The Ivy League Hasn't Changed

Every couple of decades I seem to run into something that conveys the essence of the Ivy League as I experienced it as an undergraduate. My wife normally removes all communications from my alma mater from the incoming mail and quietly throws them out before I can see them, but around 20 years ago, she missed an invitation from a local alumni group to attend a lecture from one of the "superstar" (their word) professors who'd be visiting. I decided to attend. The lecture was so awful that I wound up getting involved in the ill-fated Dartmouth alumni trustee movement to see what I might do to change things. At least I didn't get a heart attack, and that's a different story anyhow, but it's an indicator of why my wife normally keeps that sort of thing away from me.

Just lately, Yale has been running a series of YouTube lectures on Ukraine by one of their own superstars, Timothy Snyder. There's a link to one of them at the top of this post. I watched it, because I somehow expected worthwhile insight on Ukraine, but the puzzling thing was that there was actually almost no useful information about Ukraine in it. (In contrast, Ukraine historian Rabbi Henry Abramson's YouTube channel has far better presentations on Ukraine history and the current war.)

But if you watch any of the Timothy Snyder YouTubes on Ukraine, several strange things pop out. The first, from the context of remarks and asides he makes throughout the lectures, is that this is apparently a first-semester course for first-year undergraduates, and that's a little off, because on one hand, I would have expected (if I were a first-semester, first-year undergraduate) to be hearing insights into the current conflict based on the concrete experience of someone who's been there and been involved. Not a bit of it; if you want that, go watch Rabbi Abramson.

Instead, Prof Synder's lectures are peppered with digressions and asides that are clearly intended just to flatter the audience, who are, after all, impressionable kids who've just arrived on campus -- and beyond that, they've already been primed with the expectation that they've been selected in a rigorous, merit-based process that's filtered each one of them out as the crème de la crème -- they've been effectively told this in their acceptance letters. Snyder's lectures in fact contain a running joke that in effect,"You've been waiting to learn what special things you learn in a Yale class -- well, here it is. It's complicated!"

And on one hand, this is the great post-modern insight. What is a nation? Who knows? Philosophers just keep asking. How does a nation form? Who knows? It's complicated! And anyone who thinks he knows the answer is probably a Trumpist, which is what we definitely are not here. But then he switches to a sort of quasi-Hegelian formulation that there is in fact a universal three-phase national myth, a golden time of the founding, followed by a time when the founding principles were corrupted, which leads us to the present, when we are called to return to the principles of the founding.

Somehow, Ivy undergraduates are always expected to draw quasi-Hegelian conclusions, or maybe to have quasi-Hegelian conclusions drawn for them.

Snyder feels that Putinism represents this quasi-Hegelian national myth for Russia, which calls them to purify the Rus by invading Ukraine. But Trump also promotes this myth for the US in the form of MAGA, which is as destructive as Putinism. QED or something. What on earth does this have to do with the Ukraine war? And does this three-phase myth apply to Ukraine itself? If so, how? If not, why not? Well, apparently it's complicated, because Snyder won't go into it.

Oddly, Snyder encourages the class to interrupt him with questions, but nobody does. I think the answer is he's showing them how to be good Ivy Leaguers, and they aren't going to dispute it; they're there to drink the Kool-Aid, after all. If I had been in the class, though, here's the question I'd ask: "Physicists can differ on whether quantum physics or particle physics explains the world, but neither one affects how we drive a car. You can say everything's complicated, and there's a three-phase national myth, but how does that affect how we make policy? Is there any way we can come out of this class with a clearer idea of what we should be doing in Ukraine?"

My experience as an Ivy undergraduate, as well as an adult who's been through a graduate program and later occasionally interacted with Ivy League professors, is that the professor will become upset with that sort of question, dismiss it or trivialize it with a joke, and refuse to engage further. The subject of the lecture is not what might be the best Ukraine policy, the subject of the lecture is how to be an Ivy Leaguer.

I've remarked here now and then that a few weeks into my first semester at Dartmouth, I went to the dean of freshmen first-year and told him I thought there'd been a terrible mistake. He convinced me to stick it through, but I never thought I was wrong. And if you want to learn about Ukraine, listen to Rabbi Abramson, not Prof Snyder.