Walter Kirn is a writer and critic whose work appears in many publications including The Atlantic and The New York Times Book Review. Last Thursday, The Daily Californian published a review of his memoir "Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever." We talked to him about his struggles at Princeton, rule by elites and the myth of the "best years."

Daily Californian: Who was your intended audience? Or did you write this for yourself?

Walter Kirn: I didn't write it for myself. I really wrote it specifically for people who had undergone similar experiences. Or people who were about to even, or currently undergoing them, so that would be students, former students and parents who might also happen to be former students.

It didn't strike me that this was a book unique to me or to Princeton University. It's a story about the sort of minds that an American education forms, especially a test-based SAT-aimed education. And it was also a story of those strange four years when people pretend to be adults, leave behind everything they know and attempt to find themselves a very bewildering and sometimes quite pretentious world.

DC: Do you think it's a little awkward to be putting out a book about what you consider to be a waste of four years at a college that so many students today either can't get into or can't afford?

WK: I'm not sure that I considered my years in college a waste. I considered them a huge, almost overwhelming emotional and intellectual challenge that was in my case nearly my undoing. To me one of the problems at Princeton was that it was a place where the very smart or the very clever were put on a par with the very rich as if they are equal groups in society, and they aren't. They're very different groups, as life after college demonstrates. If I were just to speak my own political mind, I think it's one of our greatest achievements in society that we have places like Berkeley and the University of California system that (you can) afford a great education-and probably a better one than I got at Princeton frankly.

DC: Do you think you would have been happier at a place like Berkeley?

WK: Well, I used to live about 15 years ago in Berkeley for a little while and hung out around campus. Frankly, I think I would have been happier. It's a more textured institution. It's devoted to a kind of freedom that I think I yearned for at that age, and it's not so hemmed in by establishment concerns and preoccupations with social status.

DC: Have you been back to Princeton? Do you think it's changed over the years?

WK: Well, you know everything changes over the years, but what you might call the DNA of an institution is very hard to change. It persists in all sorts of ways. It's the focus in the place on raising your prestige and gaining your credential for the ruling class that bothers me. I don't know that anyone has ever looked at my college transcript, my grades.

DC: The word Princeton is enough?

WK: Well, in my profession the word Princeton means nothing. As a writer you sort of live or die by what you put on the page, and there's no extra credit given for a fancy diploma. You're either interesting and skilled or you're not. I mean I picked one of the few careers in which a Princeton degree makes little difference-except in small ways.

DC: Except that you have this material that you can write about.

WK: Yeah, yeah. And certain reviewers have accused me of trying to have my cake and eat it too, as though you go to a place like this and you have no right to complain. But Princeton almost uniquely among Ivy League schools has basked in a romantic glow ever since the F. Scott Fitzgerald days and has not come in for the kind of skeptical critique that other places have. At the same time I don't think it's really integral to the book that it takes place at Princeton. I've gotten letters and notes from people who have gone to a huge range of colleges and universities and who have experienced the same odyssey and the same frustrations and awakenings and obstacles.

DC: Your story seems relevant to Berkeley students because everyone here has climbed up the ladder of the meritocracy.

WK: It's really a book about the notion of meritocracy as played out in my own life. You know, we now purport to run the country's social machine on the assumption that peoples' value or peoples' promise can be pseudo-scientifically measured and predicted. And thus we create all sorts of instruments for measuring that value. And as we know from physics, the act of measurement distorts the object measured, and I think that our particular system for rating and ranking young people drives them towards certain behaviors and certain attitudes that might not be the most productive.

DC: There's a big push by minority groups to eliminate the SAT because of racial concerns.

WK: Well, you know the SAT came out of the classical IQ test, which was basically a device for sorting army recruits in WWI and deciding who was going to be put where, who was going to be first in command and who's going to follow. And so it has a kind of mechanistic, militaristic heritage.

DC: I was surprised in your book that you didn't mention cheating beyond your encounter with the Honor Committee. One huge facet of the meritocracy and how it works is that it leads students to cheat. You talk about working the system, but didn't you technically do it honestly?

