In Excellent Sheep, Deresiewicz makes a claim that "If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom." He is speaking about choosing a "lesser" college to attend or a shunning a major centered around wealth, but the implication is clear. "Yale snubbed me, and I am still doing fine, so I know what it is like to do without what you want! Students do not need to attend a good university or pursue a money-making major! Ignore my family of Ivy League grads!" Deresiewicz is the elite he claims to despise, even if he attempts to make the case that the humanities are for everyone. This defense of liberal arts, of course, is spoken by a man who has no idea about anything outside of the upper class and is so beyond normal society that he has no idea how to have a conservation with his plumber. The sort of elitist condescension where only university graduates can tell Americans what it is really like to live a "good life" is one we are all tired of hearing.

While critiquing the system of elite education that creates "excellent sheep" instead of well-rounded human beings, Deresiewicz makes sure the reader never forgets that he went to Columbia and attended elite institutions throughout his education. Why? Outside of the obvious reasons (his insecurity), he tells the story of how he was denied tenure by Yale after ten years teaching at the college. Had he been granted tenure in 2008, one wonders about the existence of this book. It seems that for ten years, he did not have much of a problem with the assembly line education of elite colleges and was happy to be a cog in that machine. Did Deresiewicz have a change of heart after being fired? Possibly. Likely? Probably not.

The criticisms of the upper class are all things we have heard before. "They are overbearing!" "They push their children too hard!" "Admissions favor the wealthy over the poor!" The same criticisms about parents of bright students would fit with parents of athletes or talented musicians. Maybe the problem is the insistence on ultimate success over becoming happy people. Deresiewicz attempts to explain this issue:

“You’re told that you’re supposed to go to college, but you’re also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn’t self-indulgent? Going into finance isn’t self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn’t self-indulgent? It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It’s selfish to pursue your passion, unless it’s also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn’t selfish at all.”

Again, Deresiewicz misses the point. The reason parents are leery of their children going into a career in music or art history is that they know the pain and struggles that those professions entail. Going into finance or law is recommended because of the guaranteed financial security of possessing a professional degree from an elite college. For those who can fall back on a trust fund while pursuing their career in history, that is a viable option, but for the kid from a family making $45,000 a year that hit the jackpot of a Yale admission? The priorities are different. One of the biggest problems in Excellent Sheep is how unaware Deresiewicz is of this scenario. Every student that attends the Ivy League is not a member of the upper class, and they do not have the ability to make decisions like "pursuing a degree in English" so casually. Their parents are attempting to direct their lives for the greatest individual good of their child.

One thing to keep in mind is that Deresiewicz is not concerned about these institutions being populated with the wealthy or favoring certain ethnicities over others, just the idea that the wealthy aren't getting a good enough education once they get there. The question then becomes: who is the intended audience of this book? The helicopter parents of the upper class? The middle class does not have time for his irrational diatribe against the elite colleges that have let him go. It seems the actual audience of this book are the institutions themselves for not recognizing the dedicated and brilliant teacher William Deresiewicz.

Excellent Sheep reads like the same paranoia touted for years by the likes of Harold Bloom and Mortimer Adler. "The liberal arts are dying!" "We need people with a moral center!" "Kids just don't read all the books of the Western Canon anymore!" It is as if Deresiewicz thinks no one has ever seen Dead Poets Society. "Look upon the state of the Ivy League ye mighty, and despair!" This screaming into the abyss about "real education" will pass once again as it did with Adler and his Great Books series. Then, Deresiewicz will invent something new to direct his outraged. As a matter of fact, I can picture his next book already:

"Entitled Brats: Millennial Humanities Majors and the Decline of STEM"