So you can file this one away as random, picayune, pointless, of interest to almost no one, etc.

Years ago, when it came out, I read the book The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg. The book was an (at the time, anyway) unprecedented look inside the admissions process of an elite college. I read it for a variety of reasons. The college in question is Wesleyan University, the college where I grew up. My father was a professor there for decades, my mother worked in the general store and post office, which was managed by my maternal grandfather, etc. etc. I knew some of the figures in the book; Ralph Figueroa, the book’s central figure, went to my church. Greg Pyke, the dean of admissions at the time, was the father of a couple of my friends from high school. More, it came out at a time when college was very much on my mind. I was going through some things. I couldn’t get into college, and I was angry about that, and envious towards those who could. The people profiled in the book were just about my age.

Anyway, I found the book fairly interesting. But one thing really stuck in my craw. And now, as I have picked it up and started to reread it (for no good reason), I’m again kind of annoyed.

One of the students profiled for the book is a young woman named Becca Jannol. Her drama in the book stems from her decision to write her personal statement about an incident during high school when she (gasp) ate a weed brownie. She turned herself in and was suspended for it. She decides to write her college essay on the incident, in what I can only describe as a classic college essay move. Here’s an important point: Jannol and Steinberg explicitly state that Jannol hopes to be more noticeable, and thus more marketable, by speaking about drug use, a subject most college admissions officers would consider a no-go area. Eventually, she is rejected from Wesleyan, in part because of the brownie incident. Later, she decides that this is the height of hypocrisy because she smelled students smoking marijuana on a visit to Wesleyan. Steinberg recounts some of this here.

Now, first of all, it’s not hypocrisy for a college admissions office to be opposed to its applicants smoking weed when people smoke weed at the campus. The university is at least officially against marijuana use by its students, after all. The admissions officers can’t be held accountable for behavior by students that the school doesn’t condone. Second, to at least some degree, Jannol’s attitude towards the incident is clearly animated by a simplistic “drugs are bad” mindset that doesn’t fit current attitudes towards marijuana use. Besides, if a college is hypocritical because it has to officially sanction drug use while students at a college use them, there is no university in the country that is not guilty of hypocrisy. But my biggest problem is that I think it is in fact Jannol who is the hypocrite. After all, she wanted to use the “danger” of reference to drugs and suspension as a way to set herself apart from the pack. She says as much in the book. But she then rages when she has to live with the consequences of that decision. Wanting the reward without the risk is human, but to then wrap that in the mantle of righteousness goes too far.

Of course, she had an obvious excuse: she was a kid. Plenty of people are filled with righteous indignation and bad ideas as teenagers. (I know I was.) My problem is more that Steinberg goes along with it uncritically. He was an adult and a professional journalist, and yet he seems to swallow Jannol’s hypocrisy narrative whole. It’s grating.

Incidentally, it’s been my opinion that the Gatekeepers was ultimately very bad for Wesleyan. Wes, like a lot of colleges, became flush with cash in the 2000s. And like a lot of colleges, Wesleyan decided to spend a lot of that cash on physical expansion. They bought a lot of land, in fact, that they have since been unable to afford to build on, thanks to the financial crisis and to a very untimely embezzlement incident. As much as Wes was acting in concert with a lot of other colleges that overexpanded their physical infrastructure, I also think that the Gatekeepers had something to do with it.

In the book, Wesleyan courts a young woman who is pretty much the college admissions ideal, a multiracial young woman named Julianna Bentes who has perfect grades, great SATs, numerous awards and activities, etc. I find it kind of poignant to think about how, for awhile, potential seems like inevitability. I believe Bentes went on to become a lawyer, and I wish her well. In any event, she does not choose Wesleyan. Her reason, as stated in the book, is that Wesleyan didn’t look nice enough; too many patches in the grass, too many worn-down looking buildings. Now, I happen to think that this is a spectacularly poor way to judge a college, but again, she was a teenager. I don’t blame her.

I do blame those in the world of higher education (almost universally administrators, by the way, not professors) who bought into the “Club Med plus classes” vision of college. Partly this is a result of the way that donations are earmarked for use. (Big donors want something that they can put a name on.) And, as with Bentes specifically, students fed this obsession with buildings and quads and architecture; research by colleges consistently found that students were attracted to the schools with the best facilities, above and beyond quotidian concerns like, you know, academics. In the competitive culture that US News and World Report has wrought, if you lose a top prospect because your campus doesn’t look nice enough, then your numbers suffer, your ranking suffers, then you don’t attract more of the top applicants… it’s a vicious cycle.

But vicious or not, college administrators need to be sensible. At Wesleyan, as at many schools, it doesn’t seem like they were. Now, I can’t say that they became so invested in physical infrastructure due to one prospective student, of course. But I think important people at the university were stung by a top prospect complaining about grass and dorm room architecture. Sure enough, Wes expanded and renovated physically for the better part of the 2000’s, until the bottom fell out. And I’ll admit, it looks lovely. What does it have to do with education? I have no idea.

As is so often the case, my conclusion is that the US News and World Report rankings and those like them should be set on fire.