Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class by Ross Gregory Douthat (Hyperion, 288 pp., $24.95) You've finished Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, and you want more. More alcohol-soaked frat parties, more college boys and girls "hooking up," more about America's co-eds stretching their minds and their bodies until, like silly putty, they reach a breaking point. If that's the case, then Ross Douthat's Privilege is just the--well, wait a second. Actually, Douthat's college memoir doesn't mention any frats, since there is virtually no Greek life at Harvard, from which Douthat graduated in 2002. And even though Douthat drank a lot of alcohol, he didn't drink to dangerous excess. Perhaps as a result, the sex inside these Ivy-trellised pages is mostly imagined. Parents shouldn't fear. Douthat's Harvard is not Wolfe's fictional Dupont.
Which may be the point. When Douthat arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1998, he was filled with ambition, literary and psychological--"At Harvard I would be happy," he writes. "At Harvard I would be cool." He spoke too soon. Imagining, as he puts it, the "Harvard of our unrequited dreams," upon enrollment Douthat discovered instead that he had entered a sprawling degree factory: an ancient, teeming series of buildings in which ambitious overachievers made the connections, secured the internships, and finagled the jobs that allow them to ascend ever upwards.
Harvard used to be the place where the country's WASP elite got an education. But, taking a page from David Brooks, Douthat argues that the aristocratic elite has been replaced by a meritocratic one. "For today's Harvard students"--and, one hastens to add, for students at elite schools in general--"there is nothing accidental or random about their position in society. They belong exactly where they are--the standardized tests and the college admissions officers have spoken, and their word is final."
This leads to arrogance, to a sense of--you guessed it--privilege, but it may also lead to confusion. Sometimes the meritocratic system doesn't work. Sometimes its beneficiaries become alienated, even corrupt. Douthat explores these and other issues, and has a lot of fun along the way, in his well written and insightful book.
-- Matthew Continetti
Chloe Does Yale by Natalie Krinsky (Hyperion, 258 pp., $19.95) The sex at Harvard may be "mostly imagined" but, according to Natalie Krinsky, no one does much else at Yale. Chloe, Krinsky's alter ego, is the kind of girl who has been on the Booty Cam at Toad's Place more often than she has been to her financial markets class. Chloe, like Natalie, writes a gossipy sex column for the Yale Daily News. But (wait for the chick-lit twist . . . ) she is actually not sexually confident at all, and really only wants to find love.
Fortunately, the book's cover is neon pink, which virtually guarantees a happy ending. But before she gets the guy, Chloe ponders the big questions in life. For example: "Natural Light [beer]--neither natural nor very light; discuss amongst yourselves" and "Quite frankly, when was the last time you hooked up with someone who respected you, much less loved you? High school?"
Krinsky's project is not so different from Tom Wolfe's, or Ross Douthat's. Why, she asks, does everyone who shows up at college act like a nymphomaniac lunatic for four years, utterly fail to attend class or read books, and yet still get to run the country?
--Katherine Mangu-Ward