Authors: David Samuels
administrators alike feel good about themselves and their place at an elite institution of higher education whose reputation rests as much on its hoary history of servicing the children of the American elite as it does on the work of the world-class scholars who are chosen to teach there.
Sax studied his teammate’s behavior carefully, in order to better understand the
Alice in
Wonderland
environment in which they found themselves, where the rich and privileged enjoyed the fruits of their family trees while insisting that whatever they had was the result of inborn talent. In their minds, Sax believed, the fact that someone like Alexi Santana was accepted at Princeton was proof of what kind of place Princeton really was. “Alexi had nothing to do with any of these people,” Sax explained. “He never went to high school, he had a really tough time growing up, and yet he was a brilliant, brilliant guy. I’m sure the people there felt very, very good that they took Alexi in and nurtured him. I think they thought they might have been
instrumental in nurturing him into the brilliant phenom that he so clearly was.”
No one wanted to break the spell by giving him an F on an assignment or kicking him off
the track team. Mumbling, and answering questions with the fewest possible number of words, he only encouraged his classmates to project their own fantasies of personal achievement and exotic lifestyles onto him. By refusing to run, he defined himself as a rebel. Isolating himself socially, he heightened the glamour of his outsider origins.
Standing out at Princeton only heightened Santana’s fear that something he said or did
might give him away. But the impostor was up to the challenge. “One of the things he was really capable of was finding out what made you tick,” recalled Jon Luff, who became Santana’s best friend on the track team during his freshman year. “He found out what subjects you were
interested in, and what your goals were in athletics or beyond college. And then he would play off whatever you told him by telling stories about having done some of those things himself, not necessarily in a competitive way, but not in a particularly modest way, either.” When Luff was trying to learn French, his friend began carrying around the works of Voltaire and Rousseau in the original, while modestly denying any special expertise in the language. French was easy to learn, he told Luff. It was something he had picked up along the way. For a granola-eating child of the sixties counterculture who grew up in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, the Nevada desert, and places in between, Luff noticed, Santana also showed an unusual interest in Italian
Vogue,
which he appeared to read voraciously and left lying around his room.
Santana also told Luff stories about training with really good Kenyan runners, who were
the stars of the famous University of Texas at El Paso track teams of the late 1970s. He said that he had met the Kenyans while running in Boulder, Colorado, which happened to be Luff’s
favorite place in the world. As they ran together on the roads outside of Princeton in the
morning, he would share his memories of the Kenyans with Luff. “Those guys were great and I loved training with them,” he would tell Luff, before segueing into memories of running on the mountain trails outside Boulder. Alone at Princeton, Luff was glad to find someone who shared his memories of early morning runs in the Rockies, and who loved running as much as he did.
In addition to being a runner, Luff also loved racing bikes, and knew everything about the
latest models from Europe and California. One day, during the Tour de France, when Luff’s
excitement about bike racing was at its peak, his friend showed up at his door with a gorgeous new high-end bike that had been spray-painted black and had no decals or other clues as to its origins. Santana claimed to have built the bike himself at the Engineering Quad. “He said he made it by himself in about three weeks, which if you know anything about the difficulty of setting angles on a bike frame is basically impossible,” Luff remembered. To pull off such a feat, his friend would have needed years of experience and access to highly specialized tools. Still, it was hard not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Santana did know a great deal about high-end racing bikes. And there was a sense in which his stories were simply too good
not
to be true.
As often happened with the stories about Santana that traveled around campus, the legend
grew from there. Not only had Alexi built a world-class racing bike himself from scratch, he was also a world-class cyclist. Soon, it seemed like everyone knew that Santana could have been a pro, and was being seriously considered for the Olympics. “That was his method,” Luff
observed. “He would plant a little seed, and let the story grow.” Everyone who heard stories about Santana and passed them became a part of the imposture, but only one person on campus knew for sure whether or not the stories were true. When Santana was asked directly about the reports that circulated about his many talents, he usually smiled and shrugged. “It was absolutely fascinating when you look back on it,” Luff said. “It’s like Jerzy Kosinski’s novel
Being There
.
By being quiet and saying nothing you become this great person, just because people project their hopes and dreams onto you.”
In some ways, Santana’s second year at Princeton was even more cloistered and private
than his first. He stuck close to the Ivy Club, and to his single dorm room. All he remembered about his living quarters that year was a girl named Miriam who lived across the hall. “It was kind of strange, because it had this little bay window, and that was half the room,” Santana’s creator told me later, remembering the room across the hall, the memory of which had for some reason stayed with him. Miriam had a Georgia O’Keeffe poster on her ceiling, and she played the flute. His other neighbor was a computer major who kept strange hours. Having passed through the promiscuous meeting and greeting of freshman year at an Ivy League college, Santana might stay safe within a close circle of teammates and club members whose familiarity with his story was unlikely to lead to any more questions. He was at home at Princeton but not yet home free.
