{"id":28,"date":"2026-11-05T05:21:49","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T05:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/?p=28"},"modified":"2026-11-05T05:21:49","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T05:21:49","slug":"philsugar-jess-row-on-the-fetishization-of-elite-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/?p=28","title":{"rendered":"PhilSugar | Jess Row on the Fetishization of Elite Schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is rare to see writers offer a compelling one-sentence summary of their aesthetic philosophy.
\nGuernica
\nfiction writer Jess Row bucks that trend. real sugar daddies Philippines<\/a> For Row, author of
\nThe Train to Lo Wu
\nand most recently
\nNobody Ever Gets Lost
\n, writing should be \u201cloud, discordant, angry, political, but also very beautifully and carefully formed and controlled.\u201d Row upholds this credo in his story \u201c
\nDear Yale
\n,\u201d featured recently in
\nGuernica
\n, which satirizes issues ranging from university fundraising to racial identity. Here he talks with
\nGuernica
\nabout the origins of \u201cDear Yale,\u201d as well as other current projects, the sugar dating compatibility<\/a> trajectory of his writing, and the place of politics in American literature.
\n\u2014Sam Kerbel for
\nGuernica
\nGuernica:
\nCan you trace the genesis of your story \u201cDear Yale\u201d? What inspired it, if anything?
\nJess Row:
\n\u201cDear Yale\u201d started out, in my mind, as a very real letter to Yale, explaining why I will never, ever, donate money to a school whose economic operations embody the culture of relentless greed, the radical disparities of wealth and power, and the evisceration of effective financial regulation in America, and indeed everywhere in the world. I soon realized that it would be so much more fun, and perhaps more effective, to turn it into satire.
\nOne of the perils of being an alumnus of a school like Yale is that no matter where you go\u2014and through no effort of your own\u2014you will receive the alumni magazine, and an endless stream of fundraising letters, in your mailbox. The eye of the school is always on you, whether or not you\u2019ve given a cent. Yale, in addition to Harvard and Princeton, has an enormous endowment\u2014it has BGC sugar dating<\/a> fluctuated in size over the last three or four years, but it is still well above twenty billion dollars. That\u2019s more than the GDP of many countries in the developing world. On top of all that accumulated capital, Yale regularly receives million-dollar gifts and bequests\u2014for new buildings, endowed chairs, programs, and so on. Again: not news. Wealth begets wealth, success begets success.
\nI\u2019m really wary of the term \u201cpolitical fiction,\u201d because I think that often it\u2019s the writers who appear sugar dating paid membership<\/a> superficially apolitical\u2026whose work has the most substantive political impact.
\nIt became clear to me at a certain point after I graduated from Yale (in 1997) that what I thought was a university that happened to have enormous financial resources could just as well be described as an engine for the accumulation of capital, which happens to have a university attached to it. In the 1990s the size of Yale\u2019s endowment took on a kind of fetish quality, a hedonistic, euphoric quality: it became a rallying point, a point of identification that would have been unthinkably vulgar thirty or forty years before. By the time I graduated\u2014this was in the middle of the Clinton economic expansion, the years immediately before the dot-com boom\u2014Yale had found that new definition of elitism, under the dual signs of global capitalism and information technology. Yale\u2019s endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.
\nGuernica:
\nHow did \u201cDear Yale\u201d turn into a story about racial identity?
\nJess Row:
\nI don\u2019t think it\u2019s possible to tell this kind of story, or really any story at all about Yale\u2019s history, without delving into the issue of racial identity, because they are so deeply intertwined. It\u2019s become customary to think about the attitude of places like Yale before the 1970s as one of racial
\nexclusion
\n, but it\u2019s just as accurate to say that\u2014particularly in the twentieth century\u2014institutions like Yale had a very clear, positive concept of racial identity that they were trying to preserve, one that intensified as it became more and more threatened. (Jerome Karabel\u2019s
\nThe Chosen
\nis an important recent book on this subject). And one of the sources of that feeling of an embattled white identity, especially in the 1920s and 30s, was Oswald Spengler\u2019s
\nThe Decline of the West
\n, the text the narrator\u2019s father is so obsessed with in \u201cDear Yale. \u201d
\nWhen I started writing the story, the narrator\u2019s personality just sort of popped into my head, fully formed, and it seemed to me quite natural that he would think these things and not be shy about saying them out loud. His attitude is perverse and extreme, but also in its own way quite lucid, and\u2014I think\u2014probably not that different from the way many old Elis see the current state of their alma mater.
