Admission (36 page)

She felt, when she unlocked her own office door on the second floor, an unmistakable and terribly welcome sense of tranquillity.
Here, all was unaltered from the morning of her departure for Vermont, when she had stopped in briefly before meeting Rachel
for their walk: her Word-a-Day calendar set to December 24 (when its word was, inauspiciously, “Inauspicious”), a scrawled
note on her desk to chase down an application from a Groton student she’d read about in a
Boston Globe
piece on young environmentalists, and three bundled stacks of applications, fifty in each, which Corinne had dropped off.
These folders, for which Portia was to act as second reader, hailed from her old district and were doubtless weighted with
future doctors, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers from the heavily Pacific Rim immigrant applicant pool, an overendowment
of abundantly overqualified kids. She sort of missed them, it occurred to her. She missed the Bay Area kids who hauled their
cellos into San Francisco on the weekends, redesigned the computer systems for their schools, and interned with research scientists
at Berkeley, and the Silicon Valley kids, shuttling from the tennis team to their community service duties at the tutoring
center, and the Hawaiian kids with their fantastic names and intensive luau dance training. They were all in there, of course,
and who else? Plus, she was anxious to see what this least favorite colleague, forced from her Mid-Atlantic comfort zone,
had made of her new charges.

She stood for a long moment, merely looking.

Outside was starless night and very cold. Inside, it was also dark, and she was entirely alone, except for the kids in their
thick and suppliant folders. She felt a kind of duty to them, but not only a duty. She truly preferred to be with them, these
fleshless people, their best selves neatly in black-and-white on the two-dimensional paper and primly contained within each
orange file. And she felt necessary to them, and she felt accountable to them, and were those really such terrible things
to feel? She took off her coat and reached for the topmost folder.

My favorite saying is “no guts, no glory.” I can’t recall who said it first, but whenever I am in trouble or facing a big
challenge, I think about this saying. What it means to me is that anything worth doing is worth doing well, not only in sports
but in life. There have been times when our team is in the dumps because things are not going well, but I always draw inspiration
from this saying. It has helped me to be a stronger individual everyday.

T
he kid who had written about zombies, it turned out, was the real thing. His impenetrable essay, which she had dispatched
to David through the university mail, came winging back the first week in January with a cover note that read: “Definitely.
Absolutely. Yes, please.”

Portia found the file on the overhead shelf she used as a parking lot for applications awaiting something or other. She slipped
this memo in the back and made a note in the “Department Rating” area of the reader’s card, a seldom used but highly influential
section on the front. Then, before she let it go, and armed with David’s endorsement, she made another attempt to glean some
sense from the essay:

Certain things are conscious. We may not know what it’s like to be a dog, or a bat: but we know (or at least we think we know)
that animals have feelings and experiences. We also know that a creature’s conscious life is somehow determined by what’s
going on in its brain. So here’s a question: What exactly is the relation between conscious experience and the brain activity
that underlies it? Many philosophers—materialists—have thought that conscious experience just is brain activity, in the same
sense in which heat just is the motion of molecules. The Zombie thought experiment puts pressure on this sort of view. We
seem to be able to imagine or conceive a creature that is just like you in every physical respect, down to the last detail,
but which is altogether unconscious. A Zombie will move and talk as if it were awake and genuinely aware of its surroundings;
but its inner light is OFF. It has no subjective experience. Now the fact that we can imagine such creatures gives us some
reason to believe that they are logically possible. But if it’s logically possible for a creature to have a brain just like
yours and no conscious experience, then consciousness is not literally identical to brain activity. Instead we should say
that brain activity normally causes consciousness, in the sense in which heating up the filament in a lightbulb normally causes
it to glow. On this view, the physical aspects of an organism are distinct from its subjective, mental aspects: at best there
are various causal laws connecting the two domains.

She read this twice but could not follow the logic past the point about the inner light being OFF. (Did this, in fact, indicate
that her own inner light was OFF?) Nonetheless, she wrote her summary and checked “High Priority—Admit” at the bottom of the
card, then put the file in the pile of folders to go to Corinne for second reading.

Her colleagues were all in the early stages of their shared annual affliction. The traveling was done for the year, and what
remained was this confluence of the cold and winter, and the all-in-our-hands sense of bleak responsibility: to the trustees
and faculty, of course, and to the guidance counselors (who were, for better or worse, their partners in the work of getting
the right students into the freshman class), and, yes, to the alumni, because Princeton honored its graduates and wished to
retain their high opinion. But mainly to the applicants themselves, who collectively seemed to hover everywhere in Portia’s
imagination, like spectral Jude the Obscures, waiting for the verdict on their futures and—Portia very much feared—their sense
of self-worth. Sometimes she imagined them, waiflike across Cannon Green and behind West College and along Nassau Street,
winding their white, supplicating hands through the great iron gates. (This was not, needless to say, an image she shared
with her colleagues.) No one was complaining aloud, but then again, no one had to; the weight of the burden was intense and
everywhere, and the entire crew (fighting the same cold) shuffled through the corridors with the same set of dour thoughts.

