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BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
158. Bill Deresiewicz: Are Universities on the Wrong Track?
Bill Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, and Aaron Pete discuss how liberal arts degrees impact personal development, the challenges in higher education, and the importance of diverse perspectives and mentors in building a democratic society.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, aaron P. Higher education is a constant topic of discussion. Is the university worth the cost? What are the benefits, and are these institutions living up to the ideas that they were based on? I discuss this and so much more with the author of Excellent Sheep. My guest today is Bill Derezovitz. It is such an honor to sit down with you, bill. Would you mind first just briefly introducing yourself for listeners who might not be acquainted with your work.
Bill Deresiewicz:My name is Bill Derezovitz, william in print. I'm a writer. I write about higher education and the arts and, you know, sort of the culture more broadly. I was an English professor at Yale from 1998 to 2008, and then I became a full-time writer. I live in Portland, oregon. My books include Excellent Sheep, which just came out in the 10th anniversary edition. I suspect we're going to be talking about a book called the Death of the Artist, about the new economics of being a creator in the age of the Internet. There's an essay collection from just a couple of years ago called the End of Solitude. There it is, and my first commercial book was the Jane Austen Education, which is about me reading Jane Austen as a young man in my late 20s.
Aaron Pete:I think it's to your point. I think it's important that we start with education, as I think it is still very topical. That hasn't changed since your book was written, but I think maybe some of the presuppositions, maybe some of the challenges that were being faced then have slightly changed, although I think their consequences remain the same. Would you mind outlining, from your perspective, what a liberal arts education is?
Bill Deresiewicz:Right? Well, there are actually a number of ways to answer this, because the term liberal arts has come to mean several things. I think the narrow definition that I'm most comfortable with and this is sort of a traditional way of defining it is the liberal arts are those fields in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake. So as opposed to vocational or professional or applied fields. So the liberal arts, contrary to the way the term is often used, does include the hard sciences as well as the social sciences. It doesn't include, like I said, the vocational fields that a lot of at least American college students major in now, like business or nursing or education. It's not that there's anything wrong with those fields, but the business of the liberal arts is to create knowledge. And when you create knowledge, you're asking how knowledge is created. The liberal arts create the knowledge that the applied fields use, right. So medicine is applied biology and maybe a few other sciences, and education is applied psychology, sociology and so forth. So when you get a liberal arts education, when it's conducted properly, you are, as I said, you're not just learning stuff, you're not just learning information, you're learning how knowledge is created, which means you're learning how to make and evaluate arguments, because that is how knowledge is created with, with evidence, observation, evaluation and so forth, and so it's a, it's a, it is, or should be, a rigorous and sophisticated training in critical thinking.
Bill Deresiewicz:The way the term is more typically used in the United States is as a synonym for the humanity, really, and I so study of literature, philosophy, art, history, history of religion. I think that cluster of fields is important in a different way, and I think that this often gets missed in discussions of higher education, especially ones and this is sometimes typical of university professors or people who are making the argument for undergraduate education. It's not just about critical thinking, which I discussed before. What makes the humanities different from other fields is that the object of study is the human, which is to say it is, at least implicitly, the self. Again, I say this with no prejudice to science. I come from a family of scientists, I was a science major.
Bill Deresiewicz:When you study physics or chemistry, you're not turning the lens on yourself. When you read literature, you do, you are or you should be. And since I think undergraduate education serves several important purposes, one of them is this exploration of the self, or what I call, in excellent sheet, building a self. And this is not the be-all and end-all of it, and I'm not even saying that you have to go to university to do this.
Bill Deresiewicz:But if you're a young person in university, you should be doing it ways you do it is through textual study in the humanities, where you are engaging with the ways that other people have engaged with these fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how you want to live your life. One way, a bit simplistic to shorthand, that is to say that these are questions of value rather than fact, and I say that because the modern university as a knowledge factory, as a research institution, was constituted by the distinction between fact and value. We're not going to deal with values, we're only going to deal with facts, and that's one of the reasons that humanistic study has been marginalized in many ways, because you can't really apply a factual analysis to questions of value. But questions of value are essential in conducting a life.
Aaron Pete:Agreed One area. I watched the TED Talk that you did and I found it really quite inspirational. But one area that I feel like we have more time to kind of break down now is you sort of mentioned that there's this big pushback against the humanities, that there's comments being made that people should stop going and getting these degrees in art history and start focusing on getting things done. And one area that I continue to see as a problem, even since that TED talk, is just growing. People that I know who have gone to university and not learned how to critically think, how to research information that they disagree with, how to take in information that might make them uncomfortable. We've seen this growth of the idea of safe spaces and you shouldn't have to hear those things. In this vein of what a university should be and what it is. What are your thoughts on where things have come since the book was written?
Bill Deresiewicz:Right, yeah, I mean in many ways. So the book came out 10 years ago. In many ways, we've just seen the same trend lines continue. I mean, the book was centrally about the American college admissions process and the kind of person it produces. We haven't really begun to touch on that too much yet, but certainly the most obvious thing that's happened on campus since then, in the last 10 years, is this explosion of a certain kind of political practice that involves a very narrow ideological conformity and ideological policing.