While distinguished commentators will continue to celebrate the pleasing thought that
anyone can strike it rich in America, the graduates of Ivy League colleges know that the
competition is hardly equal. The famous names on Ivy League diplomas are backed by the
combined weight of the famous men and socially prominent families who have attended
Princeton and its brother and sister institutions before. A diploma from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale is a familiar type of social passport, proof that the bearer has been chosen for a place among the elite. The odd doublespeak that surrounds our secular meritocratic version of chosenness has been at once confusing and heartening to generations of undergraduates who have had their
individual merits affirmed by the closest thing that the American meritocracy has to the old Puritan idea of election. Yet the power of the old idea was precisely that the choice belonged to God alone, which meant that even the most visibly elect members of society must tremble before the abyss. However odd the Puritan idea of the relationship between God’s will and individual destiny might be, it does seem more democratic and less damaging to the social fabric than the ritual of gracing a select group of eighteen-year-olds with a place among the elite, the right to preferential treatment in professional school admissions and hiring, and a lifelong network of friends and acquaintances who might help to ease their way along whatever path they might
choose to follow
While most Americans would acknowledge that a Princeton degree is a good thing to
have, we rarely talk about why that is so, in large part because the answer is so obvious. Yes, it is a fact that the assurance of being among the elect does not necessarily correspond with actual achievement and can lead to lifelong procrastination and loafing—just as it is a fact that the ranks of authentic American geniuses are filled with people who never went to college.
In my own case, it is hard to avoid the sideways perception that the statistical fluke of my admission to Harvard and then Princeton is responsible in some large part for my ability to swim in deeper waters. The promise that I might have made whatever I wanted of myself no matter
who I was or where I went to college is a democratic American idea that was hardly prevalent in my upbringing. Without the assurance conferred by my Ivy League acceptance letters, I would have happily copied what other first-generation American children around me did and become an accountant or a lawyer. Yes, there is something quite delusional about imagining how mediocre your life would be if not for the stroke of good fortune that guarantees that you will walk forever on the sunny side of the street. Fate laughs at pretenses like these, before it decides on the appropriate punishment—cancer, an autistic child, a cheating wife, or getting run over by an ice cream truck. Yet the appeal of the what-if game is undeniably strong for anyone who grows up on the American margins and is then gifted with a place at an Ivy League college. In a wink, one’s unlucky prior history is erased, to be replaced by the generic virtues that are commonly associated with the names “Harvard” or “Princeton” or “Yale”—social refinement, the illusion of effortless achievement, and the blessings of the invisible committee of Ivy League elders who confirm the certainty of one’s future success, and the truly fantastic gilt-edged combination of all of the above, which add up to a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself, whose
centrality in the greater American narrative cannot be denied by hidebound relatives or
neighbors.
Acceptance to a university like Princeton is not simply a validation of the person you
were when you applied. Rather, it means that you are free to become someone new. That is the promise that the university makes by putting its name on your diploma. Your troubled or
unworthy old self can be safely discarded in favor of the aura conferred by the institution and by the collective achievements of its well-placed graduates. Later on, if you wish, you can reveal yourself as you are, or were, and share the embarrassing details of your origins and
upbringing—that is to say, of the person you were before you acquired a proper education and a dresser full of cashmere sweaters, and learned to comport yourself as a member of the
meritocratic elite whose first lie is that that there is no such thing as an elite in America.
It is not surprising that James Hogue was puzzled by the magical nature of this exchange,
which arrogates to a small number of universities the power to erase the past, and turn dross into gold. Here and there, in our conversations, which were pieced together over a period of months, his sense of bewilderment shows through, in a way that made me feel sorry for him every time I read the transcripts. There were thirteen tapes in all. Each of the tapes lasted from forty-five minutes to one hour long, and was filled with long pauses, which suggest that the Princeton con man was also a naif.
“I can remember specific little things, like the guy who was showing me around,” he told
me, speaking of Jon Luff. “He had a rack with forty ties on it in his room. I was thinking to myself, why does a college student need forty ties? Where is he wearing these ties? Or the first time I visited here it was cold and raining, and I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell, it’s going to snow.
This is pretty awful weather. I haven’t seen rain in a long, long time. Is it like this a lot? Why can I go into the library, and they have three million volumes and they don’t have a single book on pediatrics?’ It just seemed kind of absurd to me. You could go into any public library in the United States, no matter how small, and they would have at least one book about pediatrics.”
Extrapolate from details like these, Hogue instructed me, and I would understand how he
felt about Princeton. There were gaps in the story that Princeton was trying to tell about itself.
“I don’t think in any other country people would put a sticker in the back window of their
car about where they went to college,” Hogue earnestly explained to me. “I don’t know if that’s any different than somebody that wears a baseball cap that says Caterpillar as opposed to John Deere or something,” he continued. We were sitting around the fire someplace that he would
rather not talk about. “I mean, what are they trying to say? That they’re better because they’re wearing John Deere, you know?” He felt guilty about lying to people, he says, but not guilty enough to stop. I don’t believe he felt guilty at all.
Still, I knew what it felt like to wonder about the number of ties in my roommate’s closet.
Accepting my ticket to an Ivy League college made me a willing participant in the greater fraud of a meritocracy in which some were ordained more equal than others. I knew very well at
eighteen that there was no shortage of unfairness to go around. I was grateful for the chance to escape the life that had been chosen for me by my parents and teachers, who wanted me to live according to strict rules that they believed were part of the divine order of things—not turning on lights on the Sabbath or waiting six hours to drink milk after eating meat—which seemed to me like symptoms of collective mental derangement, rather than true expressions of God’s Plan for his Chosen People. The possibility that I was right and my parents and teachers were wrong, a possibility that I held on to for years against the combined force of authority at home and at school and contrary to the tugs of affection and affiliation that I felt in my own heart, was finally and irrefutably confirmed on the day that I received my Harvard acceptance letter in the mail. On that day, the dark clouds of obedience parted and a heavenly finger reached out and touched my forehead. I was transformed into a living, breathing person, an individual with the God-given right to be whoever I wanted to be. If the price of this precious gift was the betrayal of