Yesterday, as the wimpy winter of 2002 suddenly revived
itself and chilled our startled bones, I met my good friend
Allen W. for a fortifying high-calorie lunch of pasta and
beer at Princeton’s Nassau Inn. The fabled university town
lies midway between our homes, and we agreed that a few
hours spent among the Princetonians would prove to be both
entertaining and instructive.
The first thing we did -- even before we settled down to
lunch -- was to take a long stroll across the Princeton
campus. We had done it often in the past, separately, but
now we could enjoy each other’s running commentary.
It helps if you know that Allen and I are graduates of
Rutgers, an ancient school located a mere fifteen miles up
the road from Princeton. That proximity has been Rutgers’
curse since before the American Revolution. Our fate always
was, still is, and forevermore will be that of a beta-star
perpetually outshone by the nearby alpha-star in its
constellation. Rutgers is to Princeton as Ursa Minor is to
Ursa Major, as silver is to gold, as Robin is to Batman, as
Whistler’s Aunt is to Whistler’s Mother.
Rutgers is essentially a poor man’s Princeton: an
eighteenth-century college, ivy-covered and academically
reputable, but exasperatingly outclassed by its neighbor in
just about every category you could mention, with the
possible exception of per-capita beer consumption.
Princeton belongs to the inner circle of Ivies. Rutgers
had to endure the dubious honor of being dubbed the State
University of New Jersey.
Princeton traditionally draws its student body from the
WASP aristocracy, though the campus complexion has
diversified lately to include numerous Asians. Rutgers,
originally peopled by the sons of old-guard Dutch families
with names like Van Nest and Voorhees, became a haven for
scrappy ethnic kids.
Princeton is nearly everyone’s first choice. Rutgers is
the perennial safety school for New Jersey’s disgruntled
Ivy League rejects.
Princeton can boast Jimmy Stewart, F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Woodrow Wilson among its loyal sons. Rutgers nurtured
Ozzie Nelson, Joyce Kilmer and Vice President Garret A.
Hobart. (You can look up Hobart in your encyclopedia, but I
can tell you all you need to know: with the accursed luck of
a true Rutgers man, he died in office two years before his
boss, President William McKinley, was assassinated.)
Yes, Rutgers beat Princeton in the first intercollegiate
football game, but my alma mater would have to wait a
hellish and interminable 69 years before it repeated the
deed. (Think of all the Rutgers men who lived, grew feeble
and died without ever seeing a victory over Princeton!) You’d
guess that such demoralizing and predictable annual
drubbings would have ravaged the Rutgers spirit, but the
school earned a reputation for valor in defeat; the rallying
cry, "I’d die for dear old Rutgers!" achieved
popular currency during the twenties and thirties. It’s no
accident that when the creators of Mr. Magoo had to choose
an appropriate alma mater for their kindly but optically
challenged bumbler, they settled on Rutgers -- dear old
Rutgers. It was a perfect fit.
My friend Allen and I strolled out of Princeton’s
imposing Firestone Library, past the pseudo-medieval hulk of
the chapel and down a long walkway toward the
pre-Revolutionary stones of Old Nassau. I noted that the
campus architecture was a stately hodge-podge of Colonial,
Greek Revival, Victorian and twentieth-century Collegiate
Gothic. I pointed to the twin temples erected by competing
philosophical societies back in the days when philosophy
still mattered.
Somehow it all impressed us, though we agreed that
Rutgers’ own Old Queens building was a finer and more
harmonious edifice than Princeton’s Old Nassau. We liked
the pointed archways and sculptural details of Princeton’s
Gothic dorm quadrangles, and we wondered how it would have
changed us to live in such congenial cloisters for a full
four years. We half-believed we could have absorbed the
wisdom of the ages simply by dwelling amid those arches and
spires on a daily basis. We passed monuments erected to dead
Princetonians by other Princetonians, also dead. We felt the
pride they took in their Princeton blood, the pride of
belonging to a noble and fortunate tribe.
Princeton outpoints Rutgers in nearly every measure of
academic potency, from median SAT scores to faculty
reputation. That much I can live with; after all, Plato
reads the same at Rutgers as he does at Princeton, and
Shakespeare’s verses smell as sweet even at Montclair
State. And let’s face it: few schools are as persnickety
as Princeton when it comes to admitting new students, while
Rutgers has avowed its obligation to enlighten the masses.
Nothing wrong with that, is there? Any student with
sufficient curiosity can carve a first-rate education out of
a second-tier school.
