BY AARON BARLOW

Yale is not college. What goes on there has little relevance to life on the majority of American campuses. Pundits across the country who write on education need to put this on little notecards and place them by their bedsides so that they can read them when they wake each morning. That way, they might refrain from nonsense like this: “Anyone who has followed the news from college campuses over the past few years knows they are experiencing forms of unrest unseen since the late 1960s.”

In 1969 and 1970, I was a student at Utica College, not exactly part of the ivies. After the Kent State and Jackson State killings, we shut classes down. Today, I suspect there is no unrest at all on that campus. There certainly isn’t where I teach, New York City College of Technology, one of the CUNY campuses serving mainly students who do not come from traditions of college attendance.

When we rose up at Utica, we were following the lead of Columbia University two scant years earlier (forget the earlier Berkeley Free Speech Movement; the issues now were different). Unrest had spread quickly from elite institutions to the large land-grant universities and finally even to small satellite campuses like Utica College, which was then a branch of Syracuse University. Nothing comparable is occurring today. Anyone who does more than follow the lemmings of the national news media and who visits campuses outside of the ivies knows that there are myriad problems at American colleges, but that student unrest is not one of them.

Bret Stephens, the perpetrator of the egregious quote above, goes on to claim that the unrest is, “a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.” Meritocracy, ho!

Excellence is in the eye of the beholder. Herman Melville wasn’t “excellent” until the 20^th century. D. H. Lawrence, once a most excellent writer, is shrugged away, today. In many respects, “excellence” is a rating from taste. It is also a means for exclusion, as powerful as any Stephens blames today’s students for wielding. When, in 1946, Edmund Wilson disparaged Somerset Maugham’s prose as “second rate” in the New Yorker, he pretty much destroyed Maugham’s chance for sustainability within the canon of novelists taught in American universities, Maugham’s continued popularity worldwide even today notwithstanding. On the other hand, being deemed excellent in the right quarters can make one’s career, quality or impact quite ignored, as John Leonard proved when he promoted suspense novelist Ross Macdonald.

Who gets to decide what’s excellent? What scale can we use that doesn’t, when all of the cows have come home, rest on biased judgment?

The thing that Stephens misses, the cornerstone of American education and democracy, is that every single person has potential of one sort or another and that any sorting we do necessarily bypasses and even suppresses some. Stephens turns this on its head:

The word “master” may remind some students of slavery. What it really means is a person who embodies achievement, refinement, distinction — masterliness — and whose spirit is fundamentally aristocratic. Great universities are meant to nurture that spirit, not only for its own sake, but also as an essential counterweight to the leveling and conformist tendencies of democratic politics that Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosed as the most insidious threats to American civilization.

These “leveling and conformist tendencies” have been less effective in the United States than in any place in the world. There is more outright non-conformity and idiosyncrasy here, if you look for it, than even the greatest of Stephens’ “great universities” could possibly nurture. The institutions that Stephens lauds are necessarily hierarchical and, as a result, backward looking. The truly original is rarely welcomed within them.

When you master something, you take control of the already extant; you add nothing.

Focus on the elites mistakes a part for the whole. And the whole of American higher education far outstrips Stephens’ meager, regressive imagining of mastery.