Mon 30 Jul 2007
In the entry What’s the Matter with College?, NYT Magazine Deputy Editor Jim Schachter issues somewhat of a challenge to current undergrads:
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/.
Just wanted to promote this to the front page at this point; more later.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
”
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.
”
Oh, yes indeed, what a coup — because, as we all know, the world revolves around the NYTimes in its every form, especially the Magazine, and we should all covet publication there. ‘If ONLY I had a golden ticket such as a NYTimes Magazine byline, grandpa, THEN I could really call myself worldly and wise! And maybe even eventually get hired by the some upper cruster from Manhattan/Scarsdale!”
Would the Times possibly allow a departure from the de rigeur view of college as defined by experiences of overachievers living in the top 1% of the most expensive US institutions? (No, because such theoretical and unspeakable persons do not arbitrate US Culture, thank you very much.)
I’d rather let the material surface as it usually seems to. Perhaps we’ll get another detailed expose on the state of the Clinton marriage.
July 30th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
‘08,
First, fair enough. I had not wished to editorialize in this one, but I’d much rather see the NYT carry the perspective of students at Kansas, UCSF, Belmont, or the gods forbid, UNAM.
However, the NYT has recently covered issues at all those places. McClatchy’s Mexico correspondent is a WKU grad, hardly even second tier, and the WKU experience — an open-enrollment institution trying to establish first-rate ‘centers of excellence’, largely on the shoulders of the debt of students who will never graduate — is part of a larger story of ‘inequity’ that the NYT and Perlstein in particular, have tried to chronicle.
In fact, Belmont students are discussing these issues in the background right now. (UNAM kids are probably discussing al Quaeda in Mexico and Gore’s coming visit.) I don’t think that the reasons that these stories are not widely shared are those that you state– more that the NYT is starved for resources, the nature of media is rapidly changing, and people at the Belmonts and WKUs of the world often simply don’t realize that they can speak and act, and be covered in the NYT or the Tennessean for that matter.
I hear your frustration with the situation you describe, but I don’t entirely agree with your characterization; and my approach has come to be, ‘how and why did we get here, and, if we discover we don’t wish to be here, what does this teach us about what we can do to change?’
After that, what has to be done, for people such as yourself, to act to change the situation?
Publishing something good in the NYT, which perhaps represents something more than ‘experiences of overachievers living in the top 1% of the most expensive US institutions,’ seems to me a small but reasonable step– though it’s hardly all I have in mind.
July 31st, 2007 at 12:28 am
Ken: Thanks for the pointers on the state of coverage in the NYTimes for non-elite institutions. Yes, I’m venting frustration with a leaf blower instead of a whistled merry tune, as one might. I apologize for running roughshod over the Times.
I guess I’m just continually exhasperated at the power of an institution like the NYTimes and the elite North-Eastern establishment it champions (see below for what i view as a few recent examples) in this country. I’m also a bit jaded as to the idea that the Times would print something that didn’t fit into its preferred worldview, which is fine — that’s what an imprimateur is all about. That’s probably why a lot of people love it, like how they know they can find scads of ads for expensive camps for their overweight children upstate, in the classifieds. I resent the authority the Times is often given in the cultural arena because often, I think their portraits (which a lot of people read) give only cursory attention to non-elites, and this only furthers class divisions and strange caricatures of Americans both rich and not rich.
So that’s all my personal baggage. Your point about the Times trying hard in a changing world of media is an eloquent one, and is mirrored in the fact that they are doing this esay contest with MTV. (And I guess I should be happy that it is the Times partnering with MTV, instead of almost any other paper, because they are in fact more likely to have the time and money to publish a longer and more human set of essays than most other news outlets, regardless of whether they further class divisions or not).
From the essay calling for student essays, however, I have some specific questions.
Quoted:
QUOTE: “You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who, say, shared a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now, for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture - and those hip baby-boomer parents - take care of the problem.”
QUESTION: So what’s the problem again? And let me get this straight — because of the internet, people don’t discover independent films or books? What?
QUOTE: “Some of these kids, indeed, might end up having more of a “college” experience when they enter the workplace than beforehand. The workplace may be more surprising, and maybe even more creative.
Why aren’t people paying attention to the campuses? Because, as a discrete experience, “college” has begun to disappear.
”
QUESTION: Is the outlook on college today really this dramatic? The malaise Perlstein tries to describe at the end of this provocation to write is somewhat pathetic, and probably nothing of the sort in the minds of most kids in college. The ‘college’ experience of teens and young 20-somethings today, entering institutions by the droves, are indeed different from the college experieces of those who marticulated in past. But the implied negativity of this pitch seems possibly innapropriate.
Maybe they will be so desensitized by the internet to the drama of their disconnection from the tropes of education in the past (the 90s?) that they will skim this prelude to writing and entirely miss its slant, and go on to announce the fierce and pointed (perhaps empowering) learning experiences they are pursuing nationwide. Or, as Ken seems to hint, maybe they won’t write in at all, because who has heard of newspapers today… although that is too jaded, even I agree.
REFS: The New York Times and college articles — a few recent examples of how focused the institution is on the elite.
”
(THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 2-25-07; What a College Education Buys — Feb. 25, 2007)
“Parents nationwide — and even worldwide — are eager to pay up to $180,000 to get [a college education] for their children. A quarter of a century ago, even the top Ivy League schools were a bargain, at $10,000 a year, but they recieved fewer applications than they do now.”
(For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too - April 1, 2007)
“Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.”
(A Great Year for Ivy League Colleges, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them - April 4, 2007)
July 31st, 2007 at 9:27 am
yawn ‘08,
As much as I, like Ken, agree with the thrust of your argument that the media represents elites more than it should, this picking on the NY Times seems to have been a bad target. To wit, the essay is to challenge the writer of that (terrible) essay waxing nostalgia for a long lost time of college before the masses ruined it (to be a little oversimplistic/harsh). Perhaps what they’re looking for is exactly what you claim to want…perhaps they pray they get submissions not from Yale but rather from WKU or Kansas or a community college to blast through the elitist pretensions of its readerships?
That essay was written by an outsider writer, not by the Times, remember.
As for your references…the Newton article was taken from a book a writer is working on about overachievers. So that was a particular interest of a particular writer. The quote above that one is applicable to all private colleges…practically all of them are now 180,000+ sticker prices.
Perhaps your frustrations most successfully should be presented in a response essay. Then again, you’re at Williams, so that’d be furthering the problem of elitism you have. An interesting conundrum!
July 31st, 2007 at 1:41 pm
“As for your references…the Newton article was taken from a book a writer is working on about overachievers. So that was a particular interest of a particular writer. The quote above that one is applicable to all private colleges…practically all of them are now 180,000+ sticker prices.
That essay was written by an outsider writer, not by the Times, remember.
”
… except that the Times does not have to give practically endless amounts of time and space in its pages to these ‘particular interests of particular writers.’ I guess it’s a marketing decision, probably in the interest of its readers. I think we should be able to judge a newspaper/magazine on its editions, whether its writers are staff, solicited, or accepted from submission.
(note name update, which now that I’ve written way more than I anticipated, I thought I should make slightly less obnoxious