Bill Deresiewicz:I actually taught I left Yale in 2008. I gave a lot of talks at a lot of campuses in the years after that, but it wasn't until the spring of 2015 that I was invited back to a liberal arts college in California to teach for a whole semester and it was at that point that I saw this because it really started. I mean, people will date kind of this upsurge in various ways, but the consensus is it kind of started around 2013, 2014, with having a lot to do with what was going on in online technology. So 2015 is when I really saw. I mean we didn't even call it wokeness yet, we still called it political correctness. I wrote a piece about this in 2017, called On Political Correctness which really grew out of my experience that semester.
Bill Deresiewicz:I mean there are a lot of ways to talk about this, but one of them is that what I talk, that what I identify in Excellent Sheep as this, this culture of career, is conformity, basically elite college students learning to do what the grownups want them to do for the sake of individual advancement. Well, it does a couple of things. One is it makes for a pretty anti-intellectual education because there's no premium on doing anything for one second. That isn't going to redound to your resume and thus to your career. And open-ended intellectual exploration kind of seizing hold of the material in your classes and really running with it it's not something you can put on your resume. I mean, students have literally said to me and to friends I know in the academy I don't have time for intellectual exploration, literally in those words including some of the smartest students we've had, including some of the smartest students we've had. The other thing that this kind of careerist, credentialist education does is it hollows education out in moral terms. Right, there's no higher purpose. It's really I mean, this is another word that gets thrown around a lot but it's really what education looks like in a neoliberal age. So it's where education has been moving at all levels, you know, primary, secondary, tertiary around the world since the early 80s or maybe the 70s.
Bill Deresiewicz:And by neoliberalism I just mean a system of value where the market is the only producer of values. So you know, your existence is as a producer and consumer and everything, the value of everything, is measured in its dollar return. And I mean, in some ways people were able to live with that very happily. But I also think that you know a lot of young people aren't able to live with that very happily. I mean, this is the time of exploration and idealism and you know you're born into a world that you come to realize is deeply flawed and you want to do something about it. And you also want your life to be about something more and you maybe want to have a higher opinion of yourself than just someone who chases status and money.
Bill Deresiewicz:And universities didn't like it either. I mean universities, professors, administrators. They don't want to think of themselves exclusively as being in the business of producing human capital Interesting phrase for for global corporation. So when wokeness came along, it filled both of those vacuums, the intellectual and the moral. The intellectual not because it invited students to think, but because it gave them something to think and it gave them a set of ideas that they could receive, that enabled them to feel like they were, they were intellectuals or that they had some intellectual purchase on the world. Um, and I think the the way it filled the moral vacuum is more obvious. Right, it gave everyone a mission and a sense of mission, unfortunately, but the way that it did both of those things is antithetical to what a college education should be, for reasons you've already suggested, because you're supposed to be thinking and debating and questioning yourself and reading and reading widely, reading from different perspectives, and none of that is entailed in this.
Aaron Pete:That is a very astute observation and I think one of the most polite ways I've ever heard this kind of issue described the area that I'd love to get your understanding on. You've studied this. You understand the principles in which higher education is supposed to seek to serve. You understand the roots of where this whole idea came from and what it was supposed to bring upon people. How does it feel to look at some of these campuses, to look at the groupthink that at least takes place, and see how far we've deviated from the ideals that we once set out?
Bill Deresiewicz:Right. So first of all let me say I'm not usually accused of being polite, but I'll take it. And let me also say it's not like I mean I think you always have to make this qualification. I'm not saying that there ever was some golden age 100%, but there have been, and in theory still are, ideals, and I think there have been times when things were better on campus and I would say, you know, sort of mid to late 20th century.
Bill Deresiewicz:In many ways, college was opening up to a lot more different kind of people, which I think is good socially and I think it can be good intellectually. And I don't just mean the identity categories, I also mean class and origin and so forth. And also I mean this had long since happened by then, I mean back in the day, at least in this country. I suspect this is true in Canada as well, and certainly, if we go back to the medieval European roots of universities, these were church-affiliated institutions, so they also believed that there was one truth. So they also believed that there was one truth. And the discussion of values at a 19th century American college might have looked like you go to mandatory chapel every Sunday morning and the college president, who's a clergyman basically gets up and gives you a sermon about how to live. And you know, vast social and intellectual changes that I don't need to describe in the late 19th century and across the 20th century, you know, disrupted that situation of consensus and created a situation of pluralism. And so now you have, you know, disrupted that situation of consensus and created a situation of pluralism. And so now you have, you know, you don't have an authorized truth or a received set of values. Now it's your job to think things through for yourself.
