Now he’s coming for a beloved slogan. No, he hasn’t changed the lyrics of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s classic, “Baby Got Back,” to “I like men’s asses (Sen. Jon Husted’s ass in particular) and I cannot lie.” And he hasn’t (yet) paraphrased his inner Marie Antionette is response to Americans’ concerns about affordability, “Let them eat cheesecake.” The President is instead attempting to replace “Rock the vote” with “Block the vote.”

Nothing is more American than voting, and nothing is less American than trying to prevent others from voting. We are in the midst of a sustained campaign to make voting harder and less impactful for many of us.

That begins with attempting to sow distrust in election results. Last week President Trump was asked if he would abide by the results of tomorrow’s mid-term elections. His answer was, “If the elections are fair,” Unstated but clear was that an election is fair only if I win. He is still litigating the 2020 election because he can’t bring himself to admit that he lost to Joe Biden and that there is no evidence to suggest otherwise.

In the past few years we’ve seen a variety of shenanigans designed to make it harder to vote. We have had purges of voter rolls, elimination of polling places to make people wait in line longer, and laws like the one in Georgia that make it illegal to provide food or water to those waiting to vote. Do we really want standing in line to vote to have the same perks as being placed in solitary confinement?

In 2026 alone, we have seen mid-decade partisan gerrymandering in red states designed to dilute Democratic and minority voters in congressional districts (Several blue states have responded with their own attempts to redraw district lines.) Tomorrow will be a day of reckoning. Did the redrawn districts help Republicans or did increased voter turnout and low approval ratings turn gerrymandering into dummymandering?

The Trump administration insists that thousands of non-citizens are voting, and has demanded that states provide voter rolls, something the federal government is not constitutionally entitled to. That seems to be a spurious charge for which there is no evidence. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that nearly 16,000 non-citizens were registered in Nevada before adjusting that number to 185. Nevada investigators ultimately determined that the actual number is zero. We have also seen the possible weaponization of the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting. Then there is the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, which would make all voters register with only a passport or birth certificate considered legal voter ID. That could disenfranchise half the population, including married women whose birth certificates wouldn’t contain their married name.

I voted early a couple of weeks ago, continuing a streak that now lasts more than 50 years. I have voted in every election since I became eligible to vote (I may have missed a couple of uncontested primaries), beginning when I attended a town meeting right after graduating from high school to vote for school board members. I was the youngest person in the room that night. For some reason that doesn’t seem to happen any more.

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You might say that I am devoted to voting (almost as much as I appear to be devoted to bad puns). Every time I vote it’s an almost religious experience. I am filled with love for and pride in our country. If democracy is a civic religion and “of the people, by the people, for the people” its creed, then voting is a sacrament. I want more people to vote and voting to be easier. Reverence for the act of voting as a right, privilege and solemn duty should bring with it utter disdain for those who want “power for me, but not for thee.”

My recent excursion to cast my ballot wasn’t without minor drama. There was a two-minute span where it appeared I was either guilty of or the victim of voter fraud.

In my county the only place to vote early is at the county courthouse, a 90 minute commute from my house. My wife and I happened to pass the courthouse on the way to my 50th college reunion, although we would have made the trip on a different day anyway.

At the courthouse my wife and I were in two separate lines to check in and present our IDs. For some reason the machine that printed out the form that North Carolina voters have to sign produced two forms for me and none for my wife. What was going on? Back in July Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said that foreign adversaries have the ability to change voter registrations and change votes. Had the county voter registration files been hacked by Russia or China or Iran? Or was it the ghost of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley? And does Markwayne Mullin get two ballots when he votes, one for “Mark” and one for “Wayne”?

The mistake was quickly rectified and one of my two ballots cancelled, saving both the election workers and me from my wife’s wrath. But I want it on the record that if you hear that the FBI, ICE, or any other of the government’s secret police show up at my door and arrest me for election fraud, or target the election workers, you know the story.

Our attitudes about our fellow citizens voting should be guided by the Golden Rule. That’s the biblical one, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” not the oligarchical one, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Would those trying to suppress voting be offended if their right to vote was being challenged? I think we know the answer.

That makes them hypocrites. If you rail against mail-in voting, while voting by mail yourself, you’re a hypocrite. If you are an election denier but have no problem with your own election results, you’re a hypocrite. And if you want to win elections, rather than trying to manipulate the electorate, perhaps you should do a better job of governing.

If you haven’t voted yet, make sure you do so tomorrow. Rock the vote! And don’t let anyone block the vote.

(For readers more interested in college admission-related articles, I hope to have something by the end of the week)

I am most excited about the last of these. It’s not so much about the election results themselves, but the end of election ads polluting my television viewing.

Should campaign ads, like ads for medications we’re supposed to ask our doctors about even though we have no idea what disease they are intended to treat, contain warnings and disclaimers along the lines of “Your results may vary”? Should we be warned that the content of political ads may not be healthy, with side effects ranging from headache to nausea to depression to death (of democracy, that is)?

Those questions came into sharp focus last week with the release of an ad by Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy featuring the mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar for claiming she had lived in a tent growing up. It turns out there was more to the story and that the mother, Donna Arthur, is what we call in fiction the “unreliable narrator.” She has had no contact with Acton since 1988, when her daughter was removed from her care after her husband was indicted for raping the 12-year-old girl. Arthur sided with the stepfather and fled to Pennsylvania to escape prosecution.

Politicians in tight races look for mud or any other brownish substance they can fling against the wall, so it is no surprise that Ramaswamy’s campaign ran the ad and then apologized once they realized the horrible truth of the situation. Oh wait, that only happens in a world where politicians have character and own up to their mistakes. The Ramaswamy campaign doubled down on the ad, funneling $4 million dollars into it, and both President Trump and Vice President Vance defended the ad. That raises the question of whether we want as our political leaders individuals who possess no sense of shame and are incapable or unwilling to admit when they screw up?

The Ohio ad may be the poster child for disgusting and misleading campaign ads, but there are plenty to be found all over the political landscape.

I live in a Congressional district (NC-1) where there is a close race between Democratic incumbent Don Davis and Republican challenger Laurie Buckhout. The district was gerrymandered earlier this year by the supermajority Republican North Carolina legislature to put the seat in Republican hands, but the race remains close. According to an article from Raleigh television station WRAL, Davis is perhaps the most conservative Democratic member of Congress in terms of voting record, cognizant of the needs and views of his constituents and voting with Democrats 62 percent of the time. By contrast, retiring U.S, Senator Thom Tillis (pronounced “Tom,” not “Thom”), considered insufficiently loyal by Republicans, voted with his party 97 percent of the time.

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The ads in the Davis-Buckhout race have until recently been pretty benign. The Buckhout campaign criticized Davis for missing votes and for spending $40,000 to renovate his office. Buckhout has been depicted as a carpetbagger who moved to the district in 2021 to run for office after working in the Trump administration. Each candidate has criticized their opponent for being insensitive to the health care needs of the district, with Buckhout focusing on Davis’s vote against the Big Beautiful Bill and its funding for rural health and Davis criticizing Buckhout for supporting the Medicaid cuts contained in the same bill.

The tenor of the ads has become more inflamed and personal in the past couple of weeks. That may be because we’re closer to Election Day, but the more likely answer is that we are seeing more ads produced by outside PACs. Those ads tend to be nastier and also don’t feature the candidate saying “I approve this message.”

