Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Portia’s first rule of committee preparation had nothing to do with public speaking and nothing to do with strategizing. It was: Don’t drink too much before the meeting. This applied especially to coffee, even if you have been up for hours, getting ready to face your colleagues in this most secret, fraught, satisfying, and, yes, irritating of arenas, and a few good mugs of caffeine-enriched coffee might have made the whole process go a little more smoothly. But Clarence had brought with him most of the rituals of the Yale department from which he’d sprung (and been sprung), and one of them was: If you left the conference room to use the facilities, you sat out the vote for the applicant on the table, no matter how little of the conversation you’d missed.

  It was fair, Portia thought, and it did keep things moving (which became more paramount with each year that passed, as the pool grew and grew), but it added yet another layer of fretting to an already stressful process. In addition to worrying about how to wield her own votes, how and when to show goodwill to her colleagues and curry it in return, she had to frequently ask herself where her vote might be less valuable to an applicant and so plan to pee accordingly. For a kid whose application she’d read and intended to fight for, she couldn’t afford to be absent, but for a kid who, from the very top of the discussion, was going to be an easy call—Siemens winner, published author, Olympic hopeful—she could safely slip out, as long as she did it fast.

  Murmuring apologies, Portia entered the committee room behind Robin Hindery (one of Clarence’s most recent hires and less than a year out of Princeton herself) and took the last open seat at the far end of the long table from Clarence. There were bottles of water (from which she automatically averted her eyes) in the center of the table. It was nearly nine-thirty. A late start. A bad sign.

  “Is that everyone?” said Corinne, pointedly not looking in Portia’s direction. She was, also pointedly, sitting at Clarence’s right hand and dressed for battle in a severe gray jacket (so unadorned with detail that it could only be expensive) and her ill-advisedly jet black hair ramrod straight and lacquered into place behind her ears.

  “I’m sorry,” Portia said again, disliking herself for saying it.

  “Me too,” said Robin.

  Clarence was looking over his legal pad. Beside him, his assistant, Abby, regarded them all above the screen of her open laptop, her hands poised over the keys like a court reporter, which was more or less the function she served here. They were all assembled, except for Victoria (who handled the overseas applicants and was returning from a recruiting trip to India today) and Jordan (like Robin, a new Princeton graduate, called home to Virginia over the weekend for a family emergency). Which left them with seven on this particular committee, some colleagues Portia had worked with for years, some she barely knew, some she liked and admired, others she would have been thrilled never to make small talk—let alone life-altering decisions—with again.

  “First,” said Clarence, interlacing his fingers over the stack of folders before him, “the good news. Our numbers, as you know, are up another nine percent from last year, and we’re seeing spectacular applicants, as you also know. I couldn’t be more pleased with where we are at the outset. I’m saying this now,” he added, chuckling, “before things get ugly.”

  Portia made a point of smiling at Robin, who was looking just slightly terrified.

  “And so, to the bad news, which is a lot like the good news. Up nine percent. Spectacular kids. That means hard decisions. And of course, we get attached to these applicants. I’m saying this especially to you, Robin,” said Clarence, “and I’ll say it to Jordan when she gets back tomorrow, because it’s your first time through. Some of them are not going to get in. Actually, a lot of them aren’t, and we can’t help that. But these are great kids and they’re going to end up at great colleges and they’re going to be fine. We do not imagine that the only path to their success goes through us. We have far more respect for them than that.”

  He looked down at the printout before him. “We will move quickly and carefully. We will ask and answer questions respectfully. And then we will vote. We no longer have time to defer decisions. He picked up a yellow Post-it from the cover of his uppermost folder and gave it a dubious look, as if he expected whatever it contained to suddenly alter. “One note, if I may, before we get started. I am urged, in yet another phone call from my good friend Mr. Salter, to impress upon you all the gravity of his circumstances, by which he means that the Jazz Ensemble is about to graduate its entire complement of saxophone players.” Clarence raised an eyebrow at Jordan, who had himself wielded a trombone for the irascible Mr. Salter only a few years earlier. Jordan shook his head and laughed.

