I usually think Kevin Carey is really smart and spot-on when it comes to analyzing higher ed policy. And given the poor decisions Harvard has made recently in doing damage control on its endowment losses, I thought I would really appreciate his most recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (you might need to have a subscription/be on a university network to access that link):

Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige. The university receives many more highly qualified applicants than it chooses to admit. Because the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process, Harvard could presumably increase the size of its entering class by, say, 50 percent while improving the overall academic quality of the students it admits.

I have my issues with the first paragraph, but I find the second one far more problematic. Carey states as fact that “the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process.” I know, I know, there’s been bestseller after bestseller that has attempted to demonstrate the extent to which Ivy League admissions are unfair to the earnest but non-connected student who just can’t get into Harvard because s/he doesn’t know people in power. I’m sorry, but that’s just not the case. You have to meet a basic standard of academic competence to be admitted to Harvard. Or Princeton. Or any of their peer institutions. I know, I know, George W. Bush, but since about the late ’80s family connections have begun to be far less of a point on which college admissions turn. If you’re worried about nepotism, you should be taking your concerns to politics or journalism and publishing, not colleges.

One phrase of Carey’s stands out to me—maybe, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve already figured out which phrase I’m referring to: yes, it’s “underqualified children of legacies.” First of all, that’s not the right phrasing: “legacies” are the children of alumni, so unless Carey’s referring to third-generation admits (and yes, they exist, but are no more dangerous than second-generation ones), he’s at least a little confused. But to make an actual point, alumni children are not de facto less qualified than other admits. In fact, if anything, they are likely to be a very academically well-qualified constituency: their parents received a very high-quality education. They probably went on to become middle-class, if they weren’t already. The children were probably raised with encouragement to academic pursuits. They probably had a certain number of environmental advantages.

You probably know that I’m the child of a Princeton alum. And I find the insinuation that I am less entitled to be here because my mother spent 10 years on this campus pretty insulting, frankly. I wouldn’t have lasted very long here if I couldn’t engage with my professors and my peers on a higher level, and I worked very hard both throughout high school and in the admissions process to get here. I find it very hard to believe that all this places me at some greater advantage, or suggests I’m less qualified to be here, than the kid whose parents also both have graduate degrees, but got them from different universities than mine did. If there’s anything that places me at a disadvantage here at Princeton, it’s the fact that I went to a crappy California public high school with no funding, while some of my peers went to excellent public or private schools. My friends who went to Andover or Exeter or Deerfield, or Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or Boston Latin, or even Princeton High School itself, had a better secondary education than I did. That’s a pretty big leg up. And so we all have our advantages and disadvantages, and we all come here with different skills and weaknesses. But to say that the fact that my mother was here 30 years ago gives me less right to be here today? That’s just plain unfair.

I don’t hide the fact that I’m the child of an alum partly because I don’t believe it’s something of which I should have to be ashamed, but also partly because I think that, now that I’m here—however I got here—it gives me an interesting perspective. Because I know a great deal about my mother’s experience here, I can see the contrast between my Princeton and my mother’s Princeton. I see how, in the intervening 30 years, my Princeton has become much more in-line with modern progressive America. And I see how my mother was a part, however small, in making that the case. If I didn’t want to further that legacy—if I didn’t want to do all I can to make Princeton the best possible social/cultural and academic environment—I wouldn’t think very highly of myself. There’s a way to say “legacy” without ritually spitting over your shoulder. Someone ought to tell Kevin Carey.

Yes, I (very clearly) enjoy two-clause post titles. At this point, I think you’ll just have to cope.

The Princeton University Press Club is a long-standing institution that has made the names of more than a few professional journalists. They have a slightly less long-standing blog which occasionally picks up an interesting story not covered by the Prince, but which more often than not is really quite fatuous. I’m sure all the writers are solid reporters for the local, state, and national papers where they string/intern, but on the blog, quite a lot of them are frequently guilty of either not understanding snark or of assuming that everyone on campus comes from a privileged background and thus fits totally seamlessly into a dominant culture that further privileges privilege. The most recent offender, wherein the author argues that Princeton’s twice-yearly bacchanalic prepfest isn’t alienating at all:

Lawnparties was never really about the band. It’s a wonderfully weird celebration of Princeton, honoring both what it is and what it could be.

