There’s too much nonsense in this Ivy-bashing essay from The American Scholar to dismantle it all in detail. It’s especially telling, though, how the author starts out promoting trendy ideas about “different intelligences” (”social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite”) only to end up tsk-tsking pityingly at students who socialize with each other too often and in ways of which he doesn’t approve, at the expense of the profound solitude necessary for the true intellectual life:
So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.
Well, maybe there are different social intelligences. Did he ever think of that?
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