  “Poor Mr. S.”

  “Indeed,” said Clarence. “But this being the case, I have promised to keep an eye out for saxophone players. If he does not get them, he is going to be very unhappy, as a result of which he has vowed to make me very unhappy. Unfortunately, he knows that I am a purist about jazz, so please. For him. For me,” Clarence said, woefully, “bring me saxophone players.”

  Around the table, everyone relaxed. With a dramatic flourish, Clarence crumpled the Post-it and dropped it on the table beside him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen? Deepa? Are you ready?”

  Deepa nodded. She looked exhausted, Portia saw, and a little unkempt, which was unlike her. She unfolded her glasses and gently shook them open, then she put them on and solemnly opened the first folder in her substantial pile. “Yulia Karasov,” said Deepa. “Class rank two of four hundred and fifty, magnet school in a suburb of Atlanta, five-year count eighty-three applications, fourteen admits, eleven attends. Family emigrated from Russia ten years ago. Yulia is the youngest of three, older sibs are at Yale and Emory. Dad is a radiologist. Mom is a lab technician. Russian and English spoken at home. Yulia is captain of the cross-country team, sports editor on the school paper. One summer at CTY, one on a language program in France. Math 760, verbal 710, AP fives in chemistry, history, biology. Helen writes that she has known she wanted to be a doctor since the age of five, but a CTY teacher moved her in the direction of research, and it was a struggle to let go of the image of herself as a doctor. Good writer. Recs all mention her extreme work ethic. She’ll rewrite a paper even after it’s been graded, not for credit.”

  “Very driven,” said Dylan, who had been second reader for the applications from the South. “But I loved what she wrote about giving up being a doctor. It felt very honest.”

  “This transcript is loaded,” said Deepa, gazing down at it. “She’s done everything she could here, but the recs aren’t special. They admire her, but they don’t love her.”

  “Is this a kid who’s going to contribute?” asked Corinne. “Will she write for the Prince?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Deepa said. “The only passion in the application was for something she was giving up. Obviously, she’ll be fine academically.…”

  Deepa’s voice trailed off, but her point was made. Yulia Karasov, accomplished and dedicated as she was, would not be offered admission. Clarence called for a show of hands. It was swift.

  Abby entered the information in her laptop. The folder was closed and the box marked “Deny” was checked on its cover in Clarence’s fat red pen. And then they were on to the next.

  Andrew Powers. Beloved at his private school outside of Memphis, the kind of student any teacher would be grateful to have, the kind of son any parent would be proud of. There were letters from his father’s partner, Princeton ’64, and his mother’s cousin, Princeton ’78, praising his character and skills on the lacrosse field. He had taken the SATs four times, topping out at 700 math, 690 verbal. His essay of praise for his grandfather’s war service felt stretched to fit the most general of prompts. The alum who’d interviewed him noted that he had few questions about Princeton and didn’t seem to know much about the place. “Why are you applying?” she had asked him. “To see if I could get in,” replied Andrew Powers. The vote to decline was unanimous
.

  Mary McCoy, Columbia, South Carolina, first in her class of thirty, the first violinist in the state youth orchestra, first in her family to attend college. “Students like Mary are the reason I wanted to be a teacher,” said the woman who taught her multivariable calculus. “Students like Mary make me a better teacher.” Ten students from her Catholic girls’ school had applied to Princeton over the past five years, with none admitted. Mary would be the first.

  All that morning they moved through the southern states, painfully, student by student. Portia sat very still, willing herself to be like a wind chime, letting the information move over her, raising her arm when the moment called for it. She asked few questions. She was afraid of showing her hand, which had only one thing in it. Every young man and young woman, every flutist and chemist and dancer and track star, every tempered plea, was an opportunity to lose the sole thing that mattered to her, every blossoming young person a young person who might take his place and her own chance to make restitution. This girl who dreamed of bringing technology to rural Africa. This boy who lived for political commentary. The girl who had fallen in love with Italian cinema. The boy who designed and built a waste management system for an off-the-grid community in Alabama. If she said yes to them, would there still be room for Jeremiah?

