In mid-June, Michael Bloomberg roiled the presidential race by hinting that he might enter. The civil war in Iraq ground on and global warming still had no evident solution. But interestingly, the most emailed article of all the startling news in the New York Times around then was this one: "Some Colleges to Drop Out of U.S. News Rankings," a brief article that was actually tucked away on page 13 of the print edition. What is so sensitive about this subject that of all the stories in the Times, this is the one that spread most rapidly among readers for two days?
Photo:My Twisted lens, Creative Commons, Flickr
The primatologist Frans de Waal might describe the urge to create a hierarchy as a distinguishing characteristic of our chimpanzee cousins. Chimpanzees are patriarchal, status-driven, political, and occasionally violent. Rewards flow to the dominant male in a troop, though being our cousins and clever, even the beta males have various strategies to secure their own positions. As with all social animals, survival depends, literally, on staying in the group, and with chimpanzees, security in the group comes from establishing and knowing one's status.
De Waal happens to be a fan of our other cousins, the bonobos. Bonobos look like chimps (and used to be called pygmy chimps, until they were recognized as a separate species). In captivity, bonobos live in female-dominated societies which are less clearly hierarchal, and bonobo disputes are often resolved by consensual sex — with no clear victor, or maybe two victors, in each dispute. De Waal calls the bonobo the "hippie of the primate world."
The current (July 30) New Yorker discusses bonobos in a profile of the German primatologist Gottfried Hohmann. Hohmann studies bonobos in the wild, and his research may add new detail, and complications, to de Waal's popularized, idyllic view of the species. Perhaps bonobos aren't totally hippies. But even primatologists can be competitive and hierarchal — the New Yorker piece includes this throw-away line, which explains a lot about the field:
The challenges of bonobo research call for chimpanzee vigor, and this leads to animosities.
In his work studying chimpanzee and bonobo populations in captivity, de Waal compares chimpanzee life to living in a Machiavellian society, centered around the pursuit of power, with the requisite systems of measuring power and stratagems along the way. By contrast, the gentler bonobos appear to live in Rousseau's state of nature. One might say bonobos live in Eden. And that has been the irresistible comparison that made de Waal's work famous.
For over twenty years U.S. News & World Report has ranked colleges using formulas of their own design. The print edition obviously sells well (and probably sells more each issue, as the frenzy around college applications has grown), but the idea of ranking colleges becomes perplexing when you think about the minor, subjective differences between the 12th and 13th college on the list.
A number is a label that has power irrelevant to a student's experience of a school, or to the value of that school for any particular student. That's part of the criticism of the ranking system, and why last month's story, in which colleges like Barnard and Sarah Lawrence announced they would not cooperate with U.S. News in the future, is so remarkable. The schools pushed back against a system that is both powerful and silly.
Thinking back to being a student, there is also something crazy about ranking colleges, particularly in the hairsplitting detail described in U.S. News & World Report, because college is a place which surrounds you and rapidly becomes more than a stat in a magazine. The urge to attach a number to that kind of life experience reminds one of the guitarist's amplifier in Spinal Tap, which is customized so the volume knob goes to 'eleven,' rather than the customary 'ten,' so it will be louder than all the other amplifiers. Another way of saying you can put a number on something, but it won't necessarily mean anything.
It is revealing that we like children to think imaginatively, unfettered by expectations, and un-hierarchically — and so we give them "The Little Prince" to read, where the businessman who counts everything and reduces life to arithmetic is the one who misses the point. But of course numbers do mean something, and chimps, if they could be included in this discussion — ideally somewhere on a campus — would be the first to point that out.
A chimp might explain that to a society grown edgy about status, what's relevant about college as a measuring stick is that you only do it once. If you believe it to be an indelible marker, then college is like a car you buy once and drive for the rest of your life.
College creates a cascade of social and economic hierarchal effects; friends, career opportunities, spouses. If everything in one's future comes back to college, it is natural that the anxiety ratchets up, and so the importance of a detailed guide (and of the $100/hr SAT tutor).
Because so much subsequent social anxiety has developed around the college experience (especially in the demographics of NY Times readers) it was remarkable to also read this spring about Kevin Robinson and Esther Mobley. Striking a blow for the intrinsic purposes of education, these bright, interesting high school seniors didn't sweat their college applications (or at least kept their individuality within the process), and skipped the test tutors.
Esther and Kevin have done something unusual among their peers — they seem to have an internal compass of self worth that allows them a measure of independence from the hierarchy around them; maybe they are part of a trend. But so far Esther and Kevin seem to be the exceptions, and the ranking and test prep industries boom.
The value of de Waal and Hohmann's work is to take a step back from a ubiquitous social phenomenon like college admissions and be made aware of the natural forces within us. And of course college rankings are only one of the artifacts of these forces; everything in the daily newspaper reflects both our immediate cultural preoccupations, and deeper, underlying themes of human behavior.
We live in a watershed moment, both because of the scale of influence humans have on the planet, and because of recent breakthroughs in our understanding of our own origins and of the mind. Even while most people go about their workaday lives, hot fields of research like primatology, genetics, neuroscience, and psychology (and its offshoot, behavioral economics) are converging on an understanding of ethics, of social relationships, and even of how markets work or fail to work to produce outcomes we desire. The transformation in understanding of the self may ultimately be on par with Copernicus and Darwin. But perhaps we are also in a footrace between comprehension and behavior.
An obsession with college admissions is one fairly benign test case, but the same set of tools can be applied by an adventurous reader, if one chooses, to items as varied as the forces behind the vibrant real estate market in Manhattan, why Sunni insurgents wire IED's rather than grow cucumbers, and to the social challenges of climate change. Maybe looking for the origins of our beliefs can become a way to transcend their limitations.