There Will Be Grades: Oilman's Son Goes to College

I've been reading Oil! by Upton Sinclair, the book upon which the movie There Will Be Blood is based. So far, it's not much like the film. It's told in a deceptively folksy manner by a narrator who sometimes speaks directly to the reader. The main character is not John Ross, the father (in the book he's called "Dad" and in the movie he was Daniel Day Lewis), but Bunny, his son (who is John Ross, Jr.). "Dad" is an industrious oil man who ensures his success with some casual swindling and genteel bribery, while looking out for his men and his son. Unlike in The Jungle, there's nothing horrific here yet, although one man falls in an oil well and can't be pulled out in one piece. The focus isn't on the horrors of the oil field but the subtler machinations of accumulating wealth.

I'm only halfway through so I'm guessing things are going to get ugly, but I've just begun Chapter 10, "The University," and I was struck by the opening paragraphs. They seem to encapsulate very efficiently the relationship among money, power, ideology, education, and ambition that can often be seen in American higher education culture. Sinclair's voice here is very sly and indirect, but the implications are unmistakable; he describes a prominent university built on questionable foundations and seems to delight in telling us how Ross enters the picture. Here is the description of the  university and its founding around the time of World War I:

Southern Pacific University had been launched by a California land baron as a Methodist Sunday school; its professors were all required to be Methodists, and it features scores of religious courses. It had grown enormous upon the money of an oil king who had bribed half a dozen successive governments in Mexico and the United States, and being therefore in doubt as to the safety of his soul gave large sums to professional soul-savers. Apparently uncertain which group had the right "dope," he gave equally to both Catholics and Protestants, and they used the money to denounce and undermine each other.


When Ross visits campus to see Bunny, he also meets the university's president:

Still more reassuring was his meeting with President Alonzo T. Cowper, D.D., Ph.D., LL.D. For Doctor Cowper was in the business of interviewing dads; he had been selected by his millionaire trustees because of his skill in interviewing trustees. Dr. Cowper knew how a scholar could be at the same time dignified and deferential. Our Dad, being thoroughly money-conscious, read the doctor's mind as completely as if he had been inside it: if this founder of Ross Consolidated is pleased with the education his son receives, he may someday donate a building for teaching oil chemistry, or at least endow a chair of research in oil geology. And that seemed to Dad exactly the proper attitude for a clergyman-educator to take; everybody in the world was in the business of getting money, and this was a very high-toned way.

The transformation of ill-gotten wealth to "high-toned" educational pursuits seems perfectly sensible to Dad and Bunny, the idea being that the ends justify the means:

Both Dad and Bunny took the university with the seriousness it expected. Neither of them doubted that money which had been gained by subsidizing political parties, and bribing legislators and executive officials and judges and juries---that such money could be turned at once into the highest type of culture, wholesale, by executive order.

Some time into his first year at SPU, however, Bunny realizes that his English course

was cruelly dull, and that the young man who taught it was bored to tears by what he was doing; that the 'Spanish' had a French accent, and that the professor was secretly patronizing bootleggers to console himself for having to live in what he considered a land of barbarians; that the 'Sociology' was an elaborate structure of classification, wholly artificial, devised by learned gentlemen in search of something to be learned about; and that the Modern History was taught from text-books which had undergone the scrutiny of thousands of sharp eyes, in order to spare the sensibilities of Mr. Pete O'Reilly [a rival oil baron], and avoid giving any student the slightest hint concerning the forces which control the modern world.

Sinclair presents university education as a veneer as well as a money-laundering scheme. But Bunny is also exposed to a professor who insists that students "think for themselves" and talks to Bunny in secret about the various aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution (on peril of losing his job). Bunny, already a character who tries to see beyond the surface, is highly influenced by these conversations, which disturbs Dad and also results in a file being kept on him by mysterious agents and informers.

In the book, nothing is pure, nothing untainted by corruption of some kind. What interesting about Dad is that he wants and respects money but doesn't seem interested in it as an end; it's great to have but his pleasure seems to be the wheeling and dealing as well as the hard work that are needed to get it. We'll see what happens as Bunny makes his way through college and brings his moral compass (already compromised) to bear on his father's life and business.

Class of Luxury

Have I just become an old crab or does the thought of a college dorm (sorry, residence hall) with a "heated pool, a hot tub, a sand volleyball court and four tanning booths" make you kind of cranky? Today's Chicago Tribune reports on several luxe facilities featuring everything from walk-in closets to maid service, "communal" 47-inch flat-screen TVs to computer-linked washers and dryers. (The tanning beds, inexplicably, are at Arizona State.)

