Slacking
A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation
About the Book
Ivy League universities can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students.
Even a cursory review of the course titles at top schools shows that these $320,000-plus diplomas may confer legacy prestige to graduates, but not necessarily knowledge or wisdom.
At Cornell, for example, students can take Queer Girlhood, Beyoncé Nation, and Intersectional Disability Studies. The course list at Yale includes Pop Sapphism and Comparative Settler Geographies. At Princeton: Get Your Kicks, a class on shoes. Penn offers Reality TV and Gender and Decolonizing French Food.
Even worse, these courses actually fulfill general education requirements.
It is still possible to earn a great education at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth, but doing so requires prudence and persistence. In Slacking, Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan dedicate one chapter to each Ivy League college, providing guidance about the coursework that serious students should pursue to extract a real education from these decaying institutions.
Every chapter concludes with two course lists, both of which meet the school’s general education requirements. One displays the worst collection of courses that an inveterate “slacker” could take to skate through the requirements for entertainment, reinforcement of political biases, and narrow specialization. The other lists the best choice of courses a dedicated striver could take to acquire a well-rounded, content-rich liberal education.
The contrast between the two sounds a rousing alarm bell for curriculum reform at America’s best-known colleges.
About the Authors
Adam Kissel
Adam is a visiting fellow for higher education reform in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He is a board member of Southern Wesleyan University and the National Association of Scholars. He also serves on the America 250 Advisory Council on Civics, History, and America’s Future. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, he served in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
Madison Marino Doan
Madison is a policy analyst in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on affordability and accountability reform in higher education and K-12 education choice initiatives. Doan is also a visiting fellow with the Maryland Family Institute. Her work may be found in Fox News, Washington Examiner, Real Clear Education, Washington Times, The Daily Signal, and the Educational Freedom Institute. She graduated summa cum laude from Lamar University in Economics and Finance.
Rachel Alexander Cambre
Rachel teaches at Louisiana State University (LSU) and Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and teaches remotely for Belmont Abbey College’s online Master’s in Classical and Liberal Education. A visiting fellow in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Politics and Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation from 2022 to 2024, she researches and writes on liberal arts education and American political thought. She holds degrees from Washington and Lee University and Baylor University and has held teaching and research postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Virginia.