Today I saw a new ad criticizing Buckhout on two personal foibles. In 2017 she was arrested for a DUI, during which she reportedly invoked her connections to someone at the Pentagon. The charge was eventually reduced to reckless driving. Earlier this year she was suspended from the prediction market Kalshi for betting on the election. Ten years ago either of those might have been campaign ending, but in the Trump era they seem tame. Betting on the election makes Laurie Buckhout ineligible for the baseball Hall of Fame, but doesn’t rise to the same level of outrage as the Trump administration staffers who took advantage of inside information to make millions betting on when America would attack Iran. Of course the real question is whether Buckhout bet for or against her own victory.

That brings us to an anti-Davis ad that has been hitting the airwaves recently. The ad is titled “Locker Room,” so you can probably guess what it’s about. It features a resident of my county, identified only as “Darcie.” She claims that Don Davis “put his name” on a bill “that allows men to dress up like women and go into women’s locker rooms.” The ad then pivots to a news story about a North Carolina man arrested for going into a locker room and getting “nekked” to expose himself to a young girl. She concludes, adding 2+2 and getting 106 as the answer, that when you “strip” it all down (an interesting turn of phrase), that’s who Don Davis is for, “They/Them.” The 30-second ad concludes with a picture of Davis with pictures of drag queens imposed over each shoulder.

After seeing the ad several times, I wanted to know more. It turns out that it is not only Don Davis being targeted as supporting “They/Them.” The WRAL news story reports that pro-Republican groups are running anti-trangender ads in at least ten competitive Senate races and nine competitive House races nationwide. In 2024 the “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” was a successful meme, although we have since learned that the President is for “he/himself.” Is the campaign simply a return to that playbook or is it a sign of desperation?

The bill mentioned in the “Locker room” ad is HR 15, the Equality Act sponsored in the last two sessions of Congress by Rep. Mark Takano (D-California). It prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, and does not promote nor support men dressing up like women and using women’s locker rooms. Of course the issue is not that simple. On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168, the “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” decreeing that there are only two genders, established at birth. Of course declaring that transgender individuals don’t exist doesn’t make it necessarily so, even when you are President of the United States and your uncle was a professor at MIT.

The Equality Act has been introduced in the past two sessions of Congress. Don Davis signed on as a co-sponsor in 2023, but so did 218 other members of the House. Davis was not a co-sponsor this year, but 218 representatives were. That happens to be a majority. So that raises the question, how can a piece of legislation be sponsored by a majority of the House and not get passed into law, in fact not even put up for a vote. I suspect the answer includes the words “Mike Johnson.”

Davis has put out his own ad attempting to clarify his position, acknowledging that trangender individuals born male playing women’s sports can present “real concerns about fairness and safety” and that states should decide eligibility. North Carolina already has a law in place prohibiting transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports in public schools and colleges. Davis was also the only house member to vote “present” on another bill, the “Protecting Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which attempted to specify that Title IX protections extend only to those born biologically female.

That leaves one other part of the ad, the male supposedly encouraged by Davis to expose himself in a women’s locker room. While the “They/Them” claim suggests that the criminal was transgender, that was not the case. The example cited was of a Gastonia man arrested in 2024 for exposing himself in the women’s locker room of a Planet Fitness. Even if Davis had supported “They/Them,” the offender cited in the ad was clearly a “him.”

So who is responsible for the “Locker room” ad? It is produced by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republican leadership in Congress. Speaker Johnson is known for his support of a Louisiana law mandating the post of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana classrooms. If the Speaker approves of this ad, it might be time to change that to nine Commandments, omitting the one about bearing false witness.

That’s the nekked truth.

Whenever I come to homecoming or an event like this, I have two fears. One is that I won’t recognize someone. The other is that I won’t be recognizable.

Tonight I’m adding a third phobia. The number one fear of most adults is public speaking, with a famous survey indicating that, by a two-to-one margin, people would rather die than speak in public. I have never had a fear of public speaking, other than the “What was I thinking?” moment I’m experiencing right now, but tonight I’m more than making up for it with a fear of failure and wasting your time.

I remember our time at Randolph-Macon like it was yesterday. Of course, that’s not saying much, because most days I don’t remember what happened yesterday.

There are three things I remember from the last time all of us in the class of 1976 were together, fifty years ago. We were all dressed alike, in caps and gowns. We were, I believe, the only Randolph-Macon class to have as its graduation speaker a future president of the United States, George H.W. Bush, who was at the time Director of the CIA. If I remember correctly, we secured him as a speaker because he was a neighbor of Vince Zamaria. Finally, processing in with us was a mysterious group of older gentlemen known as the “Old Grads.” That’s now us. How did that happen?

During the next few minutes I want us to reflect on our time at Randolph-Macon, with memories both personal and shared. I want to provide a quick snapshot of the Class of 1976, 50 years after graduation. Finally, I’d like to close with some thoughts about the challenges facing colleges like Randolph-Macon today.

Our individual journeys intersected in Ashland, Virginia on a Sunday afternoon in September of 1972. We came to Randolph-Macon for a variety of reasons, from different backgrounds, with different hopes and dreams.

What do you remember about that day? My family had to drive back to upstate New York, so they literally dumped my stuff in my room and hit the road. My sister says that she cried all the way home, while my father filled the empty nest by stopping and buying a pool table. That first night I had trouble sleeping because of the trains rumbling through the campus. Within a few weeks I no longer heard the trains.

I can’t visualize what I must have looked like, but unfortunately have eyewitness testimony. Becky Severin, the first female to work in admissions at the college, recalled the first time she met me. “You were so young. You looked like a little boy.” Not exactly the vibe I was trying to project.

I don’t know about you, but freshman year was an adjustment, perhaps even a culture shock, both academically and socially.

My first clue that we were no longer in Kansas, or at least high school, was the first English assignment, a two-page essay. How hard could that be? Some classmates employed the same strategy that had earned them A’s in high school, submitting ten pages instead of the required two. Mouths dropped open when the professor (David Wells) tore off and threw away everything except for the first two pages. When the papers were handed back a couple of days later, my grade was a 37, the lowest grade I had ever received. Then I looked around and realized, “37–that’s not that bad.” All of us started with 100 and had points subtracted for grammatical mistakes and extraneous words, and some class members ended up with a minus grade, rounded up to a 20. Welcome to college.

The second adjustment was dorm life. Some of us lucked out in the roommate lottery, others not as much. Some of us were unwitting lab rats in one of the great debates in college housing offices. Which is better, segregating freshmen or mixing them with upperclassmen? Do upperclassmen mentor, or corrupt, freshmen?

Irby and Olin were all-freshman dorms, and in the first couple of weeks we demonstrated our immaturity by having a massive water fight. I was ducking into my room when I heard the voice of campus security, “Irby 18, you’re in a heap of trouble!” Both dorms were called before Dean Andrews, and confirmed our immaturity by marching to Blackwell Auditorium whistling the theme song from Bridge Over the River Kwai.

During that first semester a lot of us were homesick or unhappy. On many weekends the dorms cleared out, with some of us going home every weekend. It seemed like every night after dinner there was a gripe session in someone’s room, with at least one of us ready to pack it in and leave. During one of those sessions I remember vowing silently, “I’m going to be a survivor.” I went through my own funk and called home one night seeking reassurance from my mom. Unfortunately my dad answered and was unsympathetic, probably because I had interrupted him enjoying his new pool table.

There were two things that turned around my freshman year and my Randolph-Macon experience. One was a symposium sponsored by Omicron Delta Kappa leadership fraternity on “Honor and Honesty in Our Culture,” bringing to campus a journalist and an Army colonel who had reported American war atrocities in Vietnam. For the first time I felt an intellectual excitement about the ideas and issues being discussed. That interest in ethical issues persisted throughout my career.