Not too many years ago I visited a college in Massachusetts that had just built a residence hall of six-person suites where each student had his own room, there were two bathrooms, and a kitchenette. Purdue's $52 million (yes you read that right) facility also comes with a meal plan. Many living facilities are built with single rooms (some even come with private bathrooms), since most kids have grown up without having to share a room or even a bathroom, and why would they want to start now? My thought on seeing that dorm was, Why would I want to make my own food in college?

Although many of these luxurious accommodations come with a hefty premium tacked on to the regular room and board charge, they are being snapped up even in this economy. Nothing, apparently, is too good for current college students. As the Trib writes, "Tom Cheesman, architect of Purdue's $52 million First Street Towers, said the residence hall is 'essentially a hotel.' He said it is especially attractive to 'helicopter parents who want to send their son or daughter to college campus but give them all the luxuries of home.'"


It's certainly a far cry from my freshman dorm at Amherst. I lived on the 4th floor (no elevator) with two roommates, neither of whom bathed much, in a room meant for one or maybe two. The fireplace and woodbox revealed the building's early 20th-century origins, but the former had been blocked up so we relied on the inadequate steam heat that barely reached us in the winter and blasted us finally when it started to get warm. In the depths of a New England January we had an eighth of an inch of ice on the inside of our bedroom window. At least we didn't have to cart our own wood for the fire.

Somehow, though, we managed to survive and do well. I had bought a new "record player" to bring (it also had an eight track player!) as well as an area rug, a desk lamp, and an electric typewriter I had gotten for graduation. A clock radio, too. Some books, and clothes, as well as some records came in a few boxes. My roommates brought even less. There were students who had a lot more than I did. One of my dorm mates had a huge stereo and a water bed; so I suppose those who had, brought. (One of the Purdue students has been "keeping 30 pairs of shoes at the ready and jamming the bookshelf with every episode of "The O.C." and "Dawson's Creek."" Really? For what?)

But then I suppose we had less to bring and fewer, or at least different, expectations, about what to bring and what to expect about living in a dorm. As a kid I remember thinking that a "dorm" meant I'd be in a barracks with a lot of other people, a prospect that scared me. But I did like the idea of living with a few other guys. We didn't share a lot but we co-existed pretty well. My living situations got slightly better over the years, but I wasn't in it for the amenities, and reading the Trib article I felt glutted, overwhelmed by the presence of things in an environment where ideas and relationships should be dominant.

Colleges have been in an amenities race for some time now, building massive "fitness centers" and other facilities to attract students, and new dorms are no exception. I wonder, though, what it means to try to replicate what students have at home rather than having them experience communal or semi-communal living. Negotiating a bathroom with 30 other hallmates can be exasperating, but it can also teach patience and, well, negotiation; having to clean up after yourself (or, more likely, not) gives you a sense of who you are and a taste of living on your own. Trying as hard as you can to stay in your individual bubble seems sad to me--like going to Paris and never leaving your hotel.

Everyone romanticizes their college experiences so I won't go on, but I do wonder what might have happened if Purdue had spent $52 million dollars on their labs and on faculty. Or if ASU had bought textbooks for low-income students instead of tanning beds. This kind of reckless consumption doesn't bode well for the future.

Elephant in the Room

The Choice, a New York Times blog about college admission, has begun a series of answers to questions posed to HarvardҀs Dean of Admission, Bill Fitzsimmons. Those of us who have worked in the field for more than a few days will probably know how to answer the questions from nearly 900 respondents. WhatҀs remarkable is that even though there are dozens of books, articles, websites, counselors, and other methods purporting to reveal the ӀsecretsԀ of college admission, the questions and assumptions are the same as they have always been.

The admission process is the elephant being discussed by the blind men: each one ӀknowsԀ what heҀs feeling׀a tail, an ear, a leg׀but no one knows the whole thing. Some insist that most spots in a Harvard class are reserved for wealthy donors or legacies; others believe that the deck is stacked against public school students (Interestingly, Fitzsimmons, himself a Harvard alum, is from a blue collar background). Another demands to know that applying for financial aid will have no impact on a studentҀs chances, yet another asks how HarvardҀs process can Ӏreward diversity without committing a type of reverse discrimination.Ԁ The tone of the questions ranges from Harvard-induced bliss at having been accepted to outright skepticism, with some dark rumblings from fringy types about why Harvard Ӏgives awayԀ so many seats to Ӏforeign bornԀ students.

