Admission (65 page)

P
ortia’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.