aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, May 08, 2006
Students on Kaavya Viswanathan
As spring semester winds to a close on Harvard’s campus, the disgraced sophomore is generating as much chatter as are final exams and summer internships.
Many students express sorrow for Viswanathan, saying her actions appear as naive as the book-smart but clueless protagonist of her novel.
Deena Shakir, a sophomore who befriended Viswanathan during their freshman year, describes the daughter of Indian immigrants as unassuming and outgoing. “She’s intelligent and mature beyond her age,” says the 20-year-old from San Jose, Calif. “You could tell she’d been brought up by parents who taught her well.”
Yet there’s also ample disdain. Some students believe Viswanathan was caught short-stepping a calculated effort to parlay her Harvard status into the latest hot young “chick lit” novelist. Some also worry the incident could seriously sully Harvard’s reputation.
Moreover, at a school where super overachievers are the norm, jealousy over Opal’s release has given way to considerable schadenfreude over Viswanathan’s troubles. “Most people who have judged her think she’s guilty,” says YiDing Yu, 21, a junior and economics major from Orlando. “The evidence is pretty condemning.”
In the article Peter Osnos says she’s an “immature and misguided teenager who got swept up in a race she wasn’t ready for.” I’m not so sure she’s even that.
She’s a product (victim?) of our media machine that likes to report her (alleged) half-million dollar contract and wants a young genius author and, as I said when noting Malcolm Gladwell’s coming to her defense, she’s a cog in the machine that produced this book.
The cause I suspect is hinted at by Dr. Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, a recognized world leader in the study of personality, and author of Mindset—The New Psychology of Success in this outstanding Tech Nation podcast where she comments on our misguided model of self-esteem:
[clip]:Self-esteem per se is just fine, but I think we have a misguided model of what it is and how to promote it. We think it’s something that you can just pump into a child the way you inflate a tire. And we think we can do that by telling them how great they are. That’s the misguided part… [it] tells children the name of the game is to look smart. So that when we then offer these students a chance to do something that stretches them and would help them learn, they say, “No thank you. I’d rather keep on looking smart.”
We also showed that when they then got something that was more difficult, they crashed. They said, “I guess I’m not smart after all.” They lost their enthusiasm for the task and their performance went way down. Incidentally this was an IQ test, so praising their intelligence made them less smart.[...]
[clip] There are these famous cases of Janet Cook and Stephen Glass, famous young reporters who made up stuff. Had to give back a Pulitzer Prize. Had to leave the New Republic in shame. What was that about? Were they just cheaters with deep down bad qualities? I think they were like the children in my studies who received lavish praise for their intelligence or talent and then didn’t feel that they had the luxury of learning. Maybe Janet Cook and Stephen Glass felt they had to be brilliant right away. They couldn’t take the time to learn the ropes and do the legwork and yes, they came out with these great stories right away, but they weren’t true.
