William Deresiewicz suggests that elite schools actually stunt your social and intellectual growth, and the dramatic hook he chooses to start the piece is his realization that he is incapable of making small talk with the plumber who has arrived to fix the pipes.
Okay. I disagreed with a LOT of the article, which maybe eventually I’ll blog about—but, today I just have one small question.
Why would I need to say anything to a plumber? While I certainly have an arrogant and elitist streak, it is not at all driven by things like how many degrees or type of occupation and I sure as fuck don’t believe test scores say anything about the value of a person. I can talk sports and pop culture no problem, I am perfectly confident that I could chat with the plumber, that I could learn something from the plumber, that the plumber is an intelligent person, that the plumber could probably school me on World War II via watching the History Channel and on my own time period via reading some recent biography of the Founding Fathers, but seriously?
I open the door, I say “hello, come on in. Thanks for coming, glad to see you. The problem is in the kitchen”, describe the symptoms, maybe ask if I can move anything out of the plumber’s way, and get out of his way and let him do his job. Why is small talk necessary?
Similarly, I offer the movers cold drinks, but I don’t try to chat. I point out the “Fragile” pile and I apologize for the distance from the door to the parking lot. Sure, I’ll certainly respond if they say something, and I’ll say more than “yes or no”, and I quite liked the movers I hired last summer and I think we did get a bit chatty, but I don’t remember initiating any small talk.
The Comcast man came to install my cable in the fall. We talked about where I would put the TV and how long I wanted him to cut the cord. Three men were in my apartment the other day redoing the cable. I think there may have been a small chat about my cats, because it was relevant to having strangers in the house and putting new holes in the walls.
I’m inclined to think that I am not presumptuous enough to assume people with a job to do want to hear me babble trivialities, but maybe I’m just rationalizing. I didn’t grow up with enough money that we ever hired plumbers, or movers, or paid for cable. Am I supposed to be starting small talk with all these people? This is a serious question—sometimes I think I’m being friendly when I’m not really. Are they leaving my house thinking, “wow, she was rude”?
23 June 2008 at 5:18 pm
Funny, I worry about this kind of thing too. I do the same thing you do when people have to come to my house to do work. I might offer them something to drink, but otherwise, I leave them alone to do their jobs. I kind of imagine that is the way most people handle these situations, regardless of their educational background. I think if I were the plumber/cable guy etc., I would usually prefer it that way. Get in, get out, move to the next job.
I would think they would only perceive you as rude if you conveyed that through your tone of voice or if you seemed overly demanding. Otherwise, quiet might be preferred for their work.
23 June 2008 at 7:56 pm
I guess I was raised a bit differently. My father always told me that you could likely learn things from everyone you met, and he modelled a remarkable behavior of being able to hear almost everyone – at work, in a pub, at a sporting event, in a shop, on a street.
With that skill he assembled a truly remarkable understanding of humanity, which I think truly helped him to understand theoretical ideas in a kind of context I often find missing in many of the people who now surround me on most days.
I am not as good as he was, but this ability to communicate, to hear, to not view the world as divided by ‘educational class’ is important to me.
Of course I have had plenty of the kind of jobs where I was the type of person you would want to “Get in, get out, move to the next job.” I always was amused, for example, when I was at one university, how if I arrived in a faculty office to fix their computer network connection I was treated one way (as an absolute non-person, so much so that hugely confidential things were said to others in front of me), but if I walked in the very next day to discuss a student’s technology concerns – coming with a different imprimatur – I was treated entirely differently (and wouldn’t be recognized).
Is that rude? I don’t know. Every one has the right to choose who to interact with. But is it an important set of missed opportunities? I think it is. And I think it severely damages everything from writing to social science research to medical research. Because I also figure that every voice I hear contributes to my fiction abilities. And every voice I hear and interact with enables me to improve my ability to do valid ethnography. And every voice I interact with enables me to assess research that I read, measuring it against my world of knowledge.
24 June 2008 at 12:54 pm
Yes, but last night my cabbie asked me what my MA thesis is about.
It is definitely not my elite (though emphatically non-Ivy, cute little nicknames for SLACs indicating the contrary notwithstanding) education that’s responsible for my having answered him amiably, accurately, and with something to which he would respond. (Okay, so the response was a tear about Catholics and the damage they have done to English Society — this guy seems to have had some dust-ups with some IRA types — but we had a good conversation about religion and history, even if we were coming at it from two different angles.)
But yes, Deresiewicz sounds like a tool. That’s not to say I disagree with him about Yale.
25 June 2008 at 4:55 am
I am with Dance about how I usually like to have interactions with most folks (I’m a misanthrope at heart) and I think it was exacerbated by living for 7 years in Boston while working on my PhD (and I do mean Boston–I didn’t go to Harvard and am not using “Boston” as the euphemism to cover up where I went to school (I went to BU). I don’t know if anyone has noticed this or not, but I have found this odd thing where, when I ask someone where they did their BA/MA/JD/PhD/MD they say they went to school in “Boston” and when I push further by saying something like, “Oh, I was in Boston too–were you at BC/BU/Emerson/UMass Boston?” they then confess that they went to Harvard. I can only assume that they do this so as not to seem that they are bragging, but what I sometimes feel like telling them is that technically they went to school in Cambridge and not Boston so they’re not really fooling anyone).
