Admission. Part 8

"And Princeton is...?" Helen asked archly. She plainly expected its ranking to be neither of these.

"Number one. This year. But that's not the point."

Helen looked satisfyingly surprised.

"A situation like this, in the English Department, is not going to affect the U.S. News rankings. And rationally, we could look at it and think, Well, it's not an inst.i.tutional problem. It has nothing to do with 'Princeton,' you know? It's a small, localized situation. Just... one bad apple. But unfortunately, people love a story about a great university with mud on its face. So then... well, let's say someone is trying to decide between two universities he's been admitted to. Those tiny little things can become tipping points for the applicant. Or his parents."

"Applicant?" Helen said, actually turning to face her for the first time. "Parents?" She gave Portia a frankly curious look.

"The fact is," Portia went on, "we encourage a large applicant pool so that we can select the students we want. And then, once we've selected those students, we often have to work to get them. The same Intel winner or National Spelling Bee champion or... I don't know, Academy Awardwinning actress who applies to Princeton has almost certainly applied to other Ivy League colleges, or Stanford, or MIT and Caltech. Those colleges will make an offer of admission as well, or some of them will. So now, suddenly, instead of students competing to get into Princeton, Princeton is competing to get the student. And that's when our tipping point comes into play."

"Oh, I think this is a little paranoid," Helen said.

If only it were, thought Portia. This scramble at the tail end of the admissions calendar seldom got much scrutiny from the public, but it was critically important to the universities involved. The fact was that once an offer of admission had been made, the entire game changed and the roles reversed: now the school was the one on bended knee. Having gone to the trouble of winnowing the stupendously remarkable from a vast field of the only normally remarkable, Princeton did not want to lose that stupendously remarkable student to Stanford. Or Harvard. Or-gnashing of teeth-Yale. There had been more than a few of these students over the years. She had agonized over their applications and been moved by their stories, impressed by their essays and achievements. She had stood up for them in committee and felt immense satisfaction as she persuaded her colleagues to admit them. Then she had watched them blithely go elsewhere, and while the choices were often understandable (some students were always going to choose Harvard, weren't they?), sometimes they were baffling. She remembered in particular one boy from Arkansas who had won Princeton's international poetry compet.i.tion for high school students-a very useful thing to have done if you cared to be admitted to Princeton. This kid had grown up in extreme poverty and was a loner in school, but also a student his teachers were enraptured by, and his essays were beautifully realized evocations of the life he had lived and the one he hoped to live. (He was, Martin Quilty had noted at the time, one of those kids who had somehow picked up Princeton on their radar-you were never sure how. A poster outside his English teacher's office? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Brooke Shields?) In committee, there had been so much enthusiasm for his application, Portia remembered. The admit vote had been accompanied by actual applause. But the applicant had chosen to go to a state college down south. Years later, Portia still thought of him, baffled and disappointed at his escape, or failure of nerve, or their own failure to bring him in.

She was not going to share this story with the acerbic and brittle Helen of Oxford.

"Well, think of it this way," she said instead. "Let's say a girl in Iowa is accepted at Princeton and at Stanford. Let's say this student wants to be a literary critic or a novelist. Maybe the fact that our English Department has a cheating scandal and Stanford's doesn't will be the one small thing that makes us lose her to Stanford."

"Which affects the... what's it called?" said Mark.

"Yield!" Rachel laughed. "Jesus, Mark. How long have you been living with this woman?"

"Right, the yield."

"Which affects our ranking, however we feel about ranking. Which affects our alumni, who like it that we're ranked first. And that matters to us, because our alumni matter to us. And it affects our applicant pool, which may well be smaller for the school ranked number two than it is for the one ranked number one. Which gives us fewer applicants to choose from the following year. Which gives us a very slightly less strong incoming freshman cla.s.s for the year after that. Do you see?"

Helen did not appear to see. She frowned first at her knees and then at Mark, before turning at last to Portia.

