic justification for the contemplative life, which is preparation for action.
Such are Faustian bargains.
Now… Williamsburg vs. Berkeley vs, Polonia vs. East Nashville vs the 5th arrondissment, themselves vs. a central street in Fontainebleau or Ghent or Shenzhen… that’s casting a bit of a wide net (if a personal one), but its hard to miss that the ‘Trustafarian’ style is part of a larger, global pattern of styles… which, apart from their
…tend to a search for the ‘authentic,’ as does the return to native and local languages…
Let me take the side turn: I was thinking earlier today of a comment of Guy Creese’s– I’m about to misquote: a friend at Williams asking him, “how can you stand to wear that [mass-produced] stuff?”
In fact the word Guy used was much more — authentic. What is authenticity? I risk boring you–
Trustafarians: insomuch as they are a loose ‘class’ which ‘clothes’ itself in the trappings of poverty and limitations– while making a ‘virtue’ of it– they are at least annoying and ‘false
from the point of view of those who live with actual limitations. They also have an annoying tendency to adopt ‘trendy’ ideas and self-styling, such as ‘grunge’ and ‘crunchy’ and ‘emo’ (which I hear is already passe), a fetishisation of the ‘exotic’ in particular forms such as ‘indie’ music, ‘native’ dance and items, etc., and the rejection of quite useful tools of modern life (such as medicine and antibiotics as ‘poisonous’), which, in point of fact, are usually quite false…
Regardless, in the ‘Trustafarians,’ I’m not sure there’s not a good dose of the kind of pretension that came with the transfer of the trilled Russian ‘r’ to Parisian French in the 1870s… because, to be ‘hip,’ you just had to be able to pronounce your r-s like the Russian nobles. Substance zero, conspiciously displaying your ‘wealth’ by trying to be something you are not, ‘priceless,’ if I may employ somewhat of an anacronism.
Is that quite ‘false consciousness?’ Generally I don’t think so. Amid this worldwide group… certainly there are those ‘who believe…’ that we must abandon technology, follow the ‘native ways,’ rebel against the state, resist ‘corporate’ life, and a great deal of other things ranging from the serious to serious bunk. And there are certainly genuine seekers and believers, and the lost… a great deal of the lost… but in general, the truly false and annoying, the people we instinctively mention because they are false and annoying, aren’t false and annoying because they think they’re something they aren’t, but, because they’re false and annoying. Which is to say, because they have a trust fund and wear second-hand dresses from GoodWill, trying to appear as if they couldn’t afford anything else.
I’m not quite that dismissive, actually: there’s a sort-of out-group phenomenon going on in the complain, as when a WKU student protests “I’m getting as good an education as at Vandy, without paying…”, and this tends to over-amplify the complaint. One might even mention that a wealthy trust-fund baby ‘dressing down’ is often a clumbsy attempt to not flaunt wealth, even at modesty and restraint. Behind the obnoxious, there’s often someone looking for identity and purpose, if not…
But still, in the end, an attempt to package something (’wealth’) as other than it is (or seems). Or even: to be defined by something else, than…
Oh, but… let’s not hide the other secret. The Trustafarians and their cohort are not, by-and-large, much more than, well… not-so-comfortably upper or just-plain middle class, in a time when the advantages of that ‘wealth’ are largely being eroded by changes in the cost of housing, credit, goods, health care…
In fact, if they have much in the way of trust funds, they are likely being eroded by tuition payments, a most questionable investment. In fact, I have from Morty that there is no demonstrable advantage in spending… but let’s not repeat that too loud.
As for the leftist revolution comment… well let’s leave that for a bit. I am (I think), after all, the only one around here listed by the State department as a member of a revolutionary, left-leaning insurgency opposed to a US-aligned government… makes for interesting debri… er, interrogations when returning to the States.
As for the Williams students (who, as far as I can tell, escape the list above because they are taken to be obnoxious, arrogant, unpquestioned assholes instead of merely annoying): if the basic premise is that the ‘Trustafarians’ are attempting to ‘appear to be something they are not,’ there’s a presumption that they are trying to avoid something by that appearance– namely, what we’ve been referring to as ‘wealth’ or ‘class’. I don’t buy that– perhaps it’s just bunk– but if that’s our criteria, how do Williams student’s fare?