Portia, too, was well into her winter sinus misery, a malady that typically began after New Year’s, did battle with a tag
team of antibiotics over the winter months, and finally surrendered to modern medicine just in time for the pollen surge in
April. It had begun right on schedule the week she returned from Vermont, flickering behind her cheekbones as the year turned,
sneaking tendrils of pain along the facial nerves, coiling around her ears and scalp. At her appointment with the internist
she got a prescription for Ceftin, the best of a bad lot, and asked for Ambien, which she’d been given but was not yet brave
enough to use. Instead, she lay in bed timing the pounding in her head against the dull clicking of the bedside clock, feeling
the pain across her entire face, as if the bones of her skull were contracting steadily, the flesh struggling against containment.
This was not an effective sleep aid. The house would not seem to warm up, and she wondered if there was something she was
supposed to have done to the boiler after her return; but the boiler was Mark’s domain, and she did not want to ask him about
it. She did not want to ask him about anything. She did not want her reverie that he did not exist, and that therefore nothing
had happened between them, to be broken. Besides, she was hardly at home, so it hardly mattered that she was cold.

Once again, this year, the applications had jumped—up eight hundred this time—more evidence of the still swelling population
bubble of teenagers and, too, perhaps, that their efforts to reach beyond the traditional applicant pool, to students who
might not have thought to apply ten or even five years earlier, were proving successful. It all seemed utterly overwhelming
just now, with every surface in her office piled with files and boxes more waiting downstairs in the office, but no one was
panicking because they always felt this way at this particular moment in the cycle. There had never, in Portia’s recollection,
been any real worry that they wouldn’t finish in time, though the task did have a way of expanding to fill every worker’s
every available hour.

This was the point in the admissions cycle when Portia became reacquainted with many of the students she’d spent the previous
spring encouraging to apply to Princeton. Selling the university, of course, was not difficult, but overselling it to potential
applicants sat near the top of every critic’s list of complaints (the gist of this being that top-tier colleges went out of
their way to get vast numbers to apply, only to admit an ever smaller percentage and earn, as a result, a higher
U.S. News & World Report
ranking). But while Portia did sometimes wish there were a way to selectively discourage the students she met while visiting
high schools, she would never—and could never—do it. Not only was it the office’s philosophy that every student should feel
welcome to submit an application, and that equal and thorough consideration awaited everyone who did so, the fact was that
you just couldn’t tell, when you looked into their serious, tremulous faces at the information sessions, who was the kid who’d
cheated his way through Calculus BC and who was the kid whose English teacher was going to call him “the most exciting student
I’ve had in my thirty-year career.” What if she discouraged some student who couldn’t break 1200 on his SATs from applying,
when he would turn out to be idiosyncratically cerebral, a true original kid whose unqualifiable abilities would lift the
discourse in every class he enrolled in? How could you know that the thoroughly dull high school junior struggling to make
conversation over cider and cookies would emerge as the writing program’s most gifted novelist in a decade? Still, when their
faces came back to her now, swimming up from the accounts of debating triumphs and stage fright at the piano recital, she
sometimes wished she’d been able to say to them:
Don’t. Don’t try for this. Don’t want this or, worse, make some terrible connection between who you are as a human being and
whether or not you get in.

The pool, once again, was absurdly strong, the applicants more driven, more packaged, more worried, even than the year before.
They were decent kids who had never considered that their life experience was at all unusual, since they were like everyone
else they knew, so when they set foot outside the United States, on a church home-building trip to Mexico or a visit to relatives
in Bombay, they were stunned by the poverty, dumbstruck to discover how wealthy and privileged they were. They wanted to fix
things, cure diseases, make it better. They wanted to turn into the amazing people their teachers swore they were and their
parents had always planned for them to be. They wanted not to fall short at this finish line of their entire lives (so far)
and be that kid who’d thought he was so great, who’d aimed so far above himself. Portia felt for them, of course. She wished,
as she checked, again and again, the box reading “Only if room” (a euphemism for no, as there was never room), that she could
reach through the folder to the kid beyond and say,
Anyone would be ecstatic to have their child turn out as great as you,
and,
Please, go and do all the things you say you intend to do.

Few of them were eliminated easily. The campaigners, who fashioned elaborate dossiers with glossy eight-by-tens of their grinning
faces and sent in reams of thick stock pages enumerating each spelling test and charity walk as far back as middle school,
could not be dismissed out of hand, because you couldn’t hold someone’s personality against them, and besides, some idiot
might have told them to do it. The student who provided an eighteenth-century family tree with the name of a distant ancestor
circled in red could not be eliminated instantly, though his cover letter said he wanted to go to Princeton because his antecedent
had “helped set up the place.” The girl who had entered her e-mail address as
[email protected]
could not be declined on the spot, because even Princeton applicants were allowed to be idiotic teenagers. The ones with
low SAT scores couldn’t be dispatched quickly, because some of them were superb and thoughtful writers, with recs that begged
her to see past the numbers to this singular awakening mind. So when she came to an applicant who, given the benefit of every
doubt, fell decisively short, she was relieved: Here was one she did not have to bring to committee, sell to her colleagues,
sell to Clarence. The math geeks who hadn’t done any math outside of school—“Only if room.” The literary types who were poor
writers—“Only if room.” The faux philosophers, high on Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, who only hoped to find professors worthy of
having them as a student. She had no need to trouble David with their essays: