The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  Because we had to get through about three hundred applications in each two-hour committee session, we developed shortcuts. You could look down at the names of four or five kids from one school who were terribly smart but not exceptional and say, “Reject the entire high school”; sometimes you could go further and say, “Reject the page,” and send twenty kids on a single page of computer paper packing; or, most famously, “Reject the state” when it came to sparsely populated places like North Dakota or Wyoming.

  Despite appearances, deciding which 14 percent of the applicants would get the golden ticket was really tough work. Once the children of alumni, recruited athletes, underrepresented minorities or regions, and students interested in underenrolled majors were considered, there wasn’t much room for your generic genius. (By today’s standards, by the way, 14 percent doesn’t seem so brutal. In 2014, Yale got nearly thirty-one thousand applicants and accepted a mere 6.3 percent of them.)

  The great majority of students we admitted were truly brilliant and had busted their tails to get there. But the fingerprints of privilege were still present. You just had to look a little harder to see them and resolve not to let them unfairly influence you. It wasn’t immediately obvious that kids from elite feeder schools had been coached for years on their interviews, essays, and every conceivable form of standardized testing. Many of their college counselors had worked in elite admissions offices; their tutors had PhDs. They knew prominent alums who would write recommendations on thick, creamy bond paper. The letters arrived daily from white-shoe law firms, governors’ mansions, and—in yet another shock to my blue-collar brain—vacation homes with proper names on engraved stationery: “The Manse, Little Compton, Rhode Island” or “Coral House, Hamilton, Bermuda.”

  As I tried to sort out fair from foul, Suzie, a perennial champion of the underdog, gave me advice I will never forget: “It’s very easy to throw the prize at the kids who finish the race first, but always look at the incline they faced. That will tell you much more.”

  Once the more clear-cut cases had been decided, things got fuzzy, political, and sometimes unfair. It wasn’t news to me that the process wasn’t entirely meritocratic. It wasn’t news to me that people were willing to use any and every angle to game the process. But it was a revelation about exactly what forms those advantages would take and how they were displayed: sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly. The story of two applicants that year showed the collision of the old guard and the new world.

  One late fall afternoon, I walked into the Admissions Office reception area. A lot of parents looked up nervously from the glossy promotional brochures they were perusing.

  “Parker Shipley?” I asked, looking down at his interview card: an Andover student with a strong GPA and an impressive battery of test scores. A kid with a floppy blond wave of hair half covering his “aw, shucks” expression stood up.

  “Hi, I’m Mr. Boland. I see you’re from Rochester. Me too.”

  “Cool,” he said, affable and at ease.

  His father loomed behind him. “Rochester, eh? Is your father a Xerox man?” he said too loudly. He had that particular kind of patrician accent that somehow transcends geography, a woolly vocal braid of Julia Child and William F. Buckley.

  “As a matter of fact, he is,” I said.

  He thought he saw an opening and pumped my hand eagerly. “Preston Shipley. I went to Xerox right out of Princeton. Yes, I’m a Princeton man, but I hope you won’t hold that against Parker here. What class were you at Yale?” On a good day, I suppose I could pass for old Yankee/Ivy stock instead of shanty Irish.

  “I didn’t go to Yale,” I answered matter-of-factly.

  “I’ve been with Xerox for almost twenty years and know everyone in the executive suite,” Mr. Shipley continued. “What’s your father’s name?”

  “My dad isn’t in the executive suite.” I smiled, trying to give him a clue.

  “Well, God knows, we need those engineers. There’s no copiers without them!” He guffawed.

  “He’s not an engineer either.” He looked puzzled, even troubled.

  The son got the picture well in advance of the father. So did everybody else in the waiting room, judging from their expressions. The kid shifted awkwardly from one penny loafer to the other.

  “My dad does shift work in the roll coating factory.”