"What did you say you teach, again?" said Helen.

"I don't teach. I'm an admissions officer."

Oddly, Helen turned back to Mark, as if for clarification.

"You know," he said. He seemed to be forcing some kind of levity. "Portia guards the gate. Picks the best of the lot for the incoming cla.s.s."

"Sits in judgment!" David said brightly. He was, in his odd way, trying to be helpful.

"David," Portia said wearily.

"David!" said Rachel. "You know there's a lot more to it than that."

Mark got to his feet. "Let's go and sit down. Dinner's ready. Portia? You'll tell people where to sit?"

She got up. "Yes, please come in. I'm so hungry, actually. I just got back from a trip an hour ago. Mark has done all the cooking."

"It smells wonderful." Rachel walked to the table and set down her winegla.s.s.

"Helen?" Portia touched the chair beside her. Mark came in with the platter. Green olives and chunks of chicken glistened in dark sauce.

"Oh, that looks divine," Rachel said, sitting. "Mark, you cooked this?"

"It's a simple dish," he answered modestly. He set down a bowl of steaming rice.

"It must all seem very strange to you," Portia said to Helen. She was trying to extend herself. "I'm a.s.suming you came through the U.K. system yourself?"

Helen merely regarded her.

"When you applied to university, you took A levels? Perhaps you interviewed with a tutor at the college you wanted to attend."

"Of course," she said shortly.

"Was there any kind of essay in your application?"

"Naturally. I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft and the Gothic."

"But not a personal essay. Nothing about your extracurricular activities or a person who had influenced you."

Once again, she gave Portia a blank look.

"Well, it's very different here. Intellectual potential is extremely important to us, of course, but it isn't the only factor. We want to create a community that can produce all kinds of things, not only academic work. We want athletic teams and arts events and political activity. So we ask them to tell us about those aspects of their lives as well."

"But that's ridiculous," said Helen. "English universities manage to produce athletic teams and the arts. If they want to come in and row for the college or join the union or do theater, that's fine, so long as they can do their work. We've managed to produce athletes and actors and, G.o.d knows, centuries of politicians, without asking them what club they want to join."

"So, when you interview applicants at Oxford, you wouldn't consider their other interests?" Rachel asked, ladling chicken Marbella onto her plate.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean... well, if they play an instrument. Or if they've done some kind of volunteer work."

"Volunteer work?" Helen looked baffled.

"We've had applicants who went to work in refugee camps or battered women's shelters," Portia said.

"I have a girl who spent six months in Thailand after the tsunami, working with refugees. She's in my Frost seminar right now," Rachel said.

"I have the national table tennis champion in my introductory logic seminar," David added with notable pleasure.

Helen looked at them as if they might be mad. "No. Nothing like that. If they've done those things, they don't tell us, because they know it's not pertinent to the application. Well, sometimes the school report will mention they row or they play rugby, but we're not hurting for athletes. G.o.d knows we always manage to fill up the boats and field a rugby team."

"But what if their extracurricular interest is academic? Somehow related to what they want to study?" Portia asked.

"I don't understand," Helen said. She had covered her plate with salad and a couple of pieces of chicken, seemingly liberated from any sauce.

"Well," said Mark, "what if you were considering a student who wanted to read English, and they had won a prize for their poetry?"

"Oh, they all write poetry," Helen said dismissively.

"Okay," Mark went on. "But what if one of them had already published a poem. Say, somewhere important. The TLS, or Poetry Review. Would that affect the application?"

"That did happen," she considered. "Well, just about. We had a boy who had published a novel. Or, not published yet, but a publisher had bought it. Some teenage angsty thing. But he was quite arrogant. He let me know at the interview that he would need to be let off essays now and then, if he was writing."

"Did you take him?" Portia asked.

"Not at all. Not because of the novel. Or even because he was a prat. He just wasn't terribly good. We had some quite strong applicants that year. Somewhere else took him. Oriel, I think."