Yes, Lawnparties is an anthem to the Princeton stereotype – loud music, louder pants, drinking before 10 a.m., and preppy bacchanalia. But it’s not just day drinking that makes Lawnparties a special day.

For all its elitist trappings, Lawnparties is Princeton’s egalitarian party. For one day, it doesn’t matter who you know, or what club you’re in. For one day, the bouncers don’t care if you’re on the list, or have two salmon passes. If you go to Princeton, for one day the eating club lawns are your lawns. Seniors and freshman stand shoulder to shoulder in the sun, drinking warm champagne and rocking out to Journey.

The writer of this post, of course, misses the key point that letting anyone listen to a band in the backyard of a usually-exclusive bicker club is only an act of egalitarianism if someone who is usually barred admission from said bicker club fits well enough into the culture to feel welcome there once admitted. Thinking this while reading, I got frustrated enough to comment on the post:

Egalitarian? Since when? Lawnparties elides the stratification between bicker and sign-in, between the haves and have-mores, the populars and the more-populars. But it doesn’t do anything to include people who don’t own a single pastel Lacoste polo or sundress, who don’t like to get shitfaced, or who for a variety of other reasons are just disgusted, not entertained, by the preppy Ivy League stereotype. Believe it or not, 30% of this university’s juniors and seniors aren’t in an eating club. And for many of them, all the clubs could be on PUID and they’d still feel like losers and outcasts. For some of them, Lawnparties is an excuse to go out of town for the weekend, or else an insufferably hot weekend spent indoors with all the windows shut, trying to drown out the sounds of someone else’s party to which, supposed “egalitarian” nature aside, it’s still perfectly clear that those who don’t conform aren’t invited.

Last spring, I went and sat in the basement of the library to work during Lawnparties afternoon, knowing that I would feel awkward and miserable and outcast if I dressed up and went down to Prospect Avenue to stand in a yard getting drunk, but also knowing that if I could hear the strains of Lawnparties music from my room, I would be so tortured by my outcast status that I’d be unable to work. This past weekend, a trip I’d planned happily coincided with Lawnparties weekend, so that I didn’t have to watch debauchery going on all around me to which I am implicitly not invited. Instead, two friends and I high-tailed it to Rhode Island to visit another friend, and I had perhaps one of the best weekends of my life. (While I am given to hyperbole, this is not hyperbole. At all.)

If it hadn’t been for Princeton, I wouldn’t have met the friend I was going to visit, nor the friends I made the trip with. If it hadn’t been for Princeton, I wouldn’t have managed to parachute into a subculture that isn’t interested in what the rest of Princeton is doing Lawnparties weekend. This school has a lot screwed up with its culture, but it also gives you the tools to subvert that culture, the resources to make your own choices, and of course some of the best academics in the world that you can take solace in whenever (if you’re like me) your essential state as a loner can get just a little too depressing. And that’s why I’m a Princeton evangelist, and why I care enough about Princeton to invest my time and efforts in making it a place where I and people like me are as much at home as the people who feel like Lawnparties is the great equalizer.

But for all that to work, the people who feel like Lawnparties is the great equalizer need to realize that although they are the dominant force in Princeton social life, they are not the only force. They need to realize whom they’re alienating and whose insecurities they’re reinforcing. They need to recognize that they speak for a world of privilege and social posturing that is inaccessible, undesirable, or flat-out disgusting to a lot of people with whom they share a campus.

And with that, it’s back to work: I have to read Rousseau’s Discourse Concerning Inequality for tomorrow.