Bill Deresiewicz:I would also say that I mean, there were a lot of dogmatisms in the 20th century, and many of them showed up on campus. I mean, I think dogmatism comes with the territory of being a young adult, but and I point this out in a piece that I wrote a couple years ago so Marxism, freudianism, feminism, I mean liberalism, you know, in a way that was maybe more aligned to, you know, the official American project, but it's also an ideology. It also had its text and its proponents. The point is that there wasn't just one of them right. These all, and maybe others we could name, competed with each other. So the students who espoused any one of them had to argue with each other. So the students who espoused any one of them had to argue with each other. And not only did they compete with each other, but each of these ideologies contained competing sub-ideologies.
Bill Deresiewicz:So within Marxism, there were the Leninists, the Trotskyites, the Maoists, the Social Democrats, the Democratic Socialists and so forth, and you had to know if you, if you couldn't make a good argument for yourself and you hadn't read the text, um, you were at risk of looking stupid in an argument, which is certainly something that happened to me plenty of times. I mean, I think there were a lot of listen, listen. I think a lot of college students didn't bother with any of this stuff, but a lot of them did, and I would even say that the ideal of the college student certainly as I received it, starting in college in 81 and in the 60s and 70s was that you took that project of of which, a sort of project of the self. You took it really seriously, like this is what you were. This is the most important thing that you were there to do. So I'm not I can't even remember what your question was, but um, I'm, I'm.
Aaron Pete:I'm thinking about your understanding of the, the values and the principles that higher education is supposed to deliver, the ideas that all of this was based on. Do you feel like if you sent a child to a university today, would they get the values and principles that were based on the idea of university? Do you think that that's still achievable today?
Bill Deresiewicz:Well, I mean I hesitate to kind of make sweeping statements, especially about higher education, because, again, I know the American situation. We have something like 16 million undergraduates. We have something like 4,000 undergraduate institutions, including two-year associate degree community colleges. The elite institutions represent maybe 5%, maybe a couple of hundred, maybe 250 at the broadest definition of elite. Close to 40% of American college students are older than 22. Close to 40% go to college part-time. So in other words, a lot of students at a lot of campuses are not concerned with all this nonsense that we're talking about. And even individual schools you know there are lots of different kinds of professors, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't want to make sweeping statements about it. In ways that I wasn't as aware of as I am now, before October 7th, especially, elite universities have in some ways, specifically when it comes to undergraduate education, have abandoned these principles to a shocking extent, have abandoned these principles to a shocking extent, the extent to which the DEI imperative has really spread its tentacles throughout the functions of universities. I mean, I said undergraduate education in particular, but the truth is the research function has been infiltrated as well. When faculty are expected to submit DEI statements and to elevate DEI in everything they do, not even just their teaching, but their research. You know.
Bill Deresiewicz:Again, I'm going to go back to the other hand. There are, you know, close to 500 research universities in the United States. They produce a vast amount of scholarly output. Much of it is very valuable. Most of the sciences are still doing science in the science-y way. I'm not going to speak about what I would do. I don't even have kids and I think that that's kind of. I mean, people like to do, like to tub-thump and say I would never. I'm not going to send my kids to these. I'll believe it when I see it. Because, just for reasons that have nothing to do with what we're talking about, like credentialing and networking, elite institutions are still extremely desirable places to be.
Aaron Pete:I guess like I'll share my perspective. I did a four-year undergraduate degree at one of the smaller universities that you might think of in the US which one University of the Fraser Valley and so it's considered much more practical. They do a lot of research with actual, like I did, a criminology degree. They worked with the local police department and did studies and research, and it was supposed to be much more grounded. But I started in 2013 and over the course of that time, I started to see professors wanting me to say what they wanted to hear rather than doing the opposite. And so, just anecdotally, through those experiences, one of the lessons I took away, which I'm proud of, was to take the opinion of the person who's in charge in class and trying to go against it and trying to steel man the other argument out of necessity. I just felt like that was an important part of the educational process. It was never told to me to do something like that, but I saw the value in saying you're at the front of the class, telling me it's this, but what if you're wrong? And I think that that was an enriching experience and I think a lot of the trends we've started to see hadn't occurred yet, but I'll be honest and say that some of the more impactful experiences I had was watching Robin Williams talk about the importance of seizing the day online, and a video clip of that. Listening to Jordan Peterson's lectures were inspiring in a way where I was reminded that I didn't know it all, and being in an environment where we're all equals and we all kind of know the same things and your professor is just your buddy and it's not that big of a deal and and they do this work that's very focused on this didn't give you that inspiration. That there are levels to intellectualism, of understanding complex topics that will humble you, that will make you yearn to learn more, because you understand how inadequate you are within how you understand things, that it's important to continue to study and seek knowledge for its own sake. To what your point was. That seems to diminish and people brag about only working two hours on their paper rather than bragging that they put in a lot of work and I think that that's, to your point, a result of lots of different things. We're in a consumer culture where it isn't admired that you put in extra work for no reason, that the person who did the extra readings doesn't get anything out of it.
Aaron Pete:So what was the point to begin with? But even throughout, when I so just to give you a bit of my background I come from a single mother. I've never met my father and we grew up relying solely on social assistance. So all my life I've been told that I come from nothing. We don't have a lot, we didn't have enough food in the fridge, and it made me want to be like the person who owns the million dollar home on the oceanfront property, like what does that person know and how do I get to where they are? How do I learn? And I had the benefit.