\nGuernica:
\nHow did your time at Yale compare to your other collegiate experiences?
\nJess Row:
\nI\u2019ve spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions\u2014and the privileges they embody\u2014represent in America.
\nDon\u2019t get me wrong: I love universities. I loved my time in college. Before I went to Yale I had no idea what it meant to have an intellectual life. I tried, to the best of my abilities at the time, to make use of its immense, unbelievable resources. At the same time, I was deeply lazy and complacent. I took it for granted that because I was a Yalie certain things would come naturally to me\u2014for example, that, without any training at all, I would be able to teach English grammar to speakers of Chinese. I lived under the sway of that immense collective narcissism until I graduated and it burst, and then I had, for all intents and purposes, a nervous breakdown. Which is not at all uncommon.
\nI think that the fetishization of elite schools in American culture, the way in which they cultivate an image as brands, as imprimaturs of some scarce resource called \u201cexcellence,\u201d is sad and pathological, and profoundly anti-democratic. The truth (a truth I didn\u2019t know, or at least didn\u2019t want to admit, in college) is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point. There are other models for organizing academic life so that resources are much more widely distributed\u2014this is certainly true in Canada, for example, and I think in other more centralized economies as well. It doesn\u2019t
\nhave
\nto be based on a model of scarcity and socially-defined privilege. Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s recent piece on college admissions in
\nThe New Yorker
\nmakes this case very clearly. The hierarchy of our universities mirrors our class structure. In this way\u2014and this is the point the narrator is trying to make in \u201cDear Yale\u201d \u2014we have returned to the tribalism of the 1950s, though now the tribe is not racial but socioeconomic.
\nOne of the perils of being an alumnus of a school like Yale is that no matter where you go\u2026you will receive the alumni magazine, and sugar baby asking for allowance upfront<\/a> an endless stream of fundraising letters, in your mailbox.
\nGuernica:
\nYou recently published a new sugar daddy na legit<\/a> book of stories,
\nNobody Ever Gets Lost
\n, which has perhaps a wider scope than your first collection,
\nThe Train to Lo Wu
\n. You talk on your website about the differences and similarities between the two collections, but regarding sugar daddy bio examples<\/a> your writing in general do you see a certain trajectory in terms of interest or style?
\nJess Row:
\nI think (and perhaps this is obvious from the answers above) that my writing has gotten somewhat angrier over hide sugar dating profile<\/a> the last ten years, perhaps more pessimistic, too, in its outlook. I\u2019m less concerned with carefully controlled surfaces now than I was in
\nThe Train to Lo Wu
\n, and much more open to experimentation. The collection that \u201cDear Yale\u201d will appear in (knock on wood) is titled
\nStoryknife
\n, and it\u2019s essentially a group of stories that explore different kinds of metafiction, or self-consciously meet sugar babies Philippines<\/a> created texts, which is something I would never have imagined myself doing ten years ago.
\nGuernica:
\nIn addition to teaching at The College of New Jersey, what other projects verified sugar daddy sa Philippines<\/a> are you working on?
\nJess Row:
\nI\u2019m working on a novel, tentatively titled
\nThe Immigrant
\n, which is about racial reassignment surgery. That\u2019s my main focus right now.
\nStoryknife
\nis sort of on the back burner. Then there\u2019s also an anthology project of short story criticism, and a group of translations of Chinese Zen Buddhist texts titled
\nNo Mind is True Mind: Teachings of the Ox-head School of Zen
\n.