  Of course she said yes to them. She had to say yes. She wanted to say yes. But every time she did, it took something out of her.

  She looked around the table. Corinne had a husband and her two children. Deepa, a widow, had remarried the year before in a West Windsor temple, a ceremony Portia had attended. Robin, less than a year out of Princeton, had a boyfriend in the Music Department. Clarence’s partner had come with him from Yale, a slender, bespectacled man, every bit as well dressed as Clarence, who wrote political biographies and seldom came to campus. Portia doubted he would know her if they met, say, at McCaffrey’s or Small World. But she knew him.

  Todd Simmonds of Louisville was the nephew of a Princeton trustee. Dad: attorney. Mom: homemaker. Good student, not great. Football player, but obviously not a recruit. He wrote about his love of southern history. He had done a summer internship for Morris Dees. There was a letter from Morris Dees, faint of praise, probably written by someone else, Portia thought. They put him on the wait list.

  Portia, giving in to her thirst, opened a bottle of water and drank.

  There was a lively discussion about Joanna White, African-American, mother a dean at Rollins College, father deceased. Joanna had attended an invitational humanities program for high school juniors the previous summer at Princeton, and there was a letter in her file from Mark, which Deepa read aloud, saying what a fine contributor she had been to the class. Portia, listening, was struck by the kindness in the letter and thought how strange it was that the writer might have been as removed from her as any of the other hundreds and hundreds of Princeton professors, but was instead the man she had lived with for many years. Sometimes, exhausted, he had said to her, “You have no idea what I do all day,” and she would roll her eyes and pretend to be sympathetic about his workload, as if her own were not just as intense. But the goodness in the letter affected her now, and it occurred to her, not for the first time, that Mark had always saved the best of himself for the people he dealt with in his professional life, though perhaps—and this did strike her for the first time—she had done that as well.

  Joanna White was the kind of humanities student the summer program had been designed to find, something akin to the magnet programs for science and math that effectively pinpointed great students in those fields. But Joanna’s grades beyond the humanities were dreadful and her SATs a lopsided 610/780.

  “I met with her last summer,” said Deepa, speaking in her typically soft voice. “During the program. She asked Professor Telford if she could speak to an admissions officer, and he called me. She’s very focused and very brilliant. She knows there’s a problem with her transcript, but she said to me, ‘I can do so much here.’ And I have to say, Mark Telford agreed. He said he was more impressed by her than by any other student who’d come through the program.”

  “Mom’s a dean?” Corinne asked.

  “Yes. Father died in Iraq.”

  This had an instant impact.

  “Let’s vote,” said Clarence.

  A boy from West Virginia wrote that even his application to Princeton broke a three-generation tradition for the men in his family, all of whom had attended the Citadel. But he was a painter, and the slides he’d sent had been viewed with great excitement by the Art Department. “If you give us one artist this year, give us this one,” Deepa read from the evaluation form.

  “Never been north of the Mason-Dixon.” Clarence smiled, looking down at the folder.

  He was first in his class of over two hundred, only 22 percent of whom attended four-year colleges, and the first ever to apply to Princeton. They voted and moved on.

  Lunch was sandwiches from Cox’s, brought in precisely at noon. Portia took hers up to her office and sat at her desk, reading Mark’s eulogy for Gordon Sternberg, which had been posted on the English Department Web site. It was dignified and diplomatic, full of praise for the astounding reach of Gordon’s written work. It cited his humor, his forty years of devoted students, the sometimes grudging high opinion of his colleagues around the world, not a few of whom had feuded with him very publicly and for years. It seemed to imply that his life had ended not in a filthy Philadelphia alley, but at some undefined moment of triumph, as if he had suddenly succumbed to a painless death while holding forth to an immense lecture hall packed with former students, admiring members of the department, respectful rivals, adoring children, and a devoted wife. It was, thought Portia, a masterwork of tenderness and tact. And sitting at her desk with a barely touched tuna-fish sandwich in her hands, she was proud of Mark for writing it and an instant later terribly sad that she had not been there to hear him deliver it.