Aaron Pete:My mother was part of what's called the 60 scoop, which meant she was raised by a Caucasian family I'm First Nations and she's First Nations and she was taken out of her family and put into a Caucasian home. That actually did end up benefiting us over the long term. She was raised by a nurse who knew what she was doing and able to care for her. But we grew up understanding kind of both sides. We saw what privilege and financial comfort looked like, but we also saw what absolute impoverished communities looked like and what that experience is. And so growing up, I always saw both worlds and always wanted to understand the world that came from privilege, that never had to worry about food in the fridge, and so, going to university, I applied that same logic when I went to law school.
Aaron Pete:I was interested not in the courses that were the easiest, that were gonna get me the highest grade, but the courses like taxation of corporations and shareholders, where that sounds incredibly boring every time I tell somebody, but to me that was the class where you were learning. You always hear rich people know how to move their money around to avoid paying taxes. That was the course in order to learn those types of concepts, and it was fascinating to understand how these complex systems work that businesses and corporations utilize to protect themselves from liability, to avoid paying taxes and to make sure that they are financially comfortable in the long run. And so I went into it with this principled approach that you've described, and I think that that's so important. I don't know if we need a whole overhaul of our existing system. We just need to tell people hey, if you're in a class and your teacher, your professor, is telling you it's this way, do a whole paper on how? Maybe it's not, or at least the counter arguments to that.
Aaron Pete:One of my favorite terms is steelmanning positions and embracing the idea that you need to take a position. Maybe you absolutely unequivocally disagree with and figure out all the way that it's right, just for your own understanding. So when you get into a disagreement, you know how to communicate and not bring in emotions, because so often I see people arguing from a state of emotion, which is why people like ben shapiro have found such success, because, rather than having to debate people who are his intellectual equals, he can destroy somebody who just first year in university and show and I think that what those types of people represent to me is our malnourished sense of academia that we're not that connected to the depths of how much we can learn and how deep our thinking could be. And the work that you've done on these books is a reminder of the principles that university are supposed to aspire to.
Bill Deresiewicz:And I think that that's all very well said. A couple of things. One, you know, when you mentioned someone like Jordan Peterson, and regardless of what I think of that, that person or various things that he said, what we've seen actually in well, in parallel with the events of the last 10 years on campus, and really for reasons that have to do with the same underlying technology, is the rise of an off-campus intellectual life of the kind we haven't had before, not necessarily the caliber that we haven't had before, but certainly of the magnitude and visibility. Right Agreed, I mean, you know, right, podcast Substack, right, I mean there's a whole. You don't have to go to university or be part of a small intellectual coterie in a place like New York to have the opportunity to think about big ideas, to debate them, to read in a literary and philosophical tradition. And it's not clear to me that campuses have taken cognizance of that fact and even sort of the mainstream media that's dominated by progressive ideology. They prefer dominated by progressive ideology. They prefer, they continue to prefer to act as if all that stuff is doesn't exist or is marginal or has no value, when in fact it has a great deal of value, especially relative to what those guys have been doing lately.
Bill Deresiewicz:I would also. I would just say that the thing that you described Ben Shapiro doing, that's an, but just by the way, I mean that's kind of an old thing, but I remember seeing and even again sort of being at the wrong end of when I was in college. So basically, when you're a liberal college student and you're in a liberal college and you just kind of think everybody agrees with you and you've never really had to think through your positions, you do not know how to argue against the other side and you tend to get, because you're emotionally tied up in your positions although I mean I hope that everybody is but you kind of respond with emotions and outrage and I think we tend to get angry when we I mean I certainly know that when somebody confronts me with an argument that I don't have a good answer to my response just get really angry and then that makes it even harder for me to argue against them. But the conservatives, knowing that they were in a minority, they were the scholarly ones, they were the ones who were getting together and reading Burke and whatever, and we're always much better arguers.
Bill Deresiewicz:Now we can just see it in public and it's I mean it's really disgraceful. And I mean it's disgraceful that the left I mean I consider myself a progressive, although a progressive of you know 10 or 12 years ago, and it's just, it's humiliating that progressives are so bad at arguing because I think we have good. I mean, I think many of our arguments are good arguments, especially in the economic realm.
Aaron Pete:Right, so Agreed. Moving forward from this, one of the other pieces from your TED Talk that just resonated with me personally is I sit on council for my First Nation community and addressing the education rates, encouraging people to go to university and get education rather than just going the trades route. It's something that I'm personally grappling with and trying to figure out the ways in which you inspire people to look beyond that and in your TED talk you did such a good job of describing this longstanding challenge, which is people who go to university intrinsically have understood the benefit and then pass that on to their children who intrinsically, and it just kind of so on and so on, and you end up with these communities who are all university educated and then communities like mine who are not, and it is in in your TED talk you talk about. It's an imperative if we want to live in a true democracy, if we want people to be able to argue for themselves and articulate themselves.