\nGuernica:
\nHave you read anything recently that you\u2019ve enjoyed in particular? Are there any relatively obscure writers who you\u2019d recommend?
\nJess Row:
\nI can\u2019t think of anyone I would recommend more than the late Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who appears in an essay I have coming out in
\nBoston Review
\nin May. I\u2019m also a huge fan of the Swedish novelist Lars Gustaffson, who is almost entirely unknown in the US (his books are published by New Directions). And, though he\u2019s certainly not obscure, I wish more Americans were familiar with the fiction of John Berger\u2014his book
\nWays of Seeing
\nis very well known, but his novel
\nG.
\n(which won the Booker Prize) is probably my favorite novel of the twentieth century.
\nGuernica:
\nYou said in an interview with
\nThe Rumpus
\nthat \u201cit\u2019s really a liability in contemporary American fiction that many of us are taught to avoid political or intellectual matters in our work.\u201d Are there times when weaving fiction with political issues fails? Is there a formula toward making it work successfully?
\nJess Row:
\nI\u2019m really wary of the term \u201cpolitical fiction,\u201d because I think that often it\u2019s the writers who appear superficially apolitical (say, for example, John Cheever) whose work has the most substantive political impact. Cheever (and I hate to pick on him, but he presents an appealing target) created an entire new psychic landscape for the American suburbs, a kind of lifestyle of low-key suburban neurosis, that made it possible, in the 1960s and 70s, to turn away from the cities and what was happening in the culture at large, and return to a kind of ersatz Wasp subjectivity that didn\u2019t have to travel any farther than the boundaries of Greenwich or Darien. He created, in the American short story, a ground for suburban bourgeois self-absorption that was picked up by writers like Ann Beattie and Laurie Colwin in the 1980s, and is very much still with us today.
\nAll of which is a long way of saying that the politics in American fiction is largely unconscious, and what I would like to do\u2014what the writers I most admire tend to do\u2014is
\nmake
\nit conscious and explicit, to tell rather than show. Not out of some attack of conscience (although as a matter of principle I think it\u2019s bad faith to refuse to acknowledge the obvious implications of a work of art, whatever they may be) but because I think it\u2019s aesthetically interesting, and also because it makes a lot of people upset. It provokes interesting conversations.
\nI think it\u2019s also important to say\u2014and maybe I didn\u2019t make this clear enough in the
\nRumpus
\ninterview\u2014that of course American fiction is full of fearsomely intellectual and cerebral writers, David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann being two obvious examples. But I think some writing workshop instructors would like to pretend that those writers don\u2019t exist, because they are relatively hard to teach, and their methods (and, to be frank, their interests and intellectual range) are so far beyond the reach of many beginning writers. As a writing teacher, I\u2019ve been trying steadily to raise the bar for my students over the years\u2014to expose them to the full range of possibilities in contemporary prose, and ask them to participate in that universe. But it\u2019s not easy. There is such a thing as workshop-safe writing, and many students (and teachers) want to cleave to it and not let go.
\nCopyright 2011
\nGuernica Magazine
\n________________________________________________________________________
\nTo read more blog entries from
\nGUERNICA
\nclick
\nHERE
\n.<\/p>\n

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It is rare to see writers offer a compelling one-sentence summary of their aesthetic philosophy. Guernica fiction writer Jess Row bucks that trend. real sugar daddies Philippines For Row, author of The Train to Lo Wu and most recently Nobody Ever Gets Lost , writing should be \u201cloud, discordant, angry, political, but also very beautifully<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"solace_meta_sidebar":"","solace_meta_container":"","solace_meta_enable_content_width":"","solace_meta_content_width":0,"solace_meta_title_alignment":"","solace_meta_author_avatar":"","solace_post_elements_order":"","solace_meta_disable_header":"","solace_meta_disable_footer":"","solace_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}