When I was an undergraduate we used to console ourselves
that, while Princeton was more difficult to enter, Rutgers
offered the tougher academic environment. To study at
Rutgers was to pass through a tempering fire of mammoth
reading loads and merciless grading. Meanwhile, the
Princetonians yawned as they clinked their Scotch glasses
and casually straightened the lapels of their tweed jackets.
They rarely broke a sweat.
Some consolation! Could it be that our neighbors were
simply brilliant beyond sweating?... that they could master
the mindboggling intricacies of Thomas Aquinas and
differential equations without rumpling their fair brows? Or
did the school pamper its young aristocrats, knowing that it
must tread lightly on future members of the ruling class? It
hardly matters: to succeed with minimal effort is the mark
of a superior man. To work diligently and come up short is
the curse of Sisyphus and Rutgers students. We honestly
believed that outsiders would recognize the value of our
hard-won Rutgers diplomas, but of course we were wrong. When
we strode into the halls of the real world, we detected a
scarcity of red carpets rolled out in our honor. I have to
tell you I was shocked.
You can give yourself a first-rate education, but you can’t
confer prestige upon yourself. Prestige is a golden aura
that descends upon you from your surroundings, permeates you
to the core, and eventually glows outward from your own
soul. We’re talking about more than a top-twenty ranking
in the U.S. News & World Report annual college survey...
more than the immediate adulation that greets Ivy Leaguers
who flash their resumes in front of starstruck employers. My
feeling is that you can absorb prestige from the very stones
of the right college, and that it never deserts you. You
absorb it from the dignity of your classmates, from the
dignity of your environment, from the dignity of the old
grads who passed through the place in a great timeless
parade of hijinks and high purpose.
Rutgers had given me a good enough education to make me
realize what I had missed. I suspected it was not only the
prestige but something even more personal: the companionship
of gifted, witty and erudite sons and daughters of the
upper-middle class. This was a strange and disturbing
development, not only because it seemed both snobbish and
self-pitying, but because I had thoroughly enjoyed my
college years. I’ll grant you that Rutgers students looked
scruffy next to Princeton’s polished gentlemen, with their
sandy Princetonian thatches and admirably constructed
Princetonian chins. But we lived with a spirited
intellectual abandon that seemed to elude our old rivals
down the road. The Princetonians we met appeared tame and
conventional, polite but pale-blooded. They already seemed
to be the investment bankers and Wall Street lawyers they
would later become. At Rutgers, we made up for our lack of
proper breeding with aggressive minds that reveled in the
outlandish and the absurd. Groucho Marx would have made an
exemplary Rutgers man. During my years there, I wouldn’t
have traded our inspired lunacy for a bushel basket of
Princeton manners.
Yet there I was a few years later, nearly despondent
because I would never gain entrance to that golden circle.
Ivy Leaguers were different from you and me, and not only
because they owned an Ivy League sheepskin. Nose pressed
against the window like a street-waif gazing into a fine
restaurant, I coveted the half-imagined upper-tier
collegiate life that I had missed: the chumminess and crisp
banter, the fine-boned women with their
whimsical-intelligent eyes and demure smiles, the brisk
walks and talks with kindred spirits along frosty
quadrangles on a November morning. To my half-demented mind,
the names of the elite colleges rang with
magical music: Amherst and Williams, Dartmouth and Bowdoin,
Yale, Cornell, Swarthmore and Haverford -- noble halls,
noble walls, noble collegians all! Surely they dined on foie
gras and punned in Latin.
To meet an upper-tier alumnus in the flesh was like being
introduced to a head of state: I wondered if I could hold my
own in such exalted company, without stammering or
committing a linguistic faux-pas that would instantly expose
me as a State U product in all my abject nakedness. How
little it seemed to matter that my SAT scores were probably
on a par with theirs, or that my publicly-educated mind was
teeming with learned lore. I felt inferior, deprived,
excluded. I felt as if I had to proceed through life with
the words "Second-Rate" stamped boldly across my
forehead. I wondered if I could "pass" for Ivy by
modulating my voice and wearing more corduroy. I wondered
how graduates of lesser schools than mine dealt with their
shame. Didn’t they all feel like shooting themselves?
Prestigious schools, more than any other institution, put
the lie to American egalitarianism.
For prestige-deprived souls like me, magazines like The
New Yorker offered the consoling aroma of class at a
modest price. Back in the seventies, for twenty or thirty
dollars a year, I could bask in that rarefied
private-college world I had missed, feeling included in the
upper-class in-jokes of a William Hamilton cartoon, enjoying
the prose of writers who addressed me as if I had actually
gone to Princeton. Esquire in those days was like
having an indulgent preppie friend who took you under his
wing and advised you on everything from women to waistcoats
-- as if he liked you enough to help you break into his
ranks. It was all an illusion, of course; the only ranks I
was breaking into at the time were the ranks of the
unemployed.