Aaron Pete:One of the key cornerstones of that is that they get this education and that they are able to not just look inwards of themselves but look inwards of their community and understand where they come from in their history and in canada, history of indigenous people is a huge topic when we're talking about indian residential schools, when we're talking about the potential of unmarked graves at those residential schools and some of the policies governments have put in over the past 150 years, and I'm starting to see this, and it was just so enlightening to see that this is all part of the process that we've taken the step of arguing for ourselves and saying we have a right to be in some of these classrooms.
Aaron Pete:We need to be involved in some of these processes. We look up to those people who've gotten law education, who've gone to become doctors, and we aspire to be like them. But we have to put in mechanisms at the front end, which is what you describe in your call to action was to support people in going and getting that education so they can participate in the political process, which is the same as participating in the democratic process, and those comments were really important when we start to try and figure out how to support our communities who are living in poverty.
Bill Deresiewicz:Yeah, I think you know sort of my point of departure, for that talk, as you know, was this thing that's always thrown in your face when you argue for humanities, education, liberal arts, education, which is, oh, this is just a luxury of the privileged, and it drives me crazy. And what I'm trying to say is no, it's actually a privilege of the privileged, right, it's one of the ways that the privileged stay privileged. I mean, obviously, education in general, as you were talking about, like becoming moving up in class, which is very important, but what they'll say is oh, go to college, you know, you people from marginalized communities, but don't study the humanities. And what I'm saying is well, I call them the fields of consciousness, right? So the fields that are involved in shaping the way we think, so academia itself, journalism, media, the arts, the law and public policy, these are all fields that you prepare for with undergraduate courses of study. That are the ones that you know poor people aren't supposed to take because they're not practical. But these are, in fact, exactly as you were saying, the ones that prepare both you and your larger community for political participation. And this might seem slightly to the side, but it connects to something I've been thinking about a lot.
Bill Deresiewicz:We have lots of people now in American media who speak for communities of color, especially the black community, communities of color, especially the black community. I haven't looked into their educational backgrounds in every case, although I suspect they skew very heavily to elite education and probably to middle-class backgrounds, but what I will say is that they are overwhelmingly progressive, right, I mean, I could list people who have columns in the New York Times Charles Blow, people like that overwhelmingly progressive. The black community itself is not overwhelmingly progressive. In fact, the typical black Democratic voter is to the right of a typical white Democratic voter. Black, black voters are moderate in general, I mean as a whole. That's how they ended up pushing Joe Biden to the nomination.
Bill Deresiewicz:No-transcript. The majority of the black community is not represented in elite media and I think it's really important to have I'm not going to say genuine voices, because it's not like those people aren't genuine, but to have voices that really come from the general experience of communities, whether it's First Nations, african American, latino, whatever it is, latino, whatever it is, you know, represented in the public sphere. Because we're just, we're not. I don't feel like we're. I don't know what it's like in Canada with First Nations, but I feel like we're not actually hearing the real voices of the majority of non-white communities in this country. We only see them when it comes to voting, and then we're. You know how is it that Donald Trump keeps getting larger and larger share of the non-white communities in this country? We only see them when it comes to voting, and then we're. You know how is it that Donald Trump keeps getting larger and larger share of the non-white vote? Well, this is one of the reasons why.
Aaron Pete:How. That's an interesting point and I'm just trying to think like my journey through university because I think one might accuse me of not being representative of the frontline First Nations person who lives on reserve and who comes from that background. I grew up off of reserve. I did grow up in poverty but I didn't grow up with the absolute typical First Nations experience. But the more I get the education, the more I understand of these processes, the more I think I espouse ideas of the democratic process, the more to my community I think I look like a colonizer, somebody who's coming in and kind of re-espousing the same ideas. But it's because I understand the idea at its root.
Aaron Pete:I don't believe in Indian residential schools. I do believe in the democratic process and there are First Nation communities who say we should go back to how we used to, which is where we'd have one family lead the whole community or we'd have families kind of run it and it's like, well, when you do that you just encourage nepotism and family dynamics and those types of issues. So I believe in the democratic process. But to the community I dress like, I look like, I talk like somebody who is not from the front line of the community. So how do you differentiate that from your perspective of, like I started from a very similar place, not identical but over the course of the education and the tools that you develop, in the appreciation you develop for the system itself and how it can support a deeper understanding, then you start to look like the very thing that maybe when you started you were completely against.
Bill Deresiewicz:Well, listen, I don't have an answer for that. This is a classic problem In England. They talk about this as the problem of the scholarship boy. You know where you're taken out of your you know, you show promise, you're taken out of your lower class community, you're sent to Oxford and Cambridge, whatever, and you start to grow into a different person. You start to learn a different set of manners, obviously, a whole set of references and knowledge, and what it ends up meaning is for you personally that you're not at home where you started, and you're not at home in the upper class either, because, of course, they'll never really treat you like an equal, and it also creates tension with your community. I mean, I think, or it can, and I think that that's something that you just have, that you, you first person, you singular and you plural have to work out. But what I was talking about, and I think maybe you might also be concerned about, is something somewhat different, which is um, which is not just that your experience has grown apart and so they're going to look at you.