The other was getting involved with the college newspaper, the Yellow Jacket. I have never been much of a joiner, so I left the first staff meeting without volunteering. Instead I wrote a satire about freshman orientation that I submitted anonymously under the non de plume “The Underground Reporter.”

The next two months were one of the most fun periods of my life. The “Underground Reporter” articles were a hit. One night my English professor met the class for dinner, and I nearly did a spit take when he was asked what he thought of The Underground Reporter. For a brief time I experienced both what it was like to be a celebrity and also to have a secret identity.

That ended when I somehow became the editor of the newspaper in early November, as far as I know the first (and maybe only) freshman to hold that post. I ended up as editor because it was a job no one in their right mind wanted. Of the four previous editors, three had flunked out of school and the fourth had developed ulcers. I edited the Yellow Jacket for two years and learned more from working on the paper than any other part of college. It was also my entry into lots of other opportunities.

So what do you remember about your Randolph-Macon experience? Was there a moment where college started to make sense and you felt like you belonged? Was there a professor or other adult on campus who made a difference in your life?

For me it was Dr. Pannill. He had interviewed me when I first visited campus, and I was probably drawn to Randolph-Macon because I was impressed by him. He ended up being my advisor and a mentor (I believe Dr. Scanlon has referred to me as a Pannill “disciple”), and his wife Mary Alleta (who is listed as a member of the Class of 1976) remained a close friend until her death in 2015. Perhaps the greatest compliment I’ve ever received was when she told me, “He always hoped you would be the one to come back and take his place.” I ultimately had the chance several years after Dr. Pannill’s death to spend a year teaching in the philosophy department.

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Enough about my journey. Let’s talk about some experiences we shared, starting with coeducation. The Class of 1976 was Randolph-Macon’s first truly coeducational class. R-MC had enrolled approximately 50 women the previous year after deciding in late January that it would go coed, but the Class of 1976 was the first class where women were intentionally planned for and recruited.

I will defer to my female classmates about whether Randolph-Macon adequately planned for coeducation. It had hired a female Assistant Dean of Students (B.J. Seymour) and a female PE teacher (Rachel Anderson), but there wasn’t much more in the way of infrastructure. When I helped Billy Wood start the women’s basketball team, the college was perfectly agreeable, but a college official, someone who should have known better, told us we were foolish to expect women to show up for practice every day. Randolph-Macon

provided no budget, no time or space to practice, no transportation to games. The only compensation I received for two years of coaching was a wife, and I have been reminded every day for the past 43 years what a good deal that was.

When I worked in admissions, the administration was adamant that Randolph-Macon would always remain majority male. That went out the window by 1987, and every class since 2005 has had more females than males. That is consistent with trends nationally, where today the ratio of females to males in college is 61:39. Randolph-Macon is currently 53 percent female, far more balanced than most liberal arts colleges.

The decision to go coed had consequences for Randolph-Macon, including the biggest controversy during our time, over dormitory visitation rules. Men were not permitted in female dorms, and vice versa, except for a few hours on the weekend. Those of you who lived in New Dorm (now Conrad) probably remember manning (or womanning) the desk in the lobby.

By our sophomore year there was a clamoring to loosen the rules. The administration refused, but President White had the courage to address the student body on the night of February 27, 1974. It didn’t go well, and the student body was galvanized to protest.

I was one of the “Ashland 8,” the student leaders attempting to coordinate the protest. I learned a lot about political movements that night. As we huddled planning the next steps, we got word that a mob was headed to the President’s house, egged on by those trying to usurp leadership. We managed to keep things calm, and 250 students ended up conducting a sleep-in in the lobbies of Moreland, Mary Branch, and New Dorm.

There had been a similar protest at the University of Richmond several nights earlier, so we called the Richmond newspapers to see if they had any interest in the story. They said to call back if there was a riot. Ten minutes later they called and said they were sending a reporter and photographer. It turned out that we picked a night when there was nothing newsworthy happening in the world, and the next morning the lead front page story in the Times-Dispatch was the protest at R-MC. I don’t think the visitation rules officially changed, but the next fall when school started they were no longer followed or enforced.

The only other issue as contentious as the visitation issue was the perpetual quest to bring a concert to Randolph-Macon. Every year we were promised that this would be the year, and it never happened. Names like Roy Buchanan and John Sebastian were thrown around. The most exciting rumor, though, was about a group just hitting the big time whose album could be heard all over campus. They would find no more enthusiastic audience than in Ashland. There was just one small problem that derailed whatever chances we had. We had the group’s name wrong, calling them “Oates and Hall.” John Oates was probably good with that, Daryl Hall not as much.

Here are some other experiences we shared:

Colloquy–the best time of the year academically, taking just one non-traditional class. In our senior year the faculty Curriculum Committee put forth a proposal to get rid of colloquy. I was one of two student representatives on the committee, and we decided to submit a minority report in opposition. The faculty voted for the student report over the committee report, and colloquy was saved.

“The Game”--The Randolph-Macon/Hampden-Sydney football rivalry is truly special, especially when we are dominating it. It was always more fun when the game was in Farmville and there was a caravan of Jackets fans on the road. It may have been the drive, it may have been the pregaming. In 1986, I wrote an article about the rivalry, published in Southern Living, that started with this sentence, “There is the game, and there is “The Game.’”

The 1975 ODU basketball game–One of the best college basketball games I’ve ever seen. We lost in double overtime after a big first-half lead, and ODU went on to win the national championship. Both teams were ranked, and my favorite memory is that when the ODU fans did the “We’re number one” cheer, we corrected them, “You’re number 9.”

Other Memories:

Camptown Races

Open fraternity parties

George Turman playing in the coffee house

The mural in Fox Hall

Attacks by Pieman (or Piemen)

Streaking

Midnight Janitor

Uncle Leroy and the Pike County Partners

The Randolph-Macon Cockroach Festival

What else do you remember from that time?

Let’s jump ahead 50 years. Here is a quick snapshot of the Class of 1976 today:

Members of the class live in 26 different states (and New Zealand). Half of us live in Virginia, and half of them reside in the Richmond area. The next most populous states? Maryland and North Carolina, followed by Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

According to Alumni Office records, 50 members of the Class of 1976 have a relative who attended Randolph-Macon. 31 of us have a spouse who attended R-MC, and 15 of us have children who went here. I fall into both categories. My son, who is here tonight, graduated in 2009, and his experience helped me reconnect with the College. I did, however, experience two awkward moments. One was hearing about Randolph-Macon “traditions” that I had never heard of before. It has been said that the first time you do something it’s innovation and the second time tradition, but I prefer my traditions to have history. The second was that moment when someone I knew well introduced me to his wife as “J.D.’s father.”

The records about careers and graduate degrees are spotty. I also am not aware of any research into the important question, How do you refer informally to our alma mater? I have always preferred the “initials” approach, calling it R-MC. In recent years I have heard younger alumni call the college simply “Macon.” I’m not sure if they have something against John Randolph of Roanoke or think that the college was named for Macon Brock. I have also occasionally heard a third formulation, where the full name is pronounced but the “d” is silent, “Ranuff-Macon.”

And earlier we recognized 32 members of our class who are no longer with us. We remember them, mourn their loss, and are thankful that we had the chance to know them.

Let me close by spending several minutes talking about the challenges facing colleges like Randolph-Macon in today’s world.

Today colleges and universities face a challenging landscape in several different respects. We have hit a demographic cliff where there will be fewer traditional students graduating from high school. The wealthy, elite colleges and universities continue to have record demand, while everyone else falls behind, with many colleges forced to drop majors and lay off staff.

