Academia: Scheherazade, Applicant

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I’ve been a bit surprised to see so many people I know on social media link to tabloid newspapers reporting the story of Penn graduate Mackenzie Fierceton having her Rhodes Scholarship revoked over allegations that she exaggerated or fabricated aspects of her life story.

Just in terms of the story alone, there are reasons to hesitate and read more deeply before passing it along with a condemnation of the young woman at the heart of it. (Plus, come on, any time you find yourself linking to the New York Post and the Daily Mail, you ought to think twice.) The Chronicle of Higher Education’s first major article on the story (originally broken by the Philadelphia Inquirer) makes some of the complexity visible. Len Gutkin’s follow-up interview with the reporter digs even deeper. Some of the details of the suit filed by Fierceton against Penn and some of its officials also are worth reviewing.

I don’t really want to opine on the specifics of the case much myself. I think there’s a deeper issue that the case helps to surface, which is the entire process of selective admissions to college and subsequent processes that follow on or resemble that process.

In April 2021, Matt Feeney wrote an essay for the Chronicle called “The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions”. In it, Feeney observes that as selective admissions moves away both from standardized testing and from the idea of composing a class that is “well-rounded” (e.g., applicants who have a wide range of talents and past experiences) towards favoring “well-lopsided” applicants who display some form of distinctive, individualized, idiosyncratic authenticity. Feeney attacks the presumptions and consequences of that shift, saying it sets up

a years long, quasi-therapeutic process in which admissions goads young people into laying bare their vulnerable selves — a process that conceals a high-value transaction in which colleges use their massive leverage to mold those selves to their liking — is reprehensible. It is terrible thing to do. It renders the discovery of true underlying selves absurd.

I am very much in Feeney’s corner on this point. He observes that one admissions professional, confronted by the fact that some applicants exaggerate and amplify aspects of their ‘vulnerable selves’ in order to gain the attention and approval of selective colleges and universities, simply imagines that he should have even more intimate access to the distinctive individuality of each applicant so that he can avoid being deceived.

Ever since admissions started being more selective at a larger and larger scale while also being tasked to a more and more ambitious vision of both maintaining and transforming tomorrow’s elites (say, since the early 1980s, perhaps) there has been a kind of arms race between admissions professionals and successful upper-middle-class households desperately hoping to win a spot for their children. Administrators fretted about financial aid discounts: what if families hide some of their assets from us to get a more favorable tuition price? So the process ended up weighted down with a remarkably intrusive, incredibly complicated procedure for financial reporting that certainly turns away some applicants, particularly first-generation applicants. Administrators realized that applicants with more social capital and awareness of the process had come to understand that admissions officers were valuing indicators of leadership or extracurricular activities, driving a generation of high school students to contend ever more intensely for the lead in the play, the editorship of the newspaper, the student council position and subsequently to schedules groaning with violin lessons, debate tournaments, academic decathlons, lacrosse matches, and soup-kitchen volunteering. So they switched how they read applications to try and keep the recipe for the secret sauce hidden. Which just fueled an entire industry of test coaches, admissions consultants, ghost writers of personal essays, strategic donations to academic institutions and ultimately the Varsity Blues scandal. Create a start-up at 14! Found a non-profit at 15! Patent something! Write a novel! Score an opera!

And live a life fuller and more complex and more dramatic—with suffering and pathos—than most people live in fifty years, all before you’re 16. Tell us your story, and make it a good one. Ordinary sociological disadvantage won’t do: tell us your secrets, share out your pain. Help us meet our targets for slightly re-engineering an elite that we still imagine in conventional ways, but also be a completely authentic and individual person at the same time.

There’s something so basically unseemly about what we are asking people to do in order to win one of an intrinsically scarce number of coveted places. To some extent, all of us in selective colleges and universities are inured to it because we ourselves have survived a similar kind of “tournament economy”, won a scarce place. Lisa Duggan points out in a great essay at her Substack this week how that affects faculty even after they’re hired, vetted and tenured: “There is a manufactured scarcity economy of smartness that leaves many clamoring for the top, only to be achieved by denigrating the competition”.

When it comes to applicants, whether for university admissions or truly scarce opportunities like the Rhodes, the denigrating is done in the selection process, and it’s a bit more like sitting down for an expensive tasting menu at a four-star restaurant, choosing which of the amazing and extravagant dishes made from rare ingredients and bespoke farm-to-table cultivation was the very best. Which story is the most extraordinary or special? Which achievement is the most unusual? Who has overcome the most difficult challenge? We fool ourselves by thinking that if we prize suffering and the overcoming of barriers, we have made our gourmet selections more equitable. We all know that if the standard is “extraordinary achievement by the age of 15” that this is incredibly loaded in favor of people with resources and power—it’s sifting for Veruca Salt when what you want is Charlie Bucket. But if the price for Charlie is that he has to tell you a story about how his father’s hands bleed from working in the toothpaste factory and how his grandparents’ bedsores stink of infection as Charlie shivers on the hard floor at night, then you haven’t struck a blow for social justice, you’ve just made Charlie have to perpetually tie his Golden Ticket to the virtue of his poverty and to tell those stories any time someone asks what he’s doing here.

It’s one reason I’ve taken to talking about the personal essay for applications as a genre of writing with some of my students: to help them make judicious decisions about which kinds of opportunities are sufficiently precious that they might justify the somewhat degrading and powerless sensation of having to perform some trauma or struggle in order to be appreciated for the rest of what you are or what you aspire to do. At the same time, I think it’s time for everybody involved in those processes to stop wanting to see young people imagine an already-lived life in order to win a place.

I think that’s what feels unseemly about what Penn did to Mackenzie Fierceton in investigating her with such intensity. I wonder how many applicants—and frankly how many employees—at Penn or any other similar institution could endure such scrutiny. I wonder at the uneven ways that institutions suddenly awake and decide that this one person must be questioned, looked into, judged, while continuing to offer the benediction of unexamined acceptance and trust to everyone else.

Institutions like Penn tend to lightly step around, elide or translate into neutral-sounding language the notion that they are both reproducing the basic character of an elite that believes itself to be trained for leadership while fiddling with its composition. So what do we say the scrutiny at admissions is about? First and foremost, the ability to do the work that a given program of study or aspirational intent will require. The selective institutions say they want to be sure that a student who wants to be a doctor can handle the premed program they offer, that the future novelist is able to write, that the entrepreneur can handle a pitch to a funder, and so on. In some sense, if that turns out to be true about any given matriculated student, you have to wonder why or when you’d insist on looking into how they got in after the fact of their performance. Doesn’t seem as if there’s any doubt that Fierceton is an extraordinarily talented student, after all.

I know, I know: because if you incentivize lying by rewarding it, then you’ll get a lot of lying, so you have to look into it if you think there’s a lie. Maybe so, but if that’s our fear, maybe we shouldn’t be in the business of demanding that people tell us their stories in the first place. We are already in the business of rewarding exaggerations. Even the very small difference of social transformation within an elite can happen, if we want it to happen, through a basic, blind consumption of crudely sociological data that asks nothing of applicants other than they tell us where they live, where they go to school, and what their household income is. I understand the legal challenges hovering around the proposition—that to some extent, admissions and other highly selective processes have fixated on idiosyncratic individuality in order to avoid the minefield of contradictory legal standards that have resulted from forty years of convoluted jurisprudence over affirmative action. But maybe the price is too high if it means we must continuously demand but only sporadically investigate deeply personal narratives.

Image credit: "Edouard Frederic Wilhelm Richter - Scheherazade" by irinaraquel is licensed under CC BY 2.0