Bill Deresiewicz:Maybe a little funny, it's that the people who speak for non-white communities in the United States are members of the elite liberal caste, wherever they started from and again. They often started from upper middle class or better right, that's the majority of people of color who go to schools like Harvard, but they are encased in the perspective, in a perspective that's not the perspective of their community, whether they ever knew it or not, no matter where they started. You know you are trying to help your community and to, I think, maybe look from the perspective of your community, as well as the new perspective that you have, this is not what's happening, right? This is just. I mean, I feel like the white and non-white members of the progressive elite are indistinguishable in terms of their perspective. Right, that's the problem.
Aaron Pete:You see the distinction I'm making.
Aaron Pete:I think so.
Aaron Pete:I guess the challenge that I'm having is to say, like for me to say I don't know what my community thinks, or say like some CTV or some newscaster is talking about my community and they don't know what they think, that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't perfectly track with what the community thinks.
Aaron Pete:Just because they didn't grow up there, right like I wouldn't think that my community understands that they're predisposed to a higher crime rate because they live on reserve and reserves have higher rates of crime than off reserve members like I don't think that most of them would would understand or know some of the facts about where they live, and so for them to speak to me about where they live, and so for them to speak to me about where they live and where they come from, they might mention that their neighbor committed a crime one time, but they wouldn't understand that the whole socioeconomic system is built in a way that predisposes them to disadvantage, and so I actually think it would be more useful for a newscaster to highlight that than to pull one of my members forward and say speak on behalf of your community, because they actually just wouldn't understand some of the circumstances in which they're in, which is what you described in the TED Talk of like. Many of these people need to take that first step of looking inwards, and they don't get that opportunity.
Bill Deresiewicz:I don't disagree with that. I would say, and again, I mean this is just kind of provisional. I've never really thought about this and I'm speaking to you, about your community, in the way that they can hear you, and it seems to me like you want to do those things and what I'm saying, and I know this is kind of a controversial statement, but I feel like a lot of the people who speak for communities of color in this country are not listening and think they know and are seem really out of touch with the experience and desires of the community, the average community member that they claim to be speaking for. I mean agreed, you know. I mean like with policing, right, I mean actually, if you pull black people, they have very, they don't want to abolish the police, they want better policing. They also want more policing. They certainly don't want no policing.
Aaron Pete:I agree with you and I think these are all really important discussions to have, because when I'm looking at encouraging my membership to go and get the university education and to start to think of some of these things, the thing that I want to make sure that I also support them on which I'd be interested to get your read on is tracking that with some sort of plan that also aligns with work, and this is where the rubber hits the road with trades is that you are gearing yourself for a type of job.
Aaron Pete:But the thing that I want to support members with is, yes, I want you to go get an education on how to be a lawyer, but I want to make sure that you have that kind of track on what your employment is going to potentially look like, and you don't have to follow that perfectly.
Aaron Pete:But I think it's important to have that tool, because so many of at least our communities end up in these paid for colleges processes and I know you have that in the US as well because it's short term and it gives them an instant answer to where they're going to be able to succeed and it kind of pulls out those people who have an initial good idea.
Aaron Pete:I want to get education but are somewhat taken advantage of and so supporting them. My approach would be like a job fair that also has the universities within it, so that we're kind of coupling the idea that if you go to university and you get this degree, it could result in these 10 different employment opportunities and here are the employers to kind of give you the tools you need. So often we do them separately, but you want a timeline, because people are worried about the cost of living and inflation and mortgage rates and all of these issues. You need to give them a full plan, and that's something I don't see universities often provide, which is here's kind of the track that you're on and you can go this way or that way or over here, but you should have a plan in place and a mile marker to make sure that you're on the right track.
Bill Deresiewicz:I think that's a really good point and I've never heard anybody speak about it this way. First of all, universities in my experience which means the experience of what students have told me at many American universities are really terrible. The career office just is useless so terrible at helping students envision what they can do with their education and then helping them make connections to the job market, and that needs to be done much better. My understanding again very limited from low-income communities or low-income families is that there's often a huge dearth of information about what you can do with your life, what the possibilities are for you, especially if you're a gifted young person, just in terms of what kinds of colleges you can go to. I mean typically from you know again from what people who know better have told me in the United States, like kids from low income families, like they'll know the local universities, the local colleges, maybe their state flagship university you know the University of Florida if they live in Florida, and maybe they've heard of the Ivy League colleges which they would never dream of applying to, but they don't know that there are all these other options in between. They don't know about financial aid and, by the same token, I mean, I think a lot of what goes in. I mean even speaking for myself, right?
Bill Deresiewicz:I mean I grew up in a community with a lot of doctors and business people upper middle class. You know we weren't anywhere close to anyone. I mean there were no writers. We weren't like within five degrees of separation from a writer, let alone an artist. So the idea of being that like never occurred to me. And I see so many people who've had successful careers in the arts and writing, who started, who got a jump much earlier than me. You know like they grew up in Manhattan and they grew up in an environment where there are a lot of those people around.