There is greater interest in large, flagship public universities, what a colleague of mine used to call the “ESPN schools,” while many small private colleges and regional publics are struggling to survive. In my last few years as a college counselor, many of my students envisioned the college experience as big football weekends. I would point out, “That’s six days a year. What happens the other 359?”

The value of higher education is being questioned as never before, both on the cost side and the benefits side. The cost of higher education in the United States has risen faster over the past 50 years than the cost of health care. The tuition, room and board at Randolph-Macon our freshman year was $2700. President Hill, am I correct that it is higher today?

There are also concerns about the benefits of a college education. Will having a college degree continue to provide an economic advantage? There are calls to bypass college for a trade, although those calling for that always seem to send their own children to college.

In this landscape my perception is that Randolph-Macon is holding its own, perhaps even thriving. The college has done a lot of things right.

That begins with location. The move from Boydton to Ashland probably saved Randolph-Macon. Being located right off I-95 and close to Richmond, a city now considered hip, is a huge advantage for the College. Amtrak even stops in Ashland. If only that had been the case back in the fall of 1972. I went home one weekend with a classmate who lived outside Philadelphia. We took the train back, and begged the conductor to stop or slow down the train in Ashland since we didn’t have a ride back. He said, “This train doesn’t stop in Ashland, and will never stop in Ashland.” Fortunately at the train station in Richmond (now the science museum) we ran into our classmate Caren Edwards, who recognized me from French class and gave us a ride back to campus.

At a time when small towns are endangered species, like small colleges, Ashland is the exception, partly because of Randolph-Macon. Ashland has certainly changed since we were here, although there is something reassuring that Andy’s still exists. Fast food alley wasn’t there until the first McDonald’s opened a month before we graduated, quickly becoming one of the busiest on the East Coast. Ashland even got national attention last fall, including a mention on Saturday Night Live, thanks to the story of the drunken raccoon that passed out in the bathroom of the ABC store. I have suggested that Ashland commission a statue of the raccoon to pair with that of Secretariat next to the railroad tracks. I’m sure that will meet the same fate as all my other great ideas.

Randolph-Macon has been smart to double its enrollment from our days. An enrollment between 1500 and 2000 is much more financially sustainable, and has allowed the college to upgrade facilities. I am reminded every time I visit campus how spartan it was when we were here. (I started to use another word that begins with “S”.) It has also been strategic to add programs such as the Physician Assistant program for which John Salley is the Medical Director, expanding the College’s appeal to prospective students.

R-MC has also benefitted from a stable and successful athletic program. In Division 3, sports are not only a source of student and alumni pride, but an engine of enrollment. It is not a coincidence that Roanoke has reinstated varsity football after an 82-year hiatus.

So Randolph-Macon has a lot to be proud of. But it would be a mistake to become overconfident. In the higher education landscape success is fragile, especially for small colleges.

One thing that gives me hope and confidence for Randolph-Macon’s future is a tradition that’s not been recently invented. A colleague I coached with at St. Christopher’s, a former captain of the basketball team at Washington & Lee, has said to me several times that every Randolph-Macon alum he has met has a real sense of pride in having gone here. Our presence here tonight is testimony to that, and it’s a strength that lots of colleges can’t claim.

It also imposes an obligation on each of us to be stewards of our alma mater for future Yellow Jackets. Randolph-Macon is the nation’s oldest United Methodist college by date of charter, and the United Methodist church calls on members to offer “prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness.” Randolph-Macon needs each of those from each of us.

Finally, I am reminded tonight of the words of a song I first heard at Randolph-Macon (not an Oates and Hall song).

I’m Jacket born,

And I’m Jacket bred,

And when I die I’ll be Jacket dead,

So Ray-rah for Randolph-Macon (or Ranuff-Macon) .

Does watching violent movies and television shows make us more or less prone to commit violence ourselves? That is the modern formulation of a classic debate within philosophy that dates back to Plato and Aristotle.

Plato argued in The Republic that poetry and drama have the power to agitate us emotionally, endangering human rationality and self-control. That philosophical hypothesis became the basis for an insanity defense claim back in the 1970s that came to be known as the “Kojak Defense.” The lawyers for a 15-year-old boy in Miami who killed an 83 year-old neighbor pled not guilty by reason of insanity based on “television intoxication” from watching too much violence on television, especially episodes of the detective drama Kojak. The jury didn’t buy it and found the boy guilty.

Aristotle was a protege of Plato. Like many disciples, he rejected his mentor’s views and ended up a rival. And so Aristotle argued in the Poetics that watching violence depicted in drama makes us less, not more, likely to commit violence ourselves. Violent movies and television shows provide an outlet or release valve for our emotions, a process Aristotle called “catharsis” (or “katharsis”) or “purgation.”

I wonder what Plato and Aristotle would have made of the television series, Criminal Minds. I have never been a devotee of the show, which focuses on the efforts of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit to hunt down serial killers, but it is obvious that it has plenty of appeal. Criminal Minds ran for 15 seasons on network television and then four more as the spinoff, Criminal Minds: Evolution, on Paramount+. The show has just been renewed for a 20th season.

What explains the fascination with Criminal Minds? Do we watch to see the BAU chase down “UnSubs” (which have nothing to do with sandwiches, surface naval vessels, or professional sports teams’ rosters)? Or, as the show’s title suggests, are the stars the depraved individuals who commit sordid crimes? Is our obsession Platonic or Aristotelian? Does watching Criminal Minds arouse our hidden demons, creatng fear and paranoia that there is a serial killer lurking in every neighborhood? Or is Criminal Minds cathartic, helping us overcome our primal urges to torture and kill random strangers and make jewelry out of their body parts?

However you choose to answer those questions, let us stipulate that Criminal Minds is an improbable venue to find a college admissions subplot. But that’s exactly what we got in the most recent season of Criminal Minds: Evolution. Perhaps even more surprising was that the story line didn’t involve a rogue admissions officer or tour guide kidnapping and performing experiments on prospective coeds.

The college admissions subplot was never a major focus of any episode, but came up several times during the season. Henry LeMontagne, the older son of agent JJ Jareau (played by A.J. Cook), is trying to decide where to go to college after the sudden death of his father. Should he stay close to Quantico, where the BAU is headquartered, or follow his heart and go to California?

In an early episode one of JJ’s teammates informs her that Henry is considering staying close to home for college because of the family situation. She takes Henry for ice cream and tells him to follow his dream. In episode 7 (“The Furies”), there is a moment when JJ gasps after reading a text. That show of emotion is unlike her, so her team asks if she is okay. She shares that Henry has been accepted to “San Diego.”

That answer probably satisfies your average Criminal Minds viewer, who is ready to move on to what this week’s UnSub has in store for his or her next victim. But the inquiring minds in the college counseling world want to know more. San Diego is the name of a city and not the name of a particular college or university. There are in fact three universities with San Diego as part of their name. There is the University of San Diego, San Diego State, and the University of California-San Diego. Which one of them is Henry’s choice?

That assumes, of course, that Henry chooses a real institution. Like a bad SAT multiple-guess question, the correct answer might be “none of the above.” TV show characters applying to college tend to apply either to Ivies or to fictional colleges. Perhaps in a future post I’ll compile a list of those fictional colleges and universities.

As far as I can determine, the name of the college is never spoken on the show, so I resorted to BAU-like sleuthing, googling “Where does Henry LeMontagne go to college on Criminal Minds: Evolution?” The results were inconclusive, but one search result took me to a Parade magazine article that stated that Henry will be attending the fictional “Hallridge University.” I followed by asking the same question of Google AI, figuring that a technology smart enough and powerful enough to kill off humanity should be able to answer a simple question about a TV show. It answered “San Diego College,” another fictional institution. Is that an AI hallucination or just a bullshit answer? Super intelligence indeed.