  “Roll coating?” Mr. Shipley said. “Well. Oh. I don’t get over there much.” He looked blank and a little afraid, as if a member of the Khmer Rouge were about to interrogate his offspring.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet a fellow Rochesterian,” I said, shaking his hand again.

  This guy bugged me. His son had strong grades from a great prep school, along with good teeth and manners to match. Short of a sudden heroin addiction or spate of criminal activity, the kid was destined to go to one of probably twelve preordained institutions. Wasn’t that enough?

  A week after my interview with Parker, I sat in an overstuffed wing chair in the august lounge of the Yale Club of New York. The school’s motto, “Lux et Veritas,” was stitched into the carpet, embossed on my iced tea coaster, and emblazoned on the jacket of the old waiter who had begrudgingly brought me the iced tea. I was waiting for Hal Buckley and Francis Alcock, the two Old Blues who headed the local volunteer alumni group that conducted the alumni interviews required of all applicants. I had been forewarned by the dean of admissions that the New York group was chafing at the recent difficulty many of the Manhattan prep schools had had in getting students accepted to Yale, many of them children of alumni. Most of the schools had been feeders to Yale for nearly a century; one even predated the university’s founding in 1701 by seventy years.

  I had talked to them by phone but had never met them in person. Retired Wall Streeters, they were both old, smart, white, and pedigreed. With matching sets of wiry gray eyebrows, they could have been twins. We exchanged some initial pleasantries, and then I braced myself for the onslaught. “We used to hold our receptions for admitted students here, but your Admissions Office says it’s too stuffy and we’d scare off kids who aren’t from typical Yale backgrounds. Have you ever heard such twaddle in your life?” said Hal, the crankier of the two.

  I scanned the room—a gorgeous mausoleum, majestic but imposing as hell, filled with scores of mean-looking old men who appeared ready to lower their Wall Street Journals and scream, “Get off my lawn!” in raspy unison.

  “Why, it’s such a striking space. Who wouldn’t like it here?” I was trying to get on their good side.

  “I just hope we have a better record in getting some kids in, because last year was, quite frankly, a debacle. A travesty, really,” said Hal.

  “I assure you I’ll do my best to advocate for New York,” I said with conviction, at the same time trying to suppress the images in my head of Statler and Waldorf, the pair of grumpy-old-men Muppets in the balcony.

  Francis, who was somewhat friendlier, added, “We have a great crop of kids from Manhattan this year. Let’s see. We’ve already discussed that Westinghouse Science Competition finalist from Stuyvesant, the Latvian fencer from the Trinity School, and the daughter of the dean at Columbia Law School whose father is a close friend of the president of the university.”

  “Yes, I saw your write-ups on all of them in the office. Very thorough. Thank you.”

  Francis leaned in and peered at me over the tops of his tortoiseshell glasses. “Over the weekend, we interviewed an extraordinary young woman from Miss Bartlett’s School. She has real Yale polish. Great intellectual curiosity.”

  I checked the rumblings of a groan in my throat.

  He continued. “But she lives in the South Bronx. From a very poor Puerto Rican family. Raised by a single, unemployed mother with three other children. She would be the first in her family to college. Her name is”—here he slowed down as if he were ordering a difficult-to-pronounce dish in a foreign restaurant—“E-mman-u-el-a Gut-i-err-ez.” It was sweet how respectful of her name he was trying to b
e.

  “Really?” I perked up. I knew from my experience at Fordham how rare a profile like hers was.

  “She’s part of this Project Advance program. Do you know about it?”

  I shook my head, a little embarrassed not to. I was supposed to be the New York expert.

  “They’re doing amazing work identifying promising minority students in New York in middle school. They find these kids in the outer boroughs and get them scholarships to the very best schools. Looks like we are going to have several applicants just like her this year, and that’s just great.”

  I realized that I had judged these guys wrong. They weren’t just trying to safeguard spots for the kids of their alumni buddies.

  They ran through some more names, handed over a new stack of interview reports, and slapped me on the back as I got in the elevator. Francis smiled. “Good luck in committee, Ed. Keep your shirts starched and your powder dry.”