WK: Technically, I did, but cheating is not always an overt offense. Sometimes it's almost a way of life. When you place people in a competition, as we've seen in every professional sport and the Olympics, you encourage people to seek an edge. From what I know cheating is pandemic now. At Princeton it was tougher to pull off and the consequences scarier. The episode I write of in the book is one in which I felt frankly kind of falsely accused, and it's in there because it's indicative of a kind of "Lord of the Flies" rule by the children atmosphere that was kind of chilling.

DC: You mentioned your mental breakdown in your junior year. How metaphorical was that?

WK: Oh, it was not metaphorical. There was nothing metaphorical. It was medical, it was mental, it was actual. The causes of such meltdowns are always a little mysterious. But in my case I think it was a combination of things and I think it was almost inevitable. At first there was my basic personality, which was that of the slightly anxious, frightened striver, who didn't know particularly why he was striving but was very scared that someone might put a stop to it.

And there was a lot of drug use all through the book. One of the ways that I eased the isolation I felt and expressed the kind of excitability I felt was through drug use. I was exhausted. And finally, the liberal arts education I was getting and the sort of fashions on campus-the intellectual fashions on campus-were based in what we call Derrida's deconstructionism, and seemed to teach that words and works of art were strangely detached artifacts that had little to do with the world and a lot to do with power structures. And in some way we're kind of arbitrary. I think that the saturation by that line of thought caused me after a while to wonder if anything meant anything.

The breakdown was just as I described it. I couldn't understand peoples' speech, I could barely read, I could not put together a sentence on paper for the life of me. Words that had been familiar started to seem like strange alien soundforms. It was if anything graver than I make it out to be in the book.

DC: It's surprising how long you went on unable to comprehend words.

WK: Well, it's a tribute, I suppose, on the one hand to my own sort of desperate resourcefulness, but also I think to the way in which few were really engaging with me on a substantive level. It was possible to kind of hang back and dance your way through, even though you had no idea what was going on at times.

DC: It was ironic in the chapter where you categorized your classmates that you sort of dismissed the mathematicians, the scientists and engineers as invisible.

WK: Well, I don't like to think I dismissed them, but I do think I found them otherworldy and opaque. Sure, I had the precocious, insufferable snobbery of a lot of arts students about scientists and so on. But really I felt when I looked at the heavy physics majors and the computer science engineers like I was on the other side of some vast spiritual divide. And in some ways that's also a criticism of the institution. Princeton took all these people at 17 and 18-I mean, my gosh, we're hardly out of the womb intellectually-and gave them no way to interpret each other…and it was very hard given the incredibly competitive atmosphere, the high stakes, the class discrimination that was going on, to get outside of yourself and build bridges to those unlike yourself. At least in my case, one's instinct was to retreat a little. Try to find a safe crowd or any isolated niche and operate from there.

DC: So once you got your Keasbey fellowship and you went to Oxford what did you find there? If you're concerned with class discrimination, I think England is the best place to go for that.

WK: Well, that's true in some respects, but because I was an American in England, I didn't have to play the game at all because there was no way to really win it. So I could be a sort of serene observer of another culture. Since it wasn't the culture in which I would have to make my way ultimately I had much less anxiety. Also Oxford-bless its heart-was kind of a corrective to the American style of education. You know, all we did was write short essays on books that our professors seemed to love and have long talks with them. Lectures weren't mandatory and there were no exams until the end. So it really did allow you to wander about among the stacks, follow your interests, think and write in a basic human way because you had to communicate quite quickly in these little essays, and I actually found it much more satisfying, much more fulfilling than university here.

DC: What do you hope for in college? How do you hope things will change, what do you wish you had gotten?

WK: First of all, I am appalled by the grotesque riches of some of these institutions. Princeton has not many more students than it did when I was there, but it has hugely more money and vastly more lavish and well-equipped buildings, and I start to wonder what it's all for. I mean, if these places, these great universities are indeed so great and provide such a splendid education, then why don't they put it on the damn web? Why can't I call up a Princeton philosophy lecture? Why can't I to some extent get some credit there?