At the beginning of episode 8 (“Requiem”) the team throws a surprise party at Garcia’s apartment in Henry’s honor. When one of the agents observes that they don’t seem all that surprised, JJ’s younger son, perhaps a BAU agent in the making, points out that all of their cars were parked around the corner. (Both of JJ’s sons on the show are played by A.J. Cook’s actual sons.) Meanwhile the real agents are at the buffet table talking shop until Rossi (Joe Mantegna) reproves them, calling them “Chuckleheads.”

At the party Garcia mentions that the mascot of Henry’s college is the Bobcats. That rules out the three real-life San Diego institutions, which happen to have three of the more interesting sports team names in Division One–Aztecs (San Diego State), Toreros (USD), and Tritons (UC-San Diego).

What colleges have “Bobcats” as their mascot? Here are fourteen possibilities:

Bates

UC-Merced

Frostburg State (Md.)

Georgia College and State University

Lees-McRae (NC)

Montana State

Ohio University

College of the Ozarks (Mo.)

Peru State ( located in Nebraska, not Peru)

Pitt-Greensburg (Pa.)

Quinnipiac (Ct.)

St. Thomas (Fl.)

Texas State

West Virginia Wasleyan

Obviously none of these are located in San Diego, and only one (UC-Merced) is in California.

So where is Henry going to college? The answer is revealed in an “Easter Egg” found in the background of one shot during the party. You have to be looking for it or you’ll miss it. On the kitchen cabinets in the background are two posters or banners for Hallridge University. Perhaps there was about to be dialogue about Henry’s choice of Hallridge, but the party breaks up when the team gets a call about a case in West Virginia where the UnSub drains victims’ blood and glues their eyes open.

So, mystery solved. Hallridge it is. Interestingly enough, this is not the first mention of Hallridge on Criminal Minds. In season 14, UnSub Emmanuel Rask, famous for mailing body parts to the women in his life and leaving heads on bedposts, is identified as a graduate of Hallridge.

If this were a TV show, it would be time for the final commercial break and then the coda. On Criminal Minds that usually takes the form of the team flying home on their private jet while some member of the team does a voiceover with a pithy quote from someone like Goethe or Calvin Coolidge. But, in the sage words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friends.”

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The college admission subplot on Criminal Minds: Evolution is relatively harmless, which is more than you can say of most of the show’s storylines. I appreciate the show avoiding the temptation to send Henry to an elite college or university. San Diego should be a great place to go to college. I am not a fan of using fictional colleges, and I wish that more TV characters would decide to attend good but not “name” colleges.

There is one thing, however, that I take issue with as a college counselor. During the surprise party, JJ remarks that former team member Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler), Henry’s godfather, has sent a congratulatory note, but that “he can still make that call to Cal Tech if he changes his mind.”

That’s a callback to an episode in Season 4 just after Henry’s birth. After asking Reid to be the godfather, JJ remarks that if something happens to her it is up to him and Garcia to make sure that Henry gets into Yale. Holding the baby, Reid says, “Do you want to go to Yale, Henry? That was your godfather’s safety school. Don’t worry, I can get you into Cal Tech with one phone call.”

As a college counselor, the “one phone call” trope bothers me. It perpetuates the Suburban Legend that getting into college has more to do with who you know than who you are. There are certainly students who are admitted through connections, but it is far more rare than commonly believed.

Can Spencer Reid get Henry into Cal Tech with just one phone call? Maybe, but I am dubious. He may have a 187 IQ and multiple Ph.D’s, but he’s a profiler for the FBI, not an influential political leader. He works for Kash Patel, for God’s sake. He may be an alum, but unless he’s a major donor or Board member, it’s unlikely that he has the influence to have a student admitted with one phone call.

The show has it right that someone truly connected would make a phone call rather than write a letter. Whenever I had a student talk about “knowing someone” and that person wanted to know where they should send the letter, that was a dead giveaway that they weren’t as connected as the student believed. Someone connected would know that a phone call rather than a letter was the correct path, and would already know who to contact.

Interest from a prominent alum, or even a board member, may get a student’s application another look. But it probably doesn’t tip the scales unless the student is already admissible.

At Cal Tech that would require an SAT math score of close to 800. We can debate whether a call is more or less influential at a hyperselective institution.

Even if Reid has that kind of influence, it is unclear that he has the power to get Henry admitted. If you are the only person on whose behalf the person is calling, that is more likely than if he or she has a list of 5 or 30. A phone call might make more of a difference if you are a child or grandchild of the person making the call than if you are the child of a friend or business partner. And, sadly, faculty members have about as much pull as I do.

Counting on admission through the “one phone call” strategy is not a good plan. So Henry shouldn’t give up Hallridge based on Reid’s claim that he can get him into Cal Tech based on one phone call. It probably won’t work, and even if it does, Cal Tech is likely not a good fit. To paraphrase W.C. Fields, on the whole I’d rather be in San Diego.

Do TV and movie depictions of college admission create fear and anxiety, or do they serve to alleviate those emotions? Where are Plato and Aristotle when we need them?

Where the Criminal Minds cast went ot college:

Joe Mantegna (David Rossi)--DePaul

AJ Cook (JJ Jareau)--Utah Valley

Paget Brewster (Emily Prentiss)--Parsons School of Design

Kirsten Vangsness (Penelope Garcia)--Cal State-Fullerton

Aisha Tyler (Dr. Tara Lewis)--Dartmouth

Matthew Gray Gubler (Dr. Spencer Reid)--UC-Santa Cruz, NYU

Thomas Gibson (Aaron Hotchner)--College of Charleston, Juilliard

Mandy Patinkin (Jason Gideon)--Kansas, Juilliard

Shemar Moore (Derek Morgan)--Santa Clara

Josh Stewart (Will LeMontagne)--West Virginia Wesleyan (Go Bobcats!), WVU

I was in New York that night, and remember it for reasons only tangentially related to baseball. I was a rookie admissions officer, and my travel schedule included representing my college at the New York City National College Fair held at the New York Coliseum. I was new enough that my college credit cards had not yet arrived, so every weekend I would go to the bank and get enough cash to carry me through my recruiting week.

My boss had planned to attend the fair but had pawned it off on me. He had also made a hotel reservation for the New York Sheraton, but had made the reservation a day earlier than I needed to arrive in the city. I called the hotel and was told that I either needed to pay for the extra night or lose the reservation. I told them I would pay for the room even though I would not arrive until the next day.

After a day of school visits in New Jersey, I drove into the city to check in. Arriving at the hotel, my introduction to the Big Apple was seeing two cab drivers having a fistfight on the sidwalk after one tried to steal a fare from the other. While they were fighting, a third cab driver absconded with the passenger.

The scene inside the hotel was even more chaotic. There were long lines of people with reservations angry from being told that their rooms were no longer available. It turned out that the Royals were staying at the hotel and their win the previous night meant that they were not vacating their block of rooms.

I caught a break when I got up to the counter, because the guy I had talked to on the phone the previous day was there and remembered our conversation. I had a room, but I had to pay the bill in advance, leaving me with four dollars in my pocket for four days in New York City. I couldn’t afford a glass of water, much less dinner. Once in my room, which of course was right next to the noisy elevator, I called my boss, who agreed to wire me money the next day.

I had things easier than the Royals and all those displaced by the Royals. I also was better off than an admissions friend who arrived in the city at 3 a.m., checked into his hotel, then had to get up two hours later to move his rental car because of alternate side of the street parking regulations.

