College is characterized in two contradictory ways: it is the only firm path to the upper-middle class, and it is a time of Animal House antics. This is so familiar that we often forget it doesn’t make sense. Want to be a respectable member of the upper class? Quick, bong this beer. Campus decadence is a sorting mechanism that elevates people who pay lip service to permissiveness, but don’t fully participate—a preparatory performance of the fake counterculture. “Decadence” sounds incorrect since the word elicits extravagant and glamorous vices…All our decadence becomes boring, cringe-inducing, and filled with HR-approved jargon. “For my Fulbright, I studied conflict resolution in nonmonogamous throuples.” Campus dynamics may partially explain this phenomenon. Camille Paglia has argued that many of the brightest left-wing thinkers in the 1960s fried their brains with too much LSD, and this created an opportunity for the rise of corporate academics who never participated in the ’60s but used its values to signal status. What if this dropout process repeats every generation? A key benefit of any prestige university is the social network. In order to take full advantage of this, students must participate in party culture without losing control of their appetites. Fiction often confronts open secrets, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt follows a group of eccentric college students who destroy their lives after taking their professors’ Dionysian stories too seriously. This might point to obvious truths about moderation: self-control accompanies success. Yet vices and virtues are not doled out equally, and when leadership training is done in a hyper-permissive atmosphere, we narrow the type of character who emerges. A Harvard Business Review study (https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-according-to-a-10-year-study) of common traits among CEOs found that the leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a “catapult experience”—a bold and potentially risky career move. Perhaps the same traits that lead to this type of bold action might also lead to very poor outcomes on a college campus. Perhaps hyper-permissiveness actually ends up promoting a form of timidity. We’re left with Silicon Valley dorks who microdose LSD in order to create hookup apps where users exchange sex puns on the toilet. It seems misguided to criticize college antics when woke scolds and corporate ascetics are draining the life out of everything. College is fun, and mostly harmless. As a society, however, it’s worth asking how the story of college as a time of extended adolescence can coexist with the story of college as the path to success. Solo cup culture flourishes because college is simply a pay-to-play credentialing service.
James McElroy
