By Howard Schweber After spending a summer teaching political theory to Pakistani college students, I can confidently make two assertions: they are just like all the other college students I have known, and they are not at all like the other college students I have known. Beyond that, I found puzzles and mysteries. My first impression of Pakistani students was that they are … well, just college students. How utterly, disappointingly unexotic. Grade-conscious careerists, canny manipulators of the system, highly competitive … future engineers and finance majors. But there are some differences, after all. That word “elite” comes into play, here. In the U.S., no college student would describe him or herself as “elite” – that word is primarily reserved for use as a political insult. Americans, notoriously, valorize the idea of belonging to “the middle class,” sometimes to a ludicrous degree. Pakistani students have no such compunctions, and...