They no longer really need to add to their endowments in these places, although the endowments have suffered in the downturn. Why haven't they come out into the larger society to more liberally dispense their wisdom, their expertise and so on? It seems to me kind of sick that they don't, that they retain this sort of cultic remoteness.

And you know, Princeton is a place that prides itself on a certain intimacy between teachers and students, and that's terrific, but I would like to think there are ways of blending students from different backgrounds-and not just intellectual backgrounds or social backgrounds, but all kinds of them, socially and geographically-in ways that are almost compulsory. Because though it's important that people learn to find their own way, I think it's also important that they be pushed a little to do what's uncomfortable for them, which is experience the other and experience parts of themselves that might not be so well developed. I would like to think that the university administrations could be more active in that process, rather than just kind of opening the gates and then retiring to their towers. Universities aren't a natural environment, and they have every right to impose idealistic regimens on their students rather than treat them quite absurdly as fully-fledged adults who should just sort of make their own choices in a vacuum.

DC: There's less pressure on private universities to give back and serve the public, when in fact they sort of are public universities. They receive subsidization from the government and they're indebted to society.

WK: It's pretty simple for me. A lot of these elite institutions are just too much about money. They're too much about training people to make money, they're too much about trying to suck up money from students, their families and alumni, and they're too detached from the sort of conflicts that occur among their student bodies because of differences about money. If the college is a sort of utopian island, different from the rest of society, playing by different rules than the business world and so on, then why not as much as possible remove that factor?

I have a greater criticism, and I think it speaks to what is going on in our economy right now. The kind of people I went to school with-well, not the kind of people, the very people I went to school with-the people who mastered this meritocratic system most assiduously, are the same ones who came to run our kind of financial and governmental establishment. And the qualities of detachment, dishonesty, ambition and indifference that were fostered in these places have now played out on a grand scale to the detriment of tens of millions of people. Citibank, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and all these places are literally staffed by the meritocratic elite.

And look what a damn poor job they did of (indistinguishable) the most basic civic morality in their behavior. I think that there is no greater mark against the system as presently constituted than the fact that its great success stories are the very ones who got us into this awful mess.

DC: Does that mean that we should get some public university graduates to start running things?

WK: Damn right! To be honest, I think these places like Princeton should be free, I think a lot of their instruction should be up on the web. I think that the system which tries to aim students from extremely young ages at these few little targets should be laughed off the playing field, and we should really sit down as a society, as a culture, and think about what the purpose of education and higher education really is. And if it's simply to create social and financial hierarchies to anoint the special and marginalized, the so-called average, then I really want no part of it.

The thing that I disliked most about Princeton, and the thing that I've seen from the letters I've received, which a lot of people disliked about the places they went, is this notion that these are the best years of your life. We've provided this great and wonderful gilded playground for you, and you should shut up and smile. You asked at the beginning: Who is this book for? If this is dedicated to anyone, it's dedicated to the people who actually cracked up in college, who didn't make it. Who for all sorts of reasons couldn't take it, stumbled. There's a huge amount of propaganda about the college experience in this society.

And it's as unrealistic as the kind of propaganda that used to go out about churches and so on. You know. Everyone's happy. Everyone's stimulated. And if you're unhappy it's your own damn fault. Well, that's a cruel, and I think moronic attitude. And I'd like to see it go away. The myth of the great adventure that is college has gotten ridiculously overblown, as though it's all we have for a rite of passage. If a rite of passage is meant to lead the young person to sane adulthood, I don't know if college is the best way to go about that as presently constituted.

DC: Well maybe you should found a Walter Kirn University …

WK: The thing that I couldn't deal with at Princeton also was that here you're being taught in your classes to be skeptical, critical, detached, thoughtful. But socially at the university you're being taught to jump up and cheer with the pack. And not all colleges and universities are quite like that, but a heck of a lot of them are. On the one hand you're being taught to think for yourself, and on the other you're being immersed in groupthink.

Tags: LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY, WALTER KIRN