Bill Deresiewicz:So all I'm saying is that I think a really important element of the way a kid or a young adult can imagine what they might be able to do with their life is what they see in the adult around them. And if you're in a poor community really any community, but especially a poor community and especially an isolated community if you don't have that variety, it's really useful for people to come in and say here are these things that you could do that you've never thought of and you don't know any adults in your life who do them, but you can do them. And here's, as you just said, here's the steps and let's make a plan together. And what would you want? Where would you want to go to school and what would you want to study and how do you get from school to the world of employment? I mean, that would be terrific. To build out all of that kind of infrastructure would be an incredibly valuable thing to do.
Aaron Pete:I've said that exact kind of statement before, which is within my reserve. We don't have doctors, nurses, we don't have chiropractors or artists or musicians. The person living next to you is on social assistance, the person living on the other side is on social assistance, and so there isn't a diverse worldview of like you could go become that thing. And I think it's incumbent on people who have gone and achieved those things to share how they got there and inspire others to do the same. Because one of the other suspicions that I have is we talk about the challenges within Canada of productivity. We've seen reductions in productivity across the country. I imagine that similar challenges are probably arising in the United States, but probably not to a similar degree, and one of my arguments is these communities are a, b, the fast track for you to start to make a six-figure income, and you have to do these things first. But this is where the this is where you could end up. I mean, there was nothing more fueling to me than when my uncle said you're probably not going to own a million dollar home on the beach, because then I was like, well, what do I have to do? Lay out the lines, and I'm going to go, accomplish those goals, because that's the type of life I want to live. People have worked hard for me to get to where I am and now if all it takes is to keep going and keep pushing, then I'm happy to do that and I think that's something we underestimate about.
Aaron Pete:The willpower of people who come from poverty is like I've seen people get their heads knocked in. I've seen gang violence. I've seen all types of things. Going into an office and filling out some paperwork all day long is easy, and I have a hard time resonating with people who talk about burnout and how hard it is to work all day and the lights in their eyes and those things, because it's like, do you want to come see what my community members live?
Aaron Pete:They would take your office day, any day of the week, over the circumstances that they've had to live in for the past 40 years, and so I think invigorating those communities to say you have a secret sauce that those Ivy League people they just don't have. You have an experience that's going to fuel you when everybody else wants to quit, that you're going to want to keep going and reminding them that they have something to offer the world that's valuable. And I think sometimes we take such pity on those people of where they're starting from that we forget that they have a rocket attached to them that's ready to go. If you're willing to inspire them to see it that way and not look at the trials and tribulations they've been through as just a burden, that it's also fuel for them to go and achieve more in their life.
Bill Deresiewicz:Again, that's very well said. A couple of things. You said that bringing in, say, native doctors and lawyers to a community to show them what's possible is inspiring. I think successful professionals from marginalized communities also just not only are eager to inspire, but they're even eager to help in a very practical way. Right, because one of the things, as I suggested before, one of the biggest things that people get from going to fancy college is connections, and connections are really important in many, many fields really, and probably in all fields, even the ones that seem like they're purely meritocratic or technocratic. The other thing is that so often when I hear or read somebody from a less advantaged background who's been successful talk about how they got to be successful, very often one element of the story is some elder who said you can do it is some elder who said you can do it, don't feel like you can't.
Bill Deresiewicz:One of my favorite writers on education maybe my very favorite Mark Edmondson, who's a professor at the University of Virginia, is from a working class Irish family in Massachusetts. He's the first. If I remember correctly, he was the first person in his family to go to college and his dad was this kind of tough working class guy. I mean tough like tough to be the son of. But there was a moment that he describes in one of his books where he tells his dad oh, I wish I could study X in college, but that's just for rich kids. And his father blew up at him and he said you know, you're just as good as any other rich kid, you just don't have as much money and you should study what you want. That's good, you should study what you want. And Mark is a professor of English at one of the best schools in the country.
Aaron Pete:I love that and I love the piece about the elders, because that is something that I think is within our First Nations culture. That's something that's fallen away. Elders were expected to sit in the back and watch people and they'd start to see the people who are natural leaders, who would kind of be with their friends and go, okay, guys, we're going to do this. And then you'd be like, okay, that person's a leader, oh, that person's doing the woodwork to get that done, that person's probably going to be a carpenter or a builder or something like. They'd start to see that and tell the children this is what you.
Aaron Pete:We don't admire those types of people right now. I know within the United States it's just talk about how being old is a real downside and a real problem if you're going to run a country, and that's kind of the talking piece and that absolutely trends down to those frontline people who are like, oh, I'm not going to listen to old people, I'm the one who's going to go figure it out and fix all these problems. And that's an error from my position of just like make sure that you double check with your elders, go and speak with those people, and that's something that's very important to Indigenous people.