  And then it was time to go back.

  There were lots of Princeton families in the South. Princeton had once had the reputation of being the most southern of Ivy League colleges, not geographically but in temperament. It was well-known, though hardly a matter of pride, that students had once brought their own servants with them from home, housing them off campus in a neighborhood of town that was still, a century later, predominantly black; but the Princeton of 2008 was a very different construct. Through the afternoon, tie after tie was unceremoniously severed, with young men and women cast adrift from family tradition to find other places to be educated. Portia, still trying to bend and not break, could not help but be sad for these, too. She shrank from imagining the stunning impact of that slender envelope, arriving in homes where devotion to alma mater was entwined with family lore, where alumni wrote checks and attended reunions, perhaps imagining that their sons and daughters might one day live in the new dorm or take a class from a professor in the newly endowed chair. In a few weeks’ time, this group, more than any other, would flood the office with letters and calls, angry and shocked and heartbroken, but that was Clarence’s cross to bear, and he seemed to manage it well.

  On and on they flew. She craved the easy ones, the slam dunks: Math Olympiad finalists, congressional interns, the winner of Princeton’s international high school poetry prize (this year, a girl from North Carolina), the banjo player who’d taken a year off after high school to busk his way around Europe, the amputee who’d won the grand slalom at the Turin Winter Paralympics. It felt wonderful to gather these people together, imagine them convening at the lab bench or the cafeteria table. It felt amazing to wonder whether the soprano from Savannah, Georgia, would meet the tenor from Baton Rouge in their freshman seminar on Wagner and fall in love, or whether the fiery (but, she had to admit, articulate and persuasive) neocon from Charleston would have his worldview altered, ever so slightly, by the Chilean boy whose two fathers had adopted him at birth, brought him home to Atlanta, and raised him to reimagine the world.

  There was, around the ta
ble, a calibration taking place, similar to the one Portia always felt at the very start of the reading season, when the first and then the second and then the third applicant seemed equally impressive, equally compelling, and then the fourth and the fifth, and so on until you came to that one who was so amazing, so extraordinary, that the landscape suddenly snapped to clarity: Oh yes, now I understand. These impressive, compelling kids, enormously likable kids—they’re the ones we don’t take. This amazing, extraordinary kid, that’s the kid we take. A class of the amazing and the extraordinary. A class of working actors and winning athletes and protoliterary scholars who had so impressed Mark Telford that he’d asked for their admission, and protophilosophers already capable of discussing zombie theory with David Friedman, and the boy whose memoir was about to be published, and the girl from Richmond who had spent the previous year in Gabon establishing a sanctuary for young women who had been expelled from their families or had no families in the first place, as well as a charitable foundation to support its operation, and the young researchers already attached to major studies, and the QuestBridge scholars, and the boy from Thailand who had made his way through every math class the country’s best university could offer him, even though he wasn’t yet seventeen, and the ones who were choosing between college and the careers they had already begun, as dancers and models and gymnasts and ice skaters—careers that might not wait four years for them to return—and the violinists and oboists and trombonists and already accomplished composers the Music Department requested, calling them “simply brilliant” and “rare.” They were breathtaking. And they would come here and fight among themselves and make things and learn from one another and break one another’s hearts and push their professors to rise to their own level of curiosity and effort and come out of the closet and get engaged and get religion and change their religion and lose their religion and make the university better, and then make the world better. It gave her a sensation of almost calm, almost happiness. All things shall be well.… All manner of things shall be well.