I had read too much F. Scott Fitzgerald; I had fallen in
love with a lyrical and archaic world that had ceased to
exist before I entered college. The classic upper-crust
American collegiate style had flourished for a century, from
roughly the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s -- from one
rebellion to another. It spawned a race that seemed to
combine brilliance, nobility and mirth in equal measure.
Graduates of the better private colleges and even many of
the public ones continued to cultivate their minds
throughout their lives. It showed in the letters they wrote,
the songs they sang, the humor they savored.
"Literacy" meant more than an ability to read
words on a page; it was a state of mind that lived for the enjoyment
of words.
I met some of these literate souls when I worked briefly
at Time Inc., so I know they were for real. They weren’t
of my generation: their college years had been the 1950s --
the John Cheever fifties, not the Elvis fifties. I liked
them well enough, but I would leave them to their cocktails and their
commuter trains to Westchester. It was time for me to forget
my Fitzgeraldian fantasies and rejoin my own crowd.
I was emerging from a sad era in my personal history, and
a shameful one. How could I have been so singleminded in my
reverence for class? Hadn’t I loved Jimmy Durante and
Jackie Gleason when I was young? There they were, graduates
of the street, defiantly unashamed of their roots. Do you
think they ever fretted because they hadn’t seen the
inside of an elite private college? Do you suppose Jimmy
Durante wished he could speak with the rounded and
grammatically impeccable cadences of Franklin D. Roosevelt?
Then he wouldn’t have been the one and only Durante; he
would have been a third-rate FDR. It took me years to
realize that we can be our best selves only by being
ourselves.
Allen and I continued our stroll across the Princeton
campus, peering at the faces and manners of the students who
crossed our path. We wondered how these fortunate specimens
were different from us... what they would carry away from
their college years that we didn’t. The prestige of
Princeton would rub off on them, of course; it would serve
them as they launched their brilliant careers. But would the
current generation of Princetonians enjoy any of the social
intangibles that had eluded us? Was the era of hereditary
social distinctions buried and forgotten? These students
didn’t really look all that different from a Rutgers
crowd: they seemed only marginally more noble, poetic or
purposeful. Everyone appeared to have been clothed at The Gap,
that great retail democratizer. If they were elitists, they
successfully hid the fact in public.
Snobbery isn’t what it used to be. It’s no longer a
question of manners, breeding or where you prepped. It
matters little whether you drop your R’s in the style of a
Harvard grad or a Brooklynite. (If anything, the Brooklynite would have the edge.) Who you are matters less now than what
you do.
This shift seems fair, it seems the American way to go.
Lincoln would approve. Yet the fact remains that we still
sort our fellow citizens into the waiting slots of a caste
system. Who's on top depends on whether you ask a suburban corporate chieftain, a socialite, a downtown urban hipster or a professor of paleontology. I'd tell you that the Brahmins of the American mainstream are its media celebrities (a tiny class, populated mainly by transients) followed by the much vaster meritocracy (so-called) of corporate potentates and top-drawer professionals -- the kind of folk who tend to cluster in gated communities.
Residents of gated
communities long to bask in the company of others like
themselves: those who have mastered the unwritten code, read
current books but rarely literature, stay aggressively
healthy, and dedicate their lives to the nurturing of
high-status offspring. The new upper crust has established itself in
McMansionvilles across America. Some of the latter-day elite
are Princeton grads, some are products of Rutgers -- though
I’d bet the Princeton grads still outnumber them. What
matters is that they’ve established a community of
success. The members of the new elite derive their
self-esteem and their mutual regard from remunerative accomplishments
rather than family background or quirks of speech. No
eccentric heirs and heiresses, no underachieving cynics need
apply.
Does it mean anything these days to have a
well-stocked, finely-tuned mind -- or have mere money and
position taken over the fort? The prestige gap remains,
though its codes have changed. We still value some people
above other people. And Princeton will no doubt pick its
students according to how effectively they figure to contend
with the new success system.
As Allen and I finally settled down to lunch at the
Nassau Inn, we talked about our accomplishments and failures
-- where we’ve succeeded, where we’ve been thwarted.
Allen contended, with the wisdom of a good father, that his
single greatest accomplishment was his daughter Christina,
who happens to be my godchild. I had to agree that raising
someone of her intelligence, talent, amiability and
character would be a feather in anyone’s cap. I could only
wish for such an accomplishment myself. The fact that she
went to Bryn Mawr is almost irrelevant.