Anyway, sorry for the digression.
What I mean to say is that having left the more reticent environment of Boston for the more chatty environs of “The South” (I am well below the Mason-Dixon line) what I discovered is: if you don’t do small talk, you are perceived as one rude yankee. This is exacerbated if you are a woman–than you are breaking both cultural as well as gender codes.
I swear I was causing all sorts of offenses without meaning to because I failed to engage in chit chat with the checkout clerks at various stores, with the various Cable, Telephone, Home Repair people, with the bus driver, with pretty much anyone I had to interact with beyond passing people in the street, and even then, people made eye contact and smiled and said “Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening” more often than not.
So I’ve learned to adapt. I chat. I ask about weather or make a comment about a local current event that is fairly politically neutral or talk about the local sports teams or lament high gas prices. I do this because I don’t want to offend people and I think my ability to do this is because I am a functioning adult in this society and have realized that it’s appropriate to adapt to your situation.
I doubt that whether I had a PhD or not, or a BA or not, this would either impair or aid me in making small talk. I’m not saying that people who are bad at small talk should feel bad–some people are socially awkward and bad at small talk. But I don’t think it’s fair to pin it on your elite education.
25 June 2008 at 12:21 pm
I’m not sure the question is about “small talk” – the odd little meaninglessnesses which certain cultures use as ‘extended waves’ of recognition, though the issue of one’s ability to adapt does come in here.
I think what Deresiewicz is saying (literally, not just figuratively), is that he lacks both the language and cultural awareness skills needed to comprehend people unlike himself.
“I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.”
And I think he describes a truly important phenomenon. Not because ONLY an Ivy League education divides people (when I was a cop I was stunned by all the lingual and perceptual walls many cops built around their cohort – so much so as to be unable to communicate decently with their spouses), but because the extremes of higher education (be it most PhD programs or the Ivy League) do this so intentionally and so “well” while producing society’s supposed “leaders.” Leaders who are incapable of observing the world which they actually live in.
Observation requires a certain capability for true empathy. An observer must be able to be surprised. To gather unexpected data in unexpected ways from unexpected sources. But the training inherent in the Ivy League education (beginning with the very narrow group welcomed to these institutions) and, to a lesser but not insignificant extent, the training inherent in most post-graduate programs, limits this ability by tightly narrowing what is defined as knowledge, as authority, and as data.
The result is often this complete inability to see and to hear outside what one already expected to see and to hear.
25 June 2008 at 1:01 pm
Well, *my* question is about small talk. Other places where I don’t make small talk: at a doctor’s appointment. It’s got nothing to do with class at all.
Ira, you may be right that small talk signifies something bigger—I think the notion that it’s a elite education (Ivy or PhD) that kills it is dead wrong, though, and I think WD made a bad choice in hanging that issue (*if* that’s what he was getting at) on this vignette about his plumber. But I think it’s a badly argued essay all around.
I have occasionally demonstrated a striking blindness to the unexpected. I’ve been that way since I was seven, at my one-room alternative schoolhouse.
Jennifer, agreed about cultural norms. I am currently not below the mason-dixon, but I live in a town where the woman in front of me at the grocery line is telling the clerk all about her vacation, and I’m thinking “do they know each other?” After this happened six-seven times, I realized, no. People are just really chatty in this town. When I first moved there, everyone said hi to me passing on the street, and I remarked on it to a local friend, and she said, “well, they’ll stop if you make eye contact. But if you don’t give the nod, they will force you to acknowledge them by speaking.” Which I quite like, actually. But that’s not small talk.
I’m not arguing against organic conversation, freely volunteered, with random people of all stripes in whatever context. I also have told cabbies about my dissertation. It’s just the *obligation* of small talk in the middle of a business transaction that I find aggravating.
Jennifer, I believe the “Boston” thing was observed in the comments at a different blog—I’ll see if I can link it, as I was going to comment on something similar.
Neophyte, I went to basically the same sort of undergrad as you did. If you are looking for post topics, I’d be interested in the difference between elite and Ivy. I tend to lump them all together, myself.
3 July 2008 at 4:35 pm
I’m pretty perplexed by the whole thing, and I’m tempted to suspect WD of playing some Br’er Rabbit or perhaps diagnose him fairly far out along the autism spectrum.
As both Ira and Jennifer suggest, it’s a pretty elementary social skill to pay attention to others and work out their interactional cues and spheres of interest. The symbolic interactionists tell us that this dialectic is the very source of self. Not that you always get it right, but if you’re trying the feedback tends to be high quality and the process amicable.
I certainly do know people who through culture or brain chemistry tend to see others as functional objects rather than potential human interactants, but a due proportion of them are working class so I don’t see what Yale has to do with it. Isn’t this the content of much sexism, for example? Is Oprah a show for Ivy graduates? Yet I also know women who couldn’t interact their way out of a paper bag.
Rather than criticize the Ivy League briar patch, it might be worth looking more openly at the conditions that produce people whose intersubjectivity is impaired or undeveloped. Certainly power would have something to do with that, as feminists have long remarked about men and postcolonialists have long remarked about white imperialists.