Underneath all these comments are two questions that vary according to whether you have a child of college-going age or not: ӀHow can my child reach the inner circles of wealth, connection and power?Ԁ and ӀWhy canҀt Harvard [or other appropriately big and powerful school] fix everything thatҀs wrong with our social system?Ԁ These are both unanswerable and mutually exclusive, which is what makes college admission so much fun.

Ultimately, however, the pleas to Fitzsimmons add up to what used to be addressed to philosophers: ӀHow shall we live our lives?Ԁ Parents of second graders want to know how to plan lives that will result in Harvard attainment; a high schooler worries that if she leads an ӀauthenticԀ life she may be disadvantaged by someone who has polished and ӀcreatedԀ hers; those without Harvard genes lambaste a policy that seems automatically to reward those who have them. We want answers that will assure us that life isnҀt random but has some direction and meaning. But in expecting ӀHarvardԀ to provide those answers, we avoid the more difficult task of wrestling with them ourselves, which is why philosophy is so hard.

Of course, one big mistake is to assume that only Harvard can address those questions. As college counselors and admission officers never tire of saying, the ӀbestԀ college is the one that will challenge you appropriately, open your eyes to new ways of thinking, and help you develop and broaden your talents as you take your place in the world ahead. Plunging full-on into college life will be rewarding no matter where you are.

A true story: While I was in the Amherst admission office, one of our tour guides told us that her parents had pressured her mercilessly to apply to Harvard even though she wanted to attend Amherst. They had never heard of Amherst and insisted that Harvard was the place sheҀd go. After much haranguing, they finally prevailed upon her to visit Harvard and take the tour. At the end, a visitor asked the tour guide, ӀIs there anything youҀd change about your Harvard experience?Ԁ The guide replied, ӀI would have gone to Amherst.Ԁ The rest, as they say, is history; hers, anyway.

Despite our best efforts, college admission remains an enigma wrapped in a mystery stuffed in an elephant. We just need to remember that weҀre dealing with flawed human beings and human systems. But Americans expect answers, not more questions: Socrates was executed for being annoying, remember--he wouldnҀt last ten minutes in an admission office. And no matter what answers Fitzsimmons gives, they wonҀt be the ones questioners are looking for. Even Harvard canҀt supply those.

A version of this essay appears on the NACAC blog, Admitted.

Random Pleasures

Surprise! Harvard, Princeton, and Yale top the U.S. News university listings again, with Williams atop the liberal arts college list. IҀve suggested for a number of years that the perennial ӀwinnersԀ simply be retired and let the rest duke it out each year (no offense to Duke) so we can get a real contest going.

If weҀre stuck with the rankings, letҀs make a cage match out of рem! Instead of a constant set of characteristics that give rise to virtually identical hierarchies each year, change things up so thereҀs some real suspense, like there is on the WWF or American Gladiators. Forget all this genteel bickering, or Ӏreputation rankingsԀ filled out more or less at random, letҀs get some chairs, boards, barbed wire, and beer and get a real contest going. If youҀve seen Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, you know what I mean. Have colleges clash over stuff that matters: the square footage of their student centers; the pounds of tomatoes served in the dining hall; the average height of the faculty; the most expensive textbooks; the acreage per student. These are all concrete elements that can be objectively measured. For that matter, letҀs include the amount of concrete on each campus. Have college presidents batter each other with rolled-up copies of The Chronicle of Higher Education until thereҀs only one left standing (presumably the one who used the issue with the Almanac tucked inside).

Whether or not people actually use the rankings in any biblical way, the main impulse seems to be to eliminate randomness from the college selection process: If you look at all the factors and set them up rationally, youҀll have the ӀperfectԀ match!

This, we know, is totally impossible. Any time college counselors get together, we talk about how we came to our alma maters more or less by accident, not design. We took our tests, sent in some applications, and chose one of the ones that chose us. We seldom did doctorate level research before deciding where to apply; yet we managed to emerge as decent human beings.

I applied to Amherst because my counselor tossed out the name in passing one day. IҀd never heard of it but since it was a bus ride from New Jersey I went up and fell in love with it: it looked like what I thought college should look like. And luckily, they accepted me. (Another story.) When an Amherst professor once challenged me about why I had chosen Amherst, I couldnҀt say anything that he didnҀt counter with a variation of, ӀBut plenty of other schools have good teachers and classes. What makes Amherst unique?Ԁ I was annoyed at the time but the exchange has stayed with me because the reality is I could have been just as happy anywhere else.

