Pretty much the first thing that happened to me at Harvard was getting rejected. Like most freshmen, I applied for freshman seminars. Three professors interviewed me for a combined ten minutes, and I wrote agonizingly self-conscious answers in the blank spaces of the questionnaire. Then, on the allotted day, I walked up to the second floor of 8 Prescott St. and looked for my name on the alphabetized lists of those fortunate few who got in. Like the vast majority of applicants, my name was not on the lists. For some, rejection starts before arrival on campus: Each year, the Freshman Arts Program (FAP), the First-Year Outdoor Program (FOP) and the First-Year Urban Program (FUP) have to turn away interested students. It’s a pretty weird way to welcome 18-year-olds to college.
Last year, I cowrote a cover story for this magazine on depression and mental illness at Harvard. Staff members from Room 13, the oldest and most prominent peer counseling group on campus, said that the most common reason students seek them is insecurity. “It’s not that Harvard expects so much from us,” a staff member told me. “It’s us.” Many Harvard students have set impossibly high standards for themselves, and the gauntlet of inevitable rejections that Harvard presents can—does—wreak havoc on them. First comes first-year orientation programs, then freshman seminars, maybe honors-only concentrations, definitely seminars and conference courses. Worse are the extracurriculars: “comping” the Advocate, the Crimson, or the Lampoon; the arduous Let’s Go applications and interviews; some PBHA programs and other committees (even, ironically, Room 13); the social organizations—rejection is the definitive Harvard experience.
Rejection seems to be the school’s key operating precept. For my class, Harvard accepted 2,055 out of 18,160 applicants. It was the most selective yield yet, and in the last two years it’s only gotten harder to get in. At that rarefied level of acceptance, there is a huge element of chance. Nevertheless, the idea that acceptance to Harvard does represent some sort of objective standard remains ingrained among the population here.
Harvard admissions are, of course, not a strictly merit-based matter. Students from diverse geographic, ethnic and racial backgrounds; legacies; and, especially, athletes, have better chances of getting admitted than the general pool, and, beyond that, admission is a matter of chance. College admissions officers often say that they could have easily accepted 2,000 other applicants and had an equally impressive class. Harvard is a false meritocracy, skewed and somewhat random. With that knowledge, one would expect students to show more humility, an acknowledgement of the imperfections inherent in the school’s constant applications and rejections. But there is little to be found.
Of course, professors and students have limited time. Would I have been more satisfied with my freshman seminar rejections if the questionnaire was more thorough, if the interviews didn’t feel so cursory? No—in fact, I’d be angry that the whole useless process took so long. Seminars and conference courses demand limited enrollment, and people have to be turned down. And to be fair, the college has recently expanded the freshman seminar program. Worse than the school itself are the student organizations that imitate Harvard’s arrogant, supposedly merit-based approach.
The Harvard College Handbook requires that student groups have clear criteria for admission. This has led to the Hasty Pudding Club’s recent contortions to become “merit-based.” More seriously, it’s led to the notoriously haughty induction process at some of Harvard’s student organizations. At the Crimson, potential execs have to face an annual torture called “The Turkey Shoot.” After months of sucking up, the month-long process kicks off with position papers and the “schmooze,” a series of meals and coffees with assorted Crimson higher-ups. The final week consists of interviews in front of a semi-circle firing squad of outgoing execs asking a series of belligerent questions. Students hoping for a spot on the Lampoon undergo a similarly harrowing process. The idea that becoming assistant editor of a college newspaper or joining the business board of a humor magazine demands such a stressful process is ludicrous. But kids have such an inflated sense of themselves, their lofty positions over their peers, that they indulge in needless abuse. Compers of the Lampoon’s literature board—the writers—meet with established ‘Poonsters at “office hours.” The metaphor is telling. The people who make these organizations’ processes such a pain aren’t imitating real businesses; this isn’t how real magazines or newspapers hire staff. They’re mimicking Harvard itself.
It’s a vicious cycle. As students slog through the battery of applications and rejections, the desire to “get in” and the concomitant feeling that the whirligig of applications and rejections really does signify something important only grows. That leads to the superior attitudes of the students with the power of rejection over other kids.
Harvard students have arrived here mostly through competition, by excelling at a series of them, by being the ones that escaped rejection. Our senses of self are forged by winning; it’s why these competitions that don’t need to be so difficult have so much senseless gravity attached to them. We confuse selectivity with value because that’s always been what makes us—and Harvard—what we are.
Last year, I worked on the U.C.’s new Concert Commission, which organized the Roots and Black Eyed Peas show. I didn’t do much, but I went to meetings and helped out on the day of the concert. To remain an official organization and keep receiving Harvard funding, the group, needing clear criteria for admittance, became “merit-based,” making applicants and supplicants alike fill out an questionnaire (I think would-be new members had to go to an interview too). It wasn’t a big deal, and the heads of the commission were friendly about it, assuring veterans that it was just a formality. But I didn’t bother answering the questions. I spent the first week of school getting rejected from seminars; I have the Crimson Turkey Shoot to look forward to in November. At this point, I don’t think I want to belong to any more clubs that could reject me as a member.
Ben C. Wasserstein is an associate editor at Fifteen Minutes, but he’s better known for being the leading authority on global finance. Or not. Speaking of worldwide, though, Ben was spotted sharing bowls of goulash with the locals in Eastern Europe, where he was fondly called “Vasserstine.”
