Let’s start with the easy part: Luigi Mangione is accused of committing an evil and despicable act in allegedly gunning down UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson in New York last week. The online fans who have praised Mangione should be ashamed of themselves.
That includes an English and cinema studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where Mangione graduated in 2020. In social media posts that she has since retracted, Julia Alekseyeva called Mangione the “icon we all need and deserve” and said she had “never been prouder” to teach at Penn.
Credit: KYLE KIELINSKI
Credit: KYLE KIELINSKI
I teach at Penn, too, and I was mortified by Alekseyeva’s remarks. But I do think Mangione deserves credit for identifying a huge problem at elite universities, which he confronted — and tried to correct — when he was a student here.
I’m talking about our culture of competition, which makes every student activity into a war of all against all. Many clubs require students to submit applications or undergo interviews before they can join.
Not Luigi Mangione. As a sophomore in Penn’s school of engineering, he started a student organization devoted to video game production. But unlike most other clubs, it took all comers.
“We discussed if we would seem more legitimate with an application, but that’s not the environment we’re going for,” he told the campus newspaper in 2017. “Our goal is to have fun and learn.”
Another member of the club praised its “inclusive attitude,” which created a different vibe than many other student groups. “Everybody joined because they want to make cool games, not because they want to pad their resumes,” he said. “If it was to have those interview style applications with enormous Google forms, it wouldn’t be the same. It’d be a job.”
That’s precisely how Penn students have come to see most extracurricular activity: as a job. And that makes them into stressed-out cynics, whose prime goal is to win — at any cost — rather than to have fun and learn.
A few years ago, a student told my class that she had tried out for the Alzheimer’s Buddies Club, which sent students to visit dementia patients in nearby hospitals, but was rejected. She said applicants to the club had to submit essays and resumes, and people who made the “first cut” were then interviewed by an officer in the organization.
I was appalled. It’s a free country, I told the class, and if the students wanted to restrict membership that was their own business. But if they wanted Penn’s imprimatur — and its financial support — they should have to take anyone who was interested.
The room went quiet, and everyone avoided my gaze. Finally, a brave student spoke up. “If they did that, nobody would want to join,” he admitted.
There you have it. Forget the heartfelt essay about Grandpa’s descent into dementia, or the resume noting that you had visited nursing homes in high school. Everything of value is competitive. And without the competition, there’s no value at all.
You can find the same pattern across elite higher education. “My roommate was wait-listed to volunteer at a homeless shelter,” a student wrote in the Unofficial Guide to Harvard. “Some girl on my floor got cut from a Zumba class. It’s brutal.”
Indeed it is. And it’s deeply corrosive to the well-being of our students.
To get into an elite university, they have to submit a long list of extracurricular pursuits that supposedly illustrate their “passions” as well as their “leadership.”
And when they arrive on campus, the extracurriculars become a blood sport. “Not all of you will make it in,” Harvard’s Unofficial Guide warns. “Let the Hunger Games begin!”
It’s time for us to put an end to them, by prohibiting competitive admissions for funded student groups. Our message should be clear: you can establish your silly tests and interviews, but not on our dime. It’s not good for you, and we won’t support it.
Mangione didn’t support it, either. By welcoming everyone, his video game group was “working against Penn’s competitive club culture,” as the campus paper reported. But we can’t rely on students to resist that culture on their own. Instead, we should require clubs to follow the example Mangione set in 2017.
To repeat: Nothing can excuse Mangione’s alleged crime. He’s a scion of privilege, who stands accused of a depraved murder, not a populist hero. But we shouldn’t let his terrible wrong blind us to what he got right.
We have made our students miserable by pitting them against each other. And when college becomes the Hunger Games, everyone loses.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America” and eight other books.
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