William Deresiewicz

Early life and education

Deresiewicz grew up in a Jewish home and attended a yeshiva high school. He has described himself as being "thrown out" of the high school and has imagined that he might have been charged with "gross insubordination and incipient atheism."

Deresiewicz received his B.A. in biology and psychology (1985), his master's in journalism (1987), and Ph.D. in English (1998) from Columbia University.

Academia

In 1998, Deresiewicz joined the faculty of Yale University. He taught courses in modern British fiction, Great Books, Indian fiction, and writing, among other areas. He left academia in 2008 to become a full-time writer.

Writer

In 2011, Deresiewicz published A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught me About Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter. In it, he divulges that his life was changed and he became a better person after reading Jane Austen for the first time at age 26.

His writings span such topics as books, higher education, culture, and politics. His article "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," along with his speech "Solitude and Leadership," have gone viral on the internet. In 2014, he published Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, a book-length expansion of his argument in "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education."

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

In this memoir of a sort, Deresiewicz admits that he was initially resistant to reading 19th-century British fiction. Soon, though, he discovered that Austen’s novels are valuable tools in the journey towards becoming an adult.

Deresiewicz juxtaposes his reading of Jane Austen with insight into his own life. For example, the reader learns about his controlling father, a series of girlfriends that come and go, and the struggles of being raised in a religious household.

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" and Excellent Sheep

In the summer of 2008, Deresiewicz published a controversial essay for The American Scholar titled "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education." In it, he criticizes the Ivy League and other elite colleges and universities for supposedly coddling their students and discouraging independent thought. He claims that elite institutions produce students who are unable to communicate with people who don't have the same backgrounds as themselves, noting as the first example his own inability to talk to his plumber. Deresiewicz then uses Al Gore and John Kerry, graduates of Harvard and Yale (respectively), as examples of politicians who are out of touch with the lives of most Americans.

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Higher Education" went viral, receiving more than 40,000 shares on Facebook. Many readers had mixed reactions to the article, with plenty of criticism coming directly from the Ivy League, its peer institutions, and many others who accused him of cherry picking. The IvyGate blog published a facetious rebuttal, "Isn't Harvard Just the Worst?", telling the Class of 2012 to "enjoy these last few months of innocence, because soon you'll join the ranks of an organization whose sole purpose is to destroy the world."

The article became the groundwork for Deresiewicz' book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014). This work had a similarly mixed response. Dwight Garner, writing for the New York Times daily book review, praised it as "packed full of what [Deresiewicz] wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness.". He characterized Deresiewicz as "a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net," one whose "indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America." Other responses, however, were more critical. In the New York Times Sunday book review, Anthony Grafton conceded that "much of his dystopian description rings true" but argued that "the coin has another side, one that Deresiewicz rarely inspects...Professors and students have agency. They use the structures they inhabit in creative ways that are not dreamt of in Deresiewicz’s philosophy, and that are more common and more meaningful than the 'exceptions' he allows." In the New Yorker, Nathan Heller was critical from another corner, arguing that the "quandaries" Deresiewicz describes are "distinctly middle-class.". Heller says that Deresiewicz argues the liberal arts "will help students hone their 'moral imagination,'" but "The advice seems cheap. When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of 'moral imagination' may be at play. (Imagine being able to pay off your loans and never again having to worry about keeping a roof over your family’s heads.)" Despite this mixed critical response, the book was a New York Times bestseller.

"Solitude and Leadership"

In October 2009, Deresiewicz delivered a speech titled "Solitude and Leadership" to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point. It was later published in The American Scholar and went viral online. In it, he makes the case that leadership entails more than just success and accomplishment. Citing observations he made of students at Yale and Columbia, Deresiewicz discusses the ubiquity of “world-class hoop jumpers” who “can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.” Instead, he argues, true leaders (such as General David Petraeus) are those who are able to step outside the cycle of achievement and hoop jumping in order to think for themselves. Deresiewicz claims that solitude is essential to becoming a leader.

Awards

As a writer, Deresiewicz has won or been nominated for several awards.

Personal life

Deresiewicz lives in Portland, Oregon.