Mark reached across the table to pour more wine for David. "What happened with the novel?" he said.

"Oh, it was published. And it got some attention, I seem to recall. He was interviewed in the Times. But he didn't do at all well on his exams. He got a lower second, in fact, so it was just as well we hadn't taken him." She speared a piece of chicken with her fork, examined it briefly, and took a cautious bite of it.

"Well..." Portia sighed after a moment. "As I said, it's very different here. An entirely different system, the major difference being that the faculty aren't directly involved."

"Ah." Helen nodded into her salad. "But ultimately, it's a question of which system produces the finer student, isn't it? And that remains to be seen."

By you? Portia thought, giving in, finally-and after, she thought, abundant provocation-to her serious dislike of this woman.

"The system we have now, at Princeton and other selective colleges, has evolved continually since its inception," Portia explained, but with resignation, since she doubted Helen would care. "For the last hundred years, it's been a constant ricochet among academic standards, diversity, and tradition. In the nineteenth century, all you had to do to get into Princeton was be a white male from one of a handful of prep schools. But when faculty began calling for higher academic standards, those conventional Princeton students started getting squeezed out, and they didn't like it. So there was a swing back. Which pleased the traditional applicant pool but made the faculty angry. And so on through the twentieth century. Which is not even to speak of ethnic minorities and women."

"Still, the faculty are right," Helen said with annoyance. "A university is first and foremost a place of learning. Not table tennis or refugee work, however n.o.ble that may be. Princeton should be an academic meritocracy, like Oxford. That is the only criterion that matters."

"But isn't academic meritocracy a relatively new admissions philosophy at Oxford?" Portia asked. "Think about it: In an eight-hundred-year history, how recently did the colleges care more for academic promise than for social standing and wealth? You may not be factoring other elements into your application process now, but until a very short time ago, men were just set down for Oxford at birth. It didn't matter how brilliant they were. Cla.s.s was the only thing that mattered."

"Witness poor Jude the Obscure!" Rachel laughed.

"Have you been disappointed by your students at Princeton?" Portia asked Helen, noting and ignoring the strong beam of warning emanating from Mark.

"They're absolutely charming. They're bright. Of course, they don't know anything about English literature. You can set them down with a poem and ask them to write for half an hour. Most of them won't recognize the poem, but even if they do, they're completely incapable of doing any practical criticism at all. They don't have context, so they can't bring in other work. They don't know history, so they can't comment on what the author may have been trying to do. They've never seen theory, so they can't make any kind of argument about the text itself. All they can do is comment on how the poem makes one particular reader-them, in other words-feel. Which"-she looked at Mark-"I think you will agree, is of limited value. They simply don't understand that I couldn't care less how they feel about the poem. I'm interested in what they have to say about the poet's ideas. And the notion of that is utterly foreign. That's the problem."

"Of course, it's a function of how they've been taught," Rachel said carefully. "It's very different here. We've learned to be grateful if they come through secondary education with any feel for poetry at all."

"Yes..." Helen waved one bony hand in Rachel's direction. "Of course, I'm fully aware the students are among the best this system can produce. So I was prepared for it. And," she added as if to placate, "as I said, they are charming."

"Well, isn't it nice not to have to devote all that time to admissions yourself? More time for your own work," Mark said. "I imagine."

"Yes, that is a good thing," she agreed. She was cutting her chicken into very small pieces on her plate. "But on the other hand, I'm now being a.s.saulted by students who want me to write references for them. Rhodes scholarships. Marshall scholarships. Rotary scholarships. They're all relentlessly ambitious. Whatever they've accomplished, they have their eye on the next step. They want their options open. And they all seem to want to go to Oxford. So I'm still putting in my time for Oxford admissions."

Rachel smiled.

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" said David.

Mark and Helen looked at him, alarmed.

"It's from The G.o.dfather," Rachel explained.

"Is there more chicken?" said David.