[...]
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:23 am
I missed one point of including Guy’s comment: you can have almost any garment custom-tailored to your measurements in Shenzhen for under $50US, usually far less. Couple this with the Internet, and the possibility of dropping items into a consolidated FedEx shipment that will reach the US within a week of placing the order… and I think you can move from ‘mass production’ to ‘mass customization.’
Think of petite sizes…
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:58 am
Ken:
I must admit that you have outdone me; you cast a wide net indeed. Most of what you have said is very interesting to me - I am currently writing notes for a thesis on Walter Benjamin and Marx’s 18th Brumaire that in all likelihood will make me unemployable outside of the academic industry.
And at the same time, I’m employed by a major energy company. There’s certainly no simple way out of the dialectic - I sometimes think that the best one can do is to recognize the contradiction. But what was it that Adorno said on resignation?
My point, as bizarre as it may seem, in bringing up false consciousness was to illuminate some of the nature of these criticisms. The label of “annoying” is directed to those schools wherein students attempt, in various inconsequential ways, to subvert the established social order through which they gained privilege. Thrift shops, protest marches, consciousness-raising drugs, oh my.
The inevitable comment is that this “revolution” is nothing more than a phase, and that the liberal artists will, in the end, have to put down the bongs and put on the suits. This is usually said with a triumphal air, the ghost of a gleeful cackle.
People are happy about this disillusionment, this rapprochement with the naked dialectic of society. It’s not just joy in seeing hypocrisy exposed but satisfaction at seeing “false consciousness” stripped away. The kids grow up and learn to tell friends that they’re buying in, not selling out - or, to put it another way, the wealthy close their ranks once more, ideological qualms set aside.
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:02 am
Folks, the fact is Williams isn’t on the list, and all the speculation and innuendo as to why it isn’t doesn’t amount to jack. Fact: Williams isn’t on the list. Anything else is just so much mental masturbation bereft of any consensus.
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:50 pm
… And welcome to EphBlog! Glad to see you’re already up to speed.
Also, does anyone here actually live in Brooklyn? I’m moving there on the first of the month, after which I’ll be able to offer dispatches from the front.
July 22nd, 2007 at 8:13 pm
I am less likely to concur with that; the paragraph ‘volume’ of my thinking outloud does not equal substance.
Wide, and in the form above, rather filled with large, ratty holes…
I’m not entirely sure, as that’s not my experience. Half the execs I meet are more than intrigued by the idea of a degree in Rhetoric… and struggle fairly hard to understand ‘the world’ in some of these terms.
Got you on the use(s) of false consciousness, standard and otherwise. My thoughts on the new ‘youth culture’ are less coherent than the above, but it seems to me clear that the ‘farian’, ‘return to nature’ (counter) cult(ure) spans classes, and involves a lot of downward economic / class mobility as well… and you have a lot of 40-somethings who didn’t adopt the suit, and work as somewhat grungy $40k environmental lawyers… or sell niche insurance out of their home office and make $500k and still live a ‘fringe’ lifestyle…
Anecdote… both taken from ‘82 people I met over reunion. ‘But’ I think we tend to overemphasize the narrative and choices you present, as comforting as it may be…
Since I don’t have an easy conclusion, I’ll mention that a couple film teams just dropped in to do editing and script work here in a cafe in West Nashville… which is part of a very different economy than twenty years ago…
But I’ve got to run…
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:19 pm
The list covers a lot of ground. For example, I cannot think of two more dissimilar schools, by every imaginable measure, than Bard and Swarthmore.
It seems to me that the only unifying theme among the selections seems to be schools that are not preppy enough for the Gawker selection committee.
To me, the most annoying liberal arts college in the country, hands down, would be Washington & Lee. The highest percentage of white students, highest percentage of non-financial aid students, and highest percentage of fraternity membership. Quite the trifecta. Little wonder that the guidebooks call it “The last bastion of the southern gentleman who can hold his liquor and is damn proud of it”. Hard to imagine more annoying than that.
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:51 am
Bring back fraternities!