The next day I worked the fair, and after the evening session my friend and another counselor accompanied me to pick up the money. We walked 30 blocks down Broadway to a Western Union office filled with sketchy people. I may have been a rookie, but I wasn’t a bumpkin, so I went up to the cashier cage, which was covered with bars, and said I was there to pick “something” up. My attempt to avoid attention didn’t work, because the person manning the cage spoke into the loudspeaker and asked, “Is it money?”

Somehow I survived the walk back to the hotel, the college fair, and my time in admissions. And the other counselor who accompanied me and my friend to Western Union ended up being one of my closest college admission friends, Mildred Johnson, retired Director of Admissions at Virginia Tech. Mildred is one of the best and most professional admission officers I ever worked with, the kind they don’t make any more. Hard to believe it’s been 50 years since we met.

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One of my favorite catch phrases comes from a nearly-forgotten TV Western from the 1960’s. The Guns of Will Sonnett starred the legendary character Walter Brennan, and in every episode he would make some outlandish claim, followed by the catch phrase–”No brag, just fact.”

Last spring I met with an admission friend at an elite national university located in the South. We were talking about how the year had gone and he mentioned that the university had passed the 30,000 mark in applications for the first time. No brag, just fact. I asked if there was a point where receiving more applications was no longer beneficial. “We’re already at that point,” he responded, “but we’re under pressure from the board and administration to increase numbers and quality every year.”

I thought back to that conversation numerous times during 2012, whenever there were news reports about colleges misreporting admissions information. I thought about it in August when an internal investigation revealed that Emory University intentionally misreported admissions data for more than a decade, substituting SAT and ACT scores for admitted rather than enrolled students as well as inflating the percentage of entering freshmen coming from the top 10 percent of their high school class.

Emory was not the first time in 2012 that a prominent institution admitted to lying about admissions statistics. In February (before the conversation mentioned above) the Dean of Admissions at Claremont McKenna resigned after admitting that he falsely reported the college’s SAT stats dating back to 2005. It was also not the last time. In November George Washington University admitted extrapolating and exaggerating class rank data for incoming students, and in December the American Association of Law Schools placed Villanova on probation for two years after 2011 revelations that it had falsified admissions data.

The Emory revelations bothered me most of all, bringing forth a flood of conflicting emotions. These scandals damage all of us in the college admissions/counseling profession, calling into question our truthfulness and trustworthiness. It reinforces the belief that college admission is a business ruled by self-interest rather than a profession serving the public interest. At the same time I know and respect both of the Admissions Deans in charge at Emory during the time that the misrepresentation occurred, and neither fits the narrative of the rogue admissions officer perpetrating fraud. Both had moved to the secondary side, and both have left their jobs. In no way can I condone their actions, and yet I hurt for both of them.

What would lead experienced admissions officers at two excellent institutions like Emory and Claremont McKenna to misrepresent data? It is easy to blame the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, poster child for the myths that selectivity=prestige and that the name on the diploma is more important than the quality of the college experience itself. I have criticized U.S. News in a previous post (in a loving, helpful way), but in neither case would the changed statistics have led to a significant change in ranking.

The pressures are more subtle and substantial, coming from Boards, Provosts, Presidents, and bond-rating agencies. At one selective medium-sized university I am aware of, a new provost opened his first meeting with the admissions staff by announcing that the only agenda item was how to increase the mean SAT score of the entering class. I have also heard about an Ivy League university worried that its bond rating might be lowered after receiving 150 fewer applications just one year after a record admissions year.

An internal report at Claremont McKenna places the blame squarely in the hands of a single individual, the long-time Vice President of Admission and Financial Aid (at Emory, the Office of Institutional Research was also implicated). It concludes that he, “acting alone, compiled and reported inaccurate SAT, ACT, class rank, and application statistics, starting as early as 2004.” The report further states that “the College’s leadership did not direct, encourage, or know about the VP’s misconduct.”

The report’s conclusions put Claremont McKenna in a long tradition of internal investigations of other corporate and governmental scandals. Typically the investigations conclude that the culprit is a rogue individual who acts alone, with higher ups having no knowledge and bearing no responsibility. Maybe that’s the case both at Claremont McKenna and at Emory. Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle that the simplest explanation is usually right, and that would be the simplest explanation.

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I can’t help believing that broader institutional issues contribute to these scandals. That’s why I go back to the conversation I had back in the spring. Claremont McKenna and Emory are outstanding institutions that attract the kind of students most institutions crave, but it’s not enough. Admissions success becomes a burden. If our SAT mean is 1380, we must get to 1400. If we admitted 30 percent last year, we’ve failed if it’s not 25 percent next year. No brag, just fact. Call it Ivy Envy, call it the most insidious of the business practices taking over higher education, call it crazy.

The start of a new year is an opportunity for reflection and for resolutions. The admissions statistics scandals were the ethical issue of 2012 for college admissions. That can’t be the case for 2013. We may understand and empathize with the pressures our colleagues feel, but college admissions can’t afford another scandal of this type. It’s time to get our house in order. No brag, just fact.

In retrospect: The instances of colleges misreporting admissions data was the biggest college admissions story of 2012. I didn’t remember that several of those had taken place before I started the Ethical College Admissions blog. I still wonder about the pressures that lead reputable, even elite, institutions to stoop to this. It’s been a while since we had a scandal of this type. Does that mean that misreporting is no longer happening, or does it no longer receive attention? I don’t think it’s because U.S. News and World Report has abandoned its “trust, but don’t verify” approach to the data that colleges self-report. This post was also the first time I mentioned Occam’s Razor, one of my favorite philosophical principles. I also like being able to use the “No brag, just fact” quote.

Syracuse has been in the news, with both the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education having published recent articles about the issues facing the university. Over the past year Syracuse has seen a decline in enrollment, leading to a $30 million budget shortfall. It has shuttered 93 academic programs, 55 of which had no students enrolled in them. Like many universities, it has been impacted by Trump administration policies that have resulted in a loss of revenue streams such as federal research dollars and international student enrollment.

New Chancellor Michael Haynie, a faculty member and administrator at the university since 2006, has appointed a faculty committee to “propose solutions that are disruptive and potentially unpopular” in considering Syracuse’s identity and value proposition in the current landscape of higher education. He has asked the committee to make recommendations in four areas:

Institutional Identity: What differentiates Syracuse University in today’s higher education–and how do we ensure we deliver student outcomes aligned with the expectations families assume when coming to Syracuse?

Academic Structure, Scale and Excellence: Are Syracuse’s academic organizational structure, enrollment and R1 research ambitions well-aligned with our purpose, and where might repositioning or investment be warranted?

Financial Model and Sustainability: How might Syracuse approach financial sustainability in an era when dependence on residential undergraduate tuition is no longer sufficient?

Strategic Investments and Priorities: How should the University consider and evaluate opportunities to deepen its strengths in areas of expanding student demand, and in response to new technologies and the economic renaissance underway in Central New York?

Depending on your perspective, and on how honestly and deeply Syracuse is willing to answer those questions, Haynie is either decisive and forward-thinking or the very existence of the committee is a sign that Syracuse is struggling. And that brings us to our two metaphors.

“Canary in the coal mine?” was my response when a counseling friend forwarded an email she had received from Syracuse’s Dean of Admission after the Wall Street Journal article appeared in late August. The Dean’s message included a link to Chancellor Haynie’s communication to the Syracuse community.

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There is no question that the landscape of higher education is shifting and unsettled. There has been a lot of talk about the enrollment “cliff,” the demographic decline in the number of traditional high school students going to college. There has also been a lot of concern about how many small, tuition-driven colleges are fighting for their very existence.