"Where was your trip, Portia?" Rachel asked. She was a capable hostess herself, and practiced at diverting the conversation when necessary.

Portia told them about Deerfield and the boy who had been wrapped in an orange blanket at birth. She told them about Northfield, where a girl had asked about Princeton's portfolio because she had made a decision to apply only to inst.i.tutions of higher education that invested along sustainability and humanitarian principles. (Good luck with that, Portia had thought at the time.) She chose carefully what she told them about Quest. She was not willing to have them laugh at its idealism, even at the extremes of its idealism. She did not tell them anything important. She told them the students had challenged her about higher education itself, which was unusual and, she had to admit, sort of refreshing. She told them about the boy she had met, the odd boy reading the biography of Edie Sedgwick, who had casually tossed half a dozen G.o.ddesses of wisdom in her direction and whom the school had more or less left to his own devices.

"He sounds like a future philosopher," Rachel said wryly.

"What do you mean?" Helen asked, accepting-though it seemed rather reluctantly-a tiny additional portion of chicken from Mark.

"That's what David's crowd were all like when they were teenagers. They hated having to take cla.s.ses in stuff they couldn't care less about. They just wanted to be left alone so they could learn. They sat there in their fetid little rooms reading book after book and refusing to bathe."

"That's completely untrue," David informed the table. "I had excellent personal hygiene. I still have excellent personal hygiene."

"No comment!" Rachel laughed. "So"-she turned back to Portia-"you liked this kid."

"Well, he was very memorable. But we'll have to wait for the application. He didn't strike me as someone who'd given much thought to attending college, let alone applying to college. To say that's extremely unusual in our applicant pool is a vast understatement. If he can pull it together, and of course if the test scores support what his teacher told me, then yes, I would try to get him admitted. I don't suppose we'll get much from a transcript. It sounds as if the public school he attended was about to fail him."

"I failed French in tenth grade," David announced proudly. "Actually, I failed it in eleventh grade, too. And band. I failed band."

"It hasn't held you back," Mark observed.

"Actually," Rachel reported proudly, "his high school wanted to suspend him."

"They did suspend me," David corrected her. "In my junior year. I kept cutting cla.s.ses so I could take the train into the city and sneak into philosophy lectures at Columbia. No one ever stopped me."

"Why would they?" his wife said dryly. "He looked exactly like the other philosophers. He even sat the exams. Even though he wasn't enrolled!"

"One exam." David grinned. "Advanced epistemology. This guy was so amazing, who taught it. I never spoke to him, of course. I mean, I wasn't supposed to be there."

"But you audited the cla.s.s and actually took the exam?" Mark asked. "Did you take it anonymously? What did you write on the exam booklet?"

He had written his name and address, David explained, because he lacked a student ID and campus mailbox, the requested information. He hadn't really thought about it. A week later, his blue booklet had turned up in the mail at home, with a red A and an indelicate query scrawled beneath it: "Who the f.u.c.k are you?"

"So naturally he decided to go to Columbia," his wife concluded.

"Do you think those F's would have kept me out of Princeton?" David asked Portia.

"Back in the eighties? They might have. Hey, you failed band! But that was the bad old days. Isn't it lucky the university's in the hands of such qualified admissions officers today?"

Mark got up to make coffee. Portia reached for the wine. She was nearly enjoying herself now, though the advent of coffee, which meant the beginning of the end of the dinner party, certainly cheered her, too.

"What makes you qualified?" Helen said abruptly. When Portia turned to look at her, she said, "I'm just curious. Again, I'm a stranger in a strange land. I really haven't the foggiest."

"I beg your pardon?" Portia said.

"You said 'qualified.' I wondered. What does that mean? How does one train to become an admissions officer? Is it a degree course?"

From the kitchen, there was a brief sputter of grinding. Then the tap, tap of coffee grounds emptying into the coffeemaker.

"No. There isn't any set degree. In fact, admissions officers come from a variety of backgrounds."

"Such as?" Helen asked.