Bill Deresiewicz:Yeah, I'm going to disagree with you a little bit. I mean, first of all, to be clear, when I said elders I'd forgotten that that might have very specific resonance for you. I'm not excluding the people that you would call elders in the narrow sense, but I really just mean any adult that you respect, that you might want to emulate, whose words have some kind of authority over you, and I think every young person has people like that. I agree with you that the rhetoric in some ways since the 60s Joan Didion said that she belonged to the last generation to identify with adults. So in some ways since the 60s, and certainly in this recent upsurge which in many ways is kind of very similar to the 60s, there's a general discrediting of adults.
Bill Deresiewicz:But I think in the lives of specific young adults they're always looking to be validated. I mean, this is part of the problem is that sometimes the people they're looking to are these idiot college professors who are, you know, as Gary Steingart said recently, academically inbred professors. So to me an elder can mean anyone in your. It can often be a teacher or a professor, or maybe somebody at your workplace or someone whose opinion matters to you who can give you that permission to try to do something that's outside of what you were, what it seems like life has handed you.
Aaron Pete:That sounds to me like and maybe we're just getting into semantics, but that sounds more like a mentor to me.
Bill Deresiewicz:A mentor exactly.
Aaron Pete:From my perspective, at least within my peer group. Mentors are dead. That's not a thing that my the people who are around my age. They don't look to somebody who's 20 years older than them as a source of knowledge and wisdom and someone to pull from on advice. I mean now the default is to go check your phone and see, oh, I've got this sore leg. Maybe I need to go check WebMD, like the instinct isn't to go get that kind of rooted knowledge, okay, well, maybe I'm not going to dispute that, because it's your peer group and your generation.
Bill Deresiewicz:That would be very unfortunate. I mean it's unfortunate for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that what a mentor can offer you is wisdom, by which I mean something, a kind of skill in the application of practical, a sort of I mean to me wisdom is about, it's about navigating your life right. I mean you can't get that online just because online can't address you. I mean you can, maybe you know. How should I? You know I cut my, I cut myself. What should I do, you know? But but that's a general prescription, right? In order to, in order, you need guides to help you guide your own life, and they can only do that if they know you right.
Bill Deresiewicz:That's, in some ways, mentorship. It's not about knowledge. It's not about the kind of knowledge that you can get on Wikipedia. It's, like I said, it's a kind of tact or touch in the application of the knowledge. That comes from experience, and I would also add, in my experience as a mentor and I've had a lot of experience as a mentor mainly your job is not to tell young people what to do or even to talk very much at all it's about asking good questions to help people hear themselves right, and of course that's dialogic. You can't do that with your computer.
Aaron Pete:I couldn't agree more and I do think that I don't know how much you know about Canadian kind of culture right now. But one term that we hear all the time is this idea of decolonization, of removing the colonial kind of processes, and I philosophically disagree with kind of the underpinnings of that idea because I mean you can't text about decolonization without seeing the irony of the claim. But one area that I do see is sharing cultures more, and within First Nations culture it is incredibly crucial and taught at a young age to look up to your elders, and elders doesn't mean seniors, it means the people that you're describing, the people who have wisdom to share, and we had one woman at National Truth and Reconciliation Day come forward and talk about her experiences in residential school and how she failed her own children who ended up passing away because of her alcohol addiction, and how she had to live with that and that she needed to live every day knowing that that was part of the decision she made and she knows that it was part of the Canadian government's fault for putting her in a position where she wasn't a good mother, but that she ultimately has to own that and encourage other community members not to do the same and to set an example and to participate in a positive way to inspire the community not to make the missteps she made in her own life. That, to me, is real wisdom that comes from that lived experience. That's not about tearing down government. It's not about calling one person out or another. It's about figuring out how to move forward in a good way, despite all the reasons not to and despite all the other people you could blame. And that's where I think we do need a renaissance of wisdom in both countries. Amen, beautiful Bill, I highly recommend people check out your books.
Aaron Pete:I found again your TED Talk and these books inspiring because they remind us of that North Star, and I think sometimes that North Star gets lost when you're paying bills, when you're trying to go do the things people tell you to do, and that's so important when we're talking about education. It doesn't stop when you're in university, but there are so many good tools that I learned throughout that process that go to exactly what you're describing. That go to being willing to look at evidence that you disagree with, being able to debate someone verbally on an issue. These are all key parts of what's going to help you in a job interview. What's going to help you ask for a pay raise in your life, like the tools that you get from university can really apply to so many different facets of your life.
Aaron Pete:But we need to know what that North Star is, and that's what I feel like you emblemate and you show other people is. This is what we should be striving towards. We might be off course, but we can get back there. So I highly recommend people check out your book Excellent Sheep and your other works. Can you tell them how else they can find you?
Bill Deresiewicz:Well, if you can spell my last name, you can find my website, BillDerezovitzcom, and there are links to everything there, and also I would love to hear from people if they want to email me. There's a contact link there as well.
Aaron Pete:Brilliant. Thank you so much for being willing to share the time and have such a thoughtful discussion. I learned a lot from it.
Bill Deresiewicz:I learned a lot too, thank you.
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