We fool ourselves if we think we can eliminate randomness from college choice, or, indeed, from many of the choices we make. TodayҀs Chicago Tribune has a story on how some colleges are trying to use social networking to match up roommates. Students can see their future roomies and make decisions accordingly. But jettisoning randomness can make life duller and bring out our lesser instincts. One girl said she asked for a change when she saw the ӀshabbyԀ house her prospective roommate lived in. Another college stopped using extensive matching questionnaires because it just led to peopleҀs being more disappointed when things didnҀt work out.

So if weҀre not going to have collegiate cage matches anytime soon, I suggest taking the rankings and getting some darts. You know where IҀm going with thatŀ

A version of this blog entry appears in the NACAC blog Admitted.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

On the El recently I saw a woman reading a Kindle. It was sleek and cool. She had strapped it into a pink leather case and she looked sleek and cool reading it. I tried to see what she was reading but the gray screen and dark gray letters were too dark to figure out in the bright light of the train. I was curious, but not about the book she was reading, as I often am. I was curious about the device. Sleekness and coolness were what drew me to it.

I thought of Nicholson Baker's article in a recent New Yorker. He talks about the Kindle. It gave me chills: "Here's what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon." Even worse: "You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don't fare so well on the little gray screen." This doesn't sound like "reading," but more of a "content acquisition" where everything is sacrificed to the pragmatic task of "accessing" the "content provider's" words in order to "process" them.

Stripped of its pleasures, including the tactile and visual, reading becomes a task, something to be gotten through as opposed to something that can offer real satisfactions. Pragmatism trumps delight. The same can be said for schools and school systems where standardized testing has become the yardstick for "progress" and the stand-in for "education. Students in grade school are drilled on test-taking skills instead of reading and writing; they are molded into good "units" so their schools can do well on their own tests. Is it any wonder they hate school?

As we try to get students from disadvantaged backgrounds to look ahead to college, it's important to remember not to "process" them but to "educate" them. That means giving their minds something to expand into and grow on. Stripping education down to its pragmatics, the right answers on the test sheet, makes students passive consumers of data, not thinkers or doers. As with the Kindle, the pleasures of thought, of ideas, of detours, of visual imagery and inference, of "what ifs?" seem all to have been drained away so students face a gray screen designed just to deliver the basics so they can "perform." I can't imagine how dreary that must be to anyone with the slightest spark of intelligence and I can see why students are bored to death.

Recently I gave a talk to a grade school faculty about ways to engage students in the college process. The school is located in a poor section of town, with groups of young men hanging out on nearby street corners. The student body is nearly all poor and African American; the school hopes to set them on a path away from poverty and crime into a successful life. They already take their 4th to 8th graders to a different college campus each year to give them an idea about what college can be like and what they can have if they try.

Although these experiences may be impressive for the kids, I spoke to the faculty about creating an imaginative environment as well so they could ingest the spirit of college, not just the bricks and mortar. It's not enough simply to carry 4th graders to a college campus, they need a reason to be there. As a rule, 4th graders don't plan ahead ten years, but they can react to stories and ideas. I suggested teachers talk about their alma maters' mascots and have students write stories about them. I asked them to use their students' imaginative capacities as a way to plant seeds for college rather than focus on the pragmatics of how much more they'll earn with a B.A. Without a wishful, idealized basis, students won't get the pragmatics later on.

Imagination precedes pragmatics, as anyone who was read to as a child knows. We imagine things before we understand them; we fantasize before we realize the reality that surrounds us. But these early constructs sustain us even after we discover that fairy tales aren't real or Wilbur wasn't a live pig. To grow up without fantasy is to grow up in a poverty much longer-lasting and brutal than physical poverty because it cannot be recovered later in life. For students who are growing up in the depths of poverty, imaginative and exciting schooling may be the difference between success and mere survival. We need to fantasize in order to think about creating a world that can suit us. Out of this comes the motivation to invent, challenge, go beyond "right now" to the future.

Trying to help schools orient their low-income, first-generation students toward college, I want to add complexity, not strip it away. The Kindle, along with test prep, online education, and more-but-less activities like emailing and twittering, strips words and concepts of their beauty and elegance, impoverishing them. We make words just units of data, and that is a great shame. We need to set our students' minds on fire, not tame them, and I believe any student of any background can be brought to the liveliness of mind that will support him through college and beyond. But it can't be done if authors are merely "content providers" and teachers are merely "data processors."

