FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Ross Gregory Douthat arrived at Harvard University in the fall of 1998 carrying an idealized vision of Ivy League life. In many ways, he was a typical Harvard student: the oldest son of a middle-class suburban family; a mildly dorky, intellectually precocious teenager; and the fortunate winner of the college admissions lottery, carried to the gates of Harvard Yard by a combination of academic pluck and dumb luck." "But the Harvard of his dreams, an institution fueled by intellectual curiosity and entrusted with the keys to educational excellence, never materialized. Instead, he found himself in a school rife with elitism and moneyed excess, an incubator for the grasping and ambitious, a college seduced by the religion of success." "So Douthat was educated at Harvard, but what Harvard taught him was not what he had gone there to learn. Instead, he was immersed in the culture of America's ever-swelling ruling class - a culture of privilege, of ambition and entitlement, in which a vast network of elite schools are viewed by students, parents, administrators, and professors more as stepping-stones to high salaries and elite social networks than as institutions entrusted with academic excellence." What emerges is a powerfully rendered portrait of a young manhood, a pointed social critique of this country's most esteemed institutions, and an exploration of issues such as affirmative action, grade inflation, political correctness, and curriculum reform. Through this work, which carries the reader from the boom times of the late 1990s through September 11 and its aftermath, Douthat emerges as a compelling voice of his generation. This is a vivid account of the education of the American elite at the turn of the century.