Warning: tedious introspection and I-statements to follow.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about sense of place (if we absolutely must quote John McPhee, “a sense of where you are”), and the regional allegiance I feel both to my relatively new home in New Jersey and to the places where my dad’s family is from in suburban and semi-rural British Columbia. It seems a very North American thing to cultivate regional identities like this; I see it in other continents and countries too, but not to quite this extent, and I’m sure it has something to do with the size and geographic diversity of Canada and the United States.

That said, I’m presently in Princeton for the weekend, in order to see some friends I missed very much and just to get a change of scene. Some of my friends were surprised I voluntarily came up here; they thought it was rather silly that I would take a mini-vacation to Princeton of all places. In the groups of people who don’t fit into the mainstream undergraduate culture, I think it is something of a ritual, or a fashion, or a way of establishing community, to disparage and complain about this campus and this town. It’s something I do often enough when I’m here during the semester—bitching about the eating clubs, about loud drunken groups of students, about anti-intellectualism, about the quality of the dining hall food and of the school paper.

But in reality, this place has so absolutely become my home that it’s where I immediately thought to come when I decided to hatch a plot to get out of D.C. for a few days. Maybe I feel so much affection for it because I don’t fit in, or maybe because it enables me to create a fantasy in which I do, irrespective of what’s actually going on. I think that in many respects, the collegiate gothic architecture, the old books in the library, the perfectly manicured quads, allow me to cultivate this quasi-Oxbridgensian fantasy of what I have always imagined and desired university/academe to be.

I am sitting now in a room in the basement of the library (most of the library is in the basement), across from a good friend. He and I have faced each other across this table several times, he no doubt doing far more substantial things than I am, if his status as a grad student, his mountain of books, and their impenetrable titles is any indication. It’s an emotionally warmer room than most of the rest of the library, with older furniture and filled with books and even with a little natural light. It’s a much more congenial place to work or study than, for example, Georgetown’s cinder-block monstrosity. And it’s a room that’s been popular among a similar set of students for multiple generations—I know people who worked in this room long before I was here, and I feel a sort of emotional connection to that tradition of sitting somewhere and reading and thinking that stretches across time at a university like this one (even if, in keeping with America’s sense of “old,” it has only been around for 260 years).

I think that because of this sense of continuous production of ideas or writing or scholarship, when I’m on campus I feel rooted to something. I don’t feel that in the neighborhood where my family lives in southern California, which has only existed for about fifty years, and where very few people are interested in or do the things I am interested in and do. I also don’t feel that in my apartment on the first floor of a row house in Georgetown, where there is a distinct sense of impermanence and a culture of “summer in DC” that is already beginning to evaporate and, by the end of August, will be gone entirely. Both San Diego and Washington seem also to be driven by a sense of fast-developing modernity and immediacy: DC quite literally runs on the 24-hour news cycle; people’s careers and lives develop based on what happens each day in politics. And my experience of San Diego is of a culture that thrives on being materialistically up-to-date, that prizes instantaneous communication, that drives everywhere and gets its coffee at Starbucks to go.

It is quite strange to say this in the context of any 21st-century college experience, but it is being at Princeton, I believe, that drove me to want to take my greatest pleasure from an anachronistic sense of learning how to be a scholar and specifically a historian. A year at Princeton made me want to send actual handwritten letters and postcards to my friends this summer. It vastly diminished my interest in experimenting with drugs and alcohol. It instilled in me what almost seems like a nerdy hedonism: where fulfilling my desires entails a reasonable degree of disconnection from peer pressure, from trends and fashions, and from the minute day-to-day changes in the state of the world. I could maybe feel that somewhere equally old and Europhilic, like Harvard or Yale, but I doubt I could feel it anywhere where I do not sense a connection to past decades and centuries. I would less want to sit here in this room in the library basement if I didn’t feel that I know people of previous generations who have sat here before me, and that their predecessors sat here before them, and that the developments of the decades have made it possible for a woman, and specifically a woman like me, to join that tradition.

So how surprising can it be that when I tire of my heart beating in time to the rhythms of the 24-hour news cycle, I come to sleepy, boring, summertime Princeton to sit in the library with my friends? This is my home, and I don’t see how it could possibly be otherwise.