The more I work with underserved students and their teachers and counselors, the more I see that education without imagination is deadening, not enlivening. Only by addressing the ineffable can we help our students rise above their daily lives to conquer the world in their own ways.

Raw Material or Finished Product?

Eugene S. Wilson, legendary admission dean at Amherst College, believed that no matter how long he was in the business he'd never perfect the art of human evaluation, and that was OK. For him, every applicant was an opportunity to see the potential in a young person, to assess him fairly, and to render a decision that might indeed prove incorrect down the line. For him (and his immediate successor at Amherst, Ed Wall), admission was most definitely an art, not a science, and putting a class together was the delicate balancing of the college's needs with the needs and desires of young men (and later, women) as they began to enter adulthood.

When I joined the Amherst admission office in 1990 I was delighted to be part of that tradition. To this day, I believe that Dean Wall used his gut more than my numbers to admit me to Amherst in 1973, and I wanted to have a chance to combine hard numbers and humane considerations to create Amherst's next generations in a way inspired by Wilson and Wall. At the core, I think they recognized that applicants to college were still unformed persons trying on new identities and exploring different aspects of their lives and the world's offerings. A liberal arts college like Amherst was designed to help students choose well and build on their previous accomplishments as they moved into their future lives.

To me, this meant that students would apply to college as works in progress, ready for the college to exert its influence on them, and vice versa. We were looking for potential, a most elusive quality: We all know of the class presidents who burned out or the most likely to succeed students who never made it out of their hometowns. Our test as admission officers was to spot the energy, the uniqueness, the elusive qualities that infused the GPA and test scores and made the whole a great deal more than the sum of its parts.

But after a few years of helping make admission decisions, I began to feel that looking for the :diamond in the rough" or the "potentiality" of an applicant was less important that getting the numbers as high as possible. Not that it was ever fully mechanistic, but our admission process seemed to me more dependent not only on the black and white figures but also on what students had already accomplished. We celebrated (and rightly so) the applicants who had achieved some remarkable goal, like writing a novel or developing a new invention, but they began to overshadow other applicants who had "only" led a community food bank or restructured their high school's student government or did exceptional work in math or biology classes. I began to call these applicants "merely wonderful" because while they were truly exceptional in their own right, they faded in comparison to the superstars.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have taken the precocious, but it became clear to me that we were beginning to look for the already formed instead of the in progress student. Faculty members wanted to see more students who had been published or made major contributions to their fields. We wanted to see academic "heavy hitters" almost to the exclusion of anyone else. We were lucky to have plenty of them apply and we were always in a little awe of what some of our eventual freshmen had done, but some of the pleasure in putting a class together was lost as we had to turn down more and more exceptional students to make way for the super-accomplished. That pleasure had come from being able to say "yes" to someone we could see as coming into him or herself at Amherst. It was potential we wanted to see on campus as much as past accomplishment, but increasingly the process became more mechanistic and less idiosyncratic, leading to more predictable, but in many respects less satisfying results.

This situation was reflected in the change made a few years into my tenure at Amherst. Our last round of deliberations was devoted to each dean's bringing to the table one favorite candidate who hadn't made it in the regular rounds. Although the applicant had to meet basic requirements for admission, the deans could present their candidates and have them admitted. Even though this round occurred after weeks of debate over hundreds of candidates, it was often the liveliest and most interesting. We were able to exercise our judgment and reward some wonderful quirk in a wonderful student who we felt would add to the incoming Amherst class. Our choices often reflected our own personalities and interests. I remember speaking up for a kid from Arkansas who, among other things, liked to create "found poetry" by cutting up prose and putting it back together randomly, then reading it at poetry slams. Others spoke for student-athletes, mad scientists, and others who would otherwise have been overlooked, and we always ended the season on that high note.

Admission continues to be more an art than a science, especially at small liberal arts colleges, but I still wonder whether the impulse to enroll only the most over-accomplished students has crowded out a more humane imperative to identify human potential that will benefit from our institutions' educational offerings. It affects students, too: The more they see the overachievers being rewarded with college admission, they more they feel they have to stay up until two in the morning and spend every waking moment getting ahead. Perhaps we should re-examine how we look at human potential in the college admission process in order to recalibrate our expectations of students' past and future, as well as our institutions' missions.