I argued in a conference presentation last spring that “enrollment cliff “ is the wrong term or metaphor. What we are experiencing is more like an enrollment earthquake. The landscape is shifting under our feet, leaving us to wonder whether what we are feeling is just a tremor or the precursor to “The Big One.”

The issues extend far beyond the number of traditional students graduating from high school and matriculating to college. It also has to do with worry or skepticism about the value of higher education. It is far from clear that the next generation of college graduates will receive the same kind of economic benefits that a college education has traditionally conferred. And there is legitimate concern about families’ ability to pay for college, and maybe even more concern about their willingness to do so.

Another trend, mirroring what is going on throughout society in this new “Gilded Age,” is the increasing gap between rich and poor. Wealthy “elite” universities may be worried about Trump administration scrutiny and inconvenienced by the loss of federal research funds, but are seeing no decline in demand for their brand and product. Two universities named for 19th-century robber barons have recently announced plans to expand their footprints. Carnegie-Mellon just received a $3 billion gift from hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin that includes seed money to build a second campus in Miami, while Vanderbilt is in the midst of preparations to open satellite campuses in New York City, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach.

On the other extreme are the many colleges and universities that are living tuition check to tuition check, unsure where (and whether) their next freshman class will come from. They find themselves on thin ice in today’s landscape (yes, we know that is a mixed metaphor). They work incredibly hard to enroll students, relying on dangerously high discount rates, and there are some probably unaware that they are now residents in higher education’s hospice wing.

Then there is a third group on the precipice. Those are venerable institutions with a history of success, and they want to think of themselves as elite, but the market no longer allows them to act that way.

Syracuse may be the poster child for that group. The Wall Street Journal quoted a former Syracuse employee as saying, “The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as like an Ivy, but it’s not,” while higher education scholar Robert Kelchen told the Chronicle, “Moderately selective private colleges are caught in the middle. They aren’t elite enough to dictate the market, and they attract a student body that is still concerned about the price tag.”

The changes in the college admissions marketplace have impacted Syracuse both positively and negatively. It is located in a part of the country where the enrollment cliff is most profound. The number of high school graduates in New York state has declined 10 percent over the past fifteen years and is projected to decline another 25 percent over the next fifteen.

In my final years as a counselor, I saw a decided preference for large universities among my students, to my chagrin as a devotee of small liberal arts colleges. They also preferred urban institutions rather than idyllic rural campuses. Syracuse fits both of those trends, but the news isn’t all positive. As a large private university, Syracuse’s competitors are public universities located in the Sun Belt with a lower sticker price. And even taking into consideration “Central New York’s coming economic renaissance,” the city of Syracuse doesn’t have the cachet of New York City or Boston or Sun Belt cities.

Syracuse is also caught in the changing dynamics of price vs. prestige as a driving force for families in choosing colleges, a trend highlighted by Jeff Selingo in his book Dream School. There are fewer families with the means to pay Syracuse’s $90,000 plus sticker price, and even fewer with the willingness. I have worked with families who were perfectly willing to pay full freight for an Ivy-plus, but not for a college or university perceived as lower in prestige. That issue led Syracuse in 2025 to offer $50,000 per year “Personal Distinction Awards” after May 1 to students whose “personal distinction” consisted of having turned Syracuse down. The ploy backfired when it angered students who had committed to Syracuse but weren’t deemed deserving of an award.

There is one other issue that may be impacting Syracuse, the realignment and arms race taking place in division one athletics. The race to buy athletes, especially in football, is going to widen the chasm between haves and have-nots, and I wonder if Syracuse’s traditionally strong basketball program will be a victim. I grew up in upstate New York, a little more than 100 miles from Syracuse, and families from my town would take the five-hour roundtrip on a wintry weeknight to the Carrier Dome to watch the Orange play. Is that still happening?

I had a sudden insight into Syracuse’s dilemma upon watching several of the new series of Burger King commercials, where corporate CEO Tom Curtis admits the fast-food chain needs to up its game, firing its creepy Burger King character and revamping both its signature Whopper and its chicken nuggets. By the way, claiming that the new nuggets are “crispier, tastier, and juicier than ever before” is hardly the same thing as claiming that they are crispy, tasty, or juicy.

Syracuse and Burger King have a lot in common. Both exist in oversaturated markets where demand is declining. Both are one-time premium brands in need of facilities maintenance (restaurants for BK, new dorms for SU). And both are having to come to grips with whether their problem lies in their brand or in their product.

Is Chancellor Haynie’s call for “differentiated academic excellence” for Syracuse any different from Burger King’s CEO trumpeting the new and improved Whopper? Differentiation is a challenge in any business. Burger King stood out in the 1970s with its “Have It Your Way” slogan and campaign, including the classic jingle that reads like one of Shakespeare’s sonnets,

Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce

Special orders don’t upset us

All we ask is that you let us

Serve it your way.

Now it’s banking on a new slogan, “Now you’re the king.”

Differentiating a college or university with a branding slogan is more challenging, both because education as a product is not as tangible as hamburger or chicken nuggets, and because all university slogans sound alike. But does Syracuse need a reinvigorated, “new and improved” product or just a reinvigorated image?

Spending money on branding when you have a $30 million budget shortfall and have just shut down 93 academic programs seems like a waste of money. That’s why I’m happy to offer two new possible slogans for Syracuse.

“Orange you ready for your future?”

“Accept no excuse. Syracuse”

Both those slogans meet Chancellor Haynie’s charge for solutions that are “potentially unpopular” perfectly. Neither of them live up to “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce,” but that’s a high bar to clear.

Last week I had another reminder that, as much as I would like to believe otherwise, I might not be hip. My friends would probably say that hasn’t been true for a long time, and my children would doubt that it has ever been the case.

The evidence is hard to ignore. At least once a week I’ll see an article or a reference to a celebrity or star and realize I have no clue who that person is. But until last week I took solace in the fact that I was professionally hip, aware of the latest trends and intrigue in the college admissions world. What changed that was reading a post in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Head Count” blog that described sexual orientation as “the next hip question in admissions” and realizing that I didn’t know what the current hip question is.

Last week the University of Iowa received national attention when it became the first public institution to ask applicants about their sexual orientation on its undergraduate application for admission. Elmhurst College in Illinois became the first college or university to ask such a question in 2011.

The question on the Iowa application is optional, and doesn’t ask directly about a student’s sexual orientation. The University has added “transgender” as an option under gender, and as one of a series of optional questions (legacy connection, parent educational background, interest in Greek life or ROTC) Iowa asks, “Do you identify with the LGBTQ Community?”

Upon seeing the story last week, I had three reactions:

1. I was relieved to see a news story about college admissions that had nothing to do with colleges manipulating and misrepresenting data;

2. I applaud the University of Iowa for its desire to be inclusive and welcoming to LGBT students, an important commitment and message for a public flagship university;

3. I wonder if the application is the right place to send that message.

Mike Barron, Associate Provost for Enrollment Management at Iowa, said in a Chronicle article that adding the question sends a message to LGBT students that the university is welcoming and “receptive to and sensitive to their lifestyle and their description of themselves.” He also stated that responses will be used only to connect students with information and will play no role in admissions decisions.

I consider Mike both a friend and someone I respect greatly, but I don’t think the admissions application is the correct venue to send those (or any other) messages. There are other ways to make students aware of student services and to communicate an institution’s commitment to welcoming various types of diversity. The application should be reserved for asking only information that is directly relevant to determining a student’s qualifications for admission. Any question that will play no role in admissions decisions shouldn’t be asked.

