Film Review: ‘Ivory Tower’ With Amazing Facts
Jan 16,2022
“Ivory Tower” is at least the second documentary in two years, following Frederick Wiseman’s artful and immersive “At Berkeley,” to comment on the increasingly prohibitive costs of higher education and the implications for America’s youth. Speaking with a broad array of authors, academics and administrators, and trotting out statistics when necessary, Rossi paints a dispiriting overall picture of a system that saddles students with crippling debt (totaling more than $1 trillion nationwide), which they are ill equipped to pay off in an increasingly pinched job market — a problem that, for many, calls into question the practical value of attending college to begin with.
One of the documentary’s key points is that most colleges are no longer selling an education but an experience, happily spending millions of dollars on plush housing complexes and state-of-the-art recreational facilities in a bid to entice as many applicants as possible. It’s the students who pay for these campus expansions, and not just financially: Too many schools, in the film’s somewhat over-generalized estimation, have allowed academic rigor to fall by the wayside, a problem that can be attributed in part to an excess of administrators and a dearth of dedicated teaching faculty. One particularly alarming statistic — that 68% of students at public universities fail to graduate in four years — is introduced by way of a visit to Arizona State U., whose party-school rep is reinforced here by footage of a massive swimming-pool bacchanal that resembles an outtake from “Spring Breakers.”
By contrast, at a time when the prestige of the Ivy League remains largely unassailable, Harvard is held up as the gold standard in terms of providing a world-class education and generous, need-based financial aid; one such beneficiary is freshman David Boone, a formerly homeless Cleveland teenager who’s amazed to have a bed and a dorm room to call his own. And then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, the most famous Harvard dropout this side of Bill Gates, whose astonishing success underlines both the questionable relevance of a college degree and the increasing emphasis on technology as a foundation of modern education. Indeed, among Harvard’s most popular classes is CS50: Introduction to Computer Science (footage from which is edited and scored to produce a moody “Social Network” vibe), one of many courses that are now offered free online to anyone who wants to enroll — part of an ongoing and so far inconclusive experiment in making education both available and affordable.
Not unlike “Page One,” “Ivory Tower” is structured in somewhat scattershot fashion, and hard-pressed to address the finer complexities of an enormous subject in a tidy hour-and-a-half framework. Yet the individual building blocks are never less than fascinating: Rather than advancing a single argument, the film tracks a wide range of intelligent perspectives, the most engaging of which shed light on lesser-known higher-education alternatives.
Among the more impressive examples is Deep Springs College, an intensive, highly selective two-year school located on a cattle ranch in Death Valley; here, 26 or so young men form a close, self-governing community, debating Hegel and mending fences as they prepare themselves, physically and intellectually, for lives of service. The film rightly adopts a more skeptical (but still open-minded) attitude toward the likes of billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who offers students $100,000 to skip college altogether and instead pour their ideas and resources into their own startups; closely linked to Thiel’s fellowship is the San Francisco-based UnCollege movement, which similarly encourages youngsters to “hack their education.”
Providing the documentary with its most dramatic source of conflict, as well as its most substantive reportage, are the 2013 student protests that occurred at Cooper Union, the privately endowed New York school of architecture, fine arts and engineering that, for more than 150 years, provided every one of its students with a full-tuition scholarship. It’s a venerable tradition that ended under the leadership of president Jamshed Bharucha, who in 2011 announced that, due to increasingly hard economic times, the school would begin charging students for tuition. The closest thing the documentary has to a real villain, Bharucha looks awfully dodgy when Rossi confronts him about the school’s badly mismanaged recent hedge-fund investments, as well as the not-insignificant matter of Bharucha’s own handsome compensation.
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