As a recent college grad and reader of Charlotte Simmons, I’m reading the Derb thread with great interest. Wolfe’s Dupont is an accurate depiction of the university (leftist elite or not) at its worst. Obviously, not everyone’s college experience is like Dupont—thankfully, my own was quite different. But recognizing that college is the time when young people are called upon “to create a new moral climate for themselves and for the nation,” Wolfe depicts the unfortunate result of a student body that chooses to create an amoral climate for themselves. The novel insinuates that in such a setting no young person, despite her moral backbone, can remain uncorrupted by the debauchery of the college party scene. Though this is often times the case, it is not always so. The overlooked point in the novel is that a young person may, too, exit college with the same moral integrity with which she entered. Charlotte probably did not have much of a moral backbone in the first place; her decline’s no real surpise. There are students who go to college in pursuit of “the life of the mind” just as there are students who, like Hoyte Thorpe, go to prestigious schools to become big-shots on Wall Street. Wolfe does aim to criticize what the Ivy Leagues has become, but he clearly emphasizes the negative aspects of college life rather than the positive aspects for the same reason that Dante’s Inferno is read more than the Paradiso—it’s just more interesting to read.