  “And get our kids in,” I heard from Hal as the door clanked shut.

  I returned to New Haven a few days later and pulled Emmanuela’s application out of a teetering pile. Her grades were strong and her Latin teacher had written a glowing recommendation, but she wasn’t at the very top of her class. She was a first-rate debater, though, and had founded the school’s Afro-Latina Alliance. When I presented her in committee, there was a long debate about her merits and careful consideration of the dozen or so other applicants from her school, each of whom could likely excel at Yale.

  In the end, Emmanuela was muscled out of the running by some superstars in her class and put on the wait list. The alums were furious. I got a testy voice mail from Hal the day after the decision letters went out. “For Pete’s sake, your office is sending us mixed messages. You tell us to find gems like Emmanuela with atypical backgrounds, but then you don’t accept them. What gives?”

  Years later, I came across her name working at Project Advance and learned that Emmanuela graduated from Columbia, where she did impressive work organizing Harlem tenants against a local slumlord. After graduation, she wanted to improve the lot of low-wage earners like her mother, and she became a widely respected union organizer and leader for health-care workers. In 2013, she ran for lieutenant governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. We had missed a true gem. (Of the Project Advance students I admitted that year to Yale, two became doctors and one a law professor; one of the doctors has enrolled her own children at Dalton, her alma mater.)

  As the Model UN competition was wrapping up for the day, I scanned the auditorium for my students. Unpracticed and intimidated, our team had ended up toward the bottom of the heap, but it was still great exposure for the kids. I spied Solomon in the auditorium, surrounded by some Columbia and Barnard students who had organized the competition. They pretty much ignored the winning Catholic girls’ school team in their plaid skirts, and the prep school teams were old news to them, but they couldn’t get enough of Solomon. You’d think he was a visiting dignitary. His swagger and humor were alluring to them—particularly coming from an “inner-city” kid whom they might have been ready to pity at first. Ironically, Byron, who had the best chances of anyone to attend a school like Columbia, sat one row behind Solomon, largely ignored by them.

  I gave Solomon the signal it was time to go. He bounded up to me with a smile.

  “Hey, mister. Those college kids, Jasmine and Taylor, say I should go to the Admissions Office and talk to them about applying here. They say they have lots of scholarships. And they have a law school here, too. It’s famous.”

  I inwardly cringed. I was sure they thought they were doing God’s work in pumping him up on Columbia.

  “It’s a little early for that. You’re only in ninth grade. And if you want to go to college, Sol, you have to start applying yourself. You need to start working harder, way harder.”

  “I work hard,” he protested. The smile was gone. He was close to shouting.

  How could I use this moment to rally him, I wondered, to encourage him but without giving him false hope?

  “Right now, you don’t work hard enough. You have to work like Byron, even harder than Byron.”

  “Man, why you such a hater? Teachers are supposed to tell you you can do anything,” he said angrily. His mood could turn on a dime.

  “Of course you can go to college. I just want you to be realistic. And you need to know what it really takes,” I said.

  “I’m not going to some crappy college. I wanna go here. It’s Ivy League. The best.” He threw his arms up for emphasis, uncannily mimicking the Alma Mater.

  Even if he did suddenly find a great work ethic and started studying twelve hours a day, did he have the natural horsepower to keep up in an environment anything close to this? I didn’t know. This kid didn’t have the benefit of Project Advance like Emmanuela or the advantages of being a Brahmin like Parker.

  Our little team started to walk toward the subway. Although it was only four o’clock, the sun had already ducked behind the tall campus buildings. An amber glow from the lights of Low Memorial Library lit the campus. The whole way, Solomon provided running commentary on every female he saw, as well as his distaste for the modern sculptures we walked by.

  “You know, mister, at lunch here it’s all the soda you can drink,” he said. He knew he had lost his cool in the auditorium and was trying to smooth things over.

