In this article, the author refutes the arguments forwarded by William Deresiewicz in his much-discussed essay, "The American Scholar." Deresiewicz claimed that his background (as a student at Columbia and a former associate professor of English at Yale) rendered him incapable of a few minutes of small talk with the plumber who came to fix his pipes. Deresiewicz went on to rehearse a familiar set of arguments about the entitlements, anti-intellectualism, and careerism of students in the Ivy League and its peer institutions. An elite education "inculcates a false sense of self-worth," he said. The author believes that some of Deresiewicz's contentions are false. As a faculty member at Yale, Deresiewicz never really knew what it was like to be a student at Yale. Deresiewicz's essay, beautifully written and critically smart, flattens the variety of his students' lives into the kinds of generalizations people try to nudge first-year composition students out of making.