Vanity Fair`s Schools for Scandal: The Inside Dramas at 16 of America`s Most Elite Campuses--Plus Oxford!, Carter Graydon

Many of us have long suspected an American obsession with status. Now Graydon Carter has collected extraordinary articles from Vanity Fair that show the lengths we will go to achieve it, preserve it, or destroy it--from the enduring, shadowy influence of Yales secret societies to the infamous senior salute at St. Pauls School; from the false accusations in the Duke lacrosse teams infamous rape case to the (mis)reportage of a sexual assault at the University of Virginia; from a deadly extreme-sport episode at Oxford to the Keystone Kop theft of a colleges rare books to the allegations of fraud by the now-shuttered Trump University.

Vanity Fairs Schools for Scandal brings focus to the perils facing American education today and how the life of the mind, and the significance of the institutions meant to foster it, has been negatively impacted by the partisan politics of privatization, tensions over so-called political correctness, the fraught dynamic of the teacher-student relationship, and what happens when visions for a bold future collide with the desire to maintain hidebound (or venerable) traditions.