  “Really,” I replied absentmindedly as I scanned the Quad for students that resembled mine. There were plenty of minority students, but to a knowing eye, most had middle-class or international trappings: better electronics, more expensive outerwear, and baseball hats worn at a different angle.

  “And you can go back for more food as many times as you want.”

  “I didn’t know that.” I looked back at the campus as we started to descend into the subway. It was late enough in the day that the kids could be dismissed directly without going back to school.

  “Later, mister.” Back to his sweet self, he gave me a fist bump and a smile. He started to bound down the stairs to the uptown train. I headed downtown.

  I was always proud about knowing the inner workings of elite places like this. People were always curious about it at cocktail parties and dinners. And, this knowledge signaled to them that I had come far. But for once, I wished I didn’t know as much as I did about this shitty, clubby world. Who goes to what school and why. I didn’t like knowing that Solomon’s fate was already pretty well sealed by his ethnic surname, his lousy zip code, and his mother’s measly income.

  “’Night, Solomon,” I called after him.

  Chapter 13

  Massacre of the Innocents

  ONE APRIL AFTERNOON, my second-period class solemnly clomped into my classroom. They had never before entered so quietly, which made me immediately realize something was up. Where was their usual “Let’s get ready to rumble!” energy? Without my urging, they all started pulling out pens and paper and answering the question on the board.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked. No response, only frantic whispering from a group of boys near the windows.

  The mystery didn’t last long. Mei and two school security guards were soon at the door. The guards almost never made their way to the third floor, so I knew some serious shit had gone down.

  The usually chipper Mei asked in her most severe voice, “Mr. Boland, may I see you for a moment?” In a mildly controlled panic at the doorway, she laid out the situation: In the science class that this group had just been in, somebody had smuggled in a pellet gun and shot Celeste Vouden twice in the neck and head. I gasped audibly.

  The thought that anyone would shoot anything at Celeste was inconceivable. She was the meekest, sweetest child in the entire grade; she spoke only in soft, nervous fragments. She had a terrible skin condition on her arms and neck that looked like she had been severely burned. As if that weren’t enough, she was nearly bald, but inexplicably wore a thin white headband every day.

  As Mei spoke, I looked over her shoulder and watche
d as two teachers escorted Celeste down the hall. Her shoulders twitched as she sobbed.

  “She’s not hurt physically, but of course she’s really terribly shaken up,” said Mei.

  The guards started rifling through everyone’s bags and searching every nook and cranny of the room.

  “Got it!” one of them announced as he pulled out the pellet gun that had been stashed up inside the thin space between the radiator and its cover.

  All the kids who were in the aisle near the radiator were pulled out for interrogation immediately. I soldiered on with the lesson, but the level of distraction made it pointless. In the following days, Mei and Gretchen interviewed almost every kid in the class.

  News of the gun was reported to the higher-ups, and soon mobile metal detectors manned by a belligerent group of unknown security guards appeared without warning. Up to that point, the teachers didn’t have the time or really the desire to enforce the hated rule against electronics unless kids used them in class. When I took the job at Union Street, I was happy it wasn’t the kind of school that needed metal detectors like Eugene Debs. Well, so much for that. The kids were furious with the searches because their iPods and phones were confiscated and only their parents could retrieve them by appointment. Nearby bodegas started running checking services where kids could leave their contraband for a dollar a day.

  Gossip and rumors churned wildly around the school until finally about a week later Mateo Jimenez, one of my advisees, was fingered by three witnesses as the shooter. A crude ballistics assessment based on his seat assignment confirmed it. He cracked easily and soon confessed, via a Spanish translator.

  There was widespread consternation in the teachers’ lounge. The chorus was insightful as usual:

  “Mateo? Really? That kinda-doughy kid who can’t speak any English?” said Marquis, the history teacher.

  “For a lot of kids, the only thing worse than being bullied is being ignored. Clearly, he was seeking to make his mark in the only way he could,” added Sita in predictable social-worker-ese.