Some random questions and observations:

–CampusPride, an advocacy group working to encourage colleges to be more welcoming to LGBT students, argues colleges should ask the question on applications in order to better track admission and retention. Shane Windmeyer, the group’s Executive Director, has described it as no different than tracking graduation rates for athletes or minorities, but there are differences. There are federal reporting requirements regarding race at this time but not regarding sexual orientation. Graduation rates for athletes, which are reported to the NCAA, are not based on information collected on admissions applications. If tracking is desirable, which I accept, then why not gather the data from students who are enrolled than from the application? A number of students become aware of their orientation while they are in college, making data collected during the application process flawed. There may be symbolic value in having the question on the application, but not value for collecting accurate information.

–Is sexual orientation a form of diversity? Do LGBT students bring a diversity of experience and viewpoint purely because of their sexual orientation? That’s a debate worth having, but neither Iowa nor CampusPride are making that argument (or I have missed it). Elmhurst seemed to suggest that it is a form of diversity when it said that all applicants who answered yes to the question, “Would you consider yourself to be a member of the LGBT community?” would be considered for the institution’s Enrichment Scholarship, given to underrepresented minority students.

–The Iowa question, “Do you identify (italics added) with the LGBTQ community?” is less clear than asking about a student’s sexual orientation. I happen to be a parent of a gay child. Do I therefore identify with the community? Yes and no. Does a straight student who is a member of his or her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance identify with the community? What does a yes answer tell Iowa? What does a no answer indicate? What does leaving the question blank signify, given that the question is optional?

–Does not askng the question on the admissions application send a message to LGBT students? Perhaps, but there are other ways (such as website and printed materials) for colleges to demonstrate their commitment to inclusion and an environment that is welcoming.

–Should sexual orientation be a private matter? The question is optional, so no one is obligated to answer, but is it the college’s business? My daughter, who went to college not yet having determined that she is gay, says she would be hesitant to answer for fear that the information could be used to weed out LGBT students as well as welcome them. She also says that students for whom sexual orientation is central to their identity will find other places in the application to communicate that. One of her gay friends suggests that people would want to answer if they thought it gave them an advantage in the admissions process.

–Are there safeguards to protect the confidentiality of information once collected? Early in my career, I noticed on a student’s application that he listed his parents as getting a divorce, something unknown to us at the school. I passed on the information to our Chaplain, as was the protocol at the time. The student was livid. How will Iowa ensure that a student struggling with his/her identity doesn’t inadvertantly get outted to parents or others through information sent to the student about services on campus?

As with most of the topics I try to address, I am much better at asking questions than providing answers. The essence of the issue, though, is that any information gathered through the admissions application should be necessary to inform an admissions decision.

This is the final post until 2013. If the Mayans are correct, it might be longer than that.

In retrospect: This was the kind of topic I liked tackling, timely, in the news, and different from much other writing about college admission. It reveals how much has changed in the past decade with regard to governmental sensitivity and support for groups such as transgender students. Would a college still ask the transgender question today? I was torn about writing this because I didn’t want to come across as criticizing Iowa for its communicating openness and welcoming for LGBTQ students, but I also continue to believe that the application s not a place for messaging or collecting data unrelated to making admissions decisions. I’m also glad that the Mayans were wrong about the world ending in 2012.

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Ask any roomful of high school students and their parents if the college admission process is stressful, and chances are that nearly every hand will be raised. Since 2007 Challenge Success, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, has asked more than 100,000 high school students what causes the most stress in their lives. The college admissions process is one of the top two answers, the other being the heavy workload students take on in high school. It might be argued that those are the same answer, since the point of the workload is to impress admission officers.

Are stress and anxiety during the college admission and application processes necessary and unavoidable, or is the prevailing wisdom about admission-related stress a Suburban Legend? (Note: “Prevailing wisdom” and “Suburban Legend” may be synonyms.)

The college process can certainly be stressful. There are a confusing number of application plans and deadlines. Colleges aren’t particularly transparent about how they make decisions. On top of that, a billion-dollar industry (test prep, application essay coaches, summer programs that claim to impress admission officers) has arisen to prey on and profit from the stress and anxiety felt by students and parents.

For students there is an additional source of stress. One of the hardest things about applying to college is that every adult in your life constantly asks you college-related questions, because they don’t know what else to talk to teenagers about. That may or may not be stressful, but it’s definitely annoying.

Applying to college can certainly be stressful, but doesn’t have to be.

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Many psychologists believe that stress is only partly a product of external factors. Stress consists of how we respond internally to our environment. That is not to say that we choose to be stressed, but two individuals may respond to similar life circumstances feeling very different levels of stress. We have some ability to control stress.

Fear of the unknown is probably the single greatest source of stress. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used to talk about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” (An “unknown known” is logically impossible.)

If you are confused about what Rumsfeld is talking about, join the club, but let’s try to apply Rumsfeld’s distinctions to college admission. For most of us, going to college qualifies as a “known known.” You (or your child) will almost certainly have the opportunity to go to college, unless for some reason you/they choose not to. That simple fact is why stress over college admission isn’t necessary.

Here’s where we must insert the required disclaimer. It’s four words usually found in the fine print in ads for medications with strange-sounding names we are advised to “ask your doctor about,” where the side effects from taking the drug seem worse than the disease, “Your results may vary.” Your results could vary, but the overwhelming majority of American students will have a college option if they choose to pursue a college education.

Returning to Rumsfeld’s terms, where you are going to college qualifies as an “unknown known.” You can be confident that you are going somewhere, you just don’t know where. That “where” question is probably the leading source of college admission-related stress. And Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknown” is whether you will be admitted to a particular place. That is doubly unknown when you are applying to places that admit fewer than 1 in 4 applicants.

Not only are students likely to go to college, they are also unlikely to make a bad choice.

Choosing where to go to college is almost never a choice between good and bad options, but rather among options all of which are good. Research suggests that the vast majority of students end up attending their first choice. A 2022 Forbes magazine survey indicated that figure was close to 80 percent. Obviously thatpercentage is going to be much lower if you set your sights only on colleges and universities that are hyper-selective.

There may also be some confirmation bias in that statistic. As Robert Frost said in “The Road Less Traveled,” once you choose you won’t look back. Once you have chosen, your choice becomes your first choice. And if for some reason your chosen college isn’t what you expected, you can always transfer.

So how do you maintain sanity as you navigate the college admission process when everyone around you is losing their…mind?

You could follow in the footsteps of the Seinfeld character Frank Costanza (father of George Costanza) portrayed by Jerry Stiller (father of Ben Stiller). In one episode he is given the mantra, “Serenity Now,” as a relaxation technique. It doesn’t work. By the end of the episode he and the rest of the cast are screaming “Serenity Now!” without any evidence of serenity.

A better approach might be to cite the Serenity Prayer. Composed by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Serenity Prayer is one of the most famous prayers ever written, used by twelve-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. There is no College Admissions Anonymous, although perhaps there should be given that obsession over college admission can resemble an addiction. Perhaps I’ll start such a group.

The Serenity Prayer goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and wisdom to know the difference.

There is profound wisdom in the Serenity Prayer, and special relevance for the college admission process. It acknowledges that there are things you can control and other things you can’t control.

You control how much time and energy you devote to the process, especially the research phase to which most students give too little attention. You control where you choose to apply, and how well you articulate in your application who you are and what you care about. But you can’t control the competition for admission, the strategic priorities that drive admission goals at a particular college or university, or your chances of being admitted at any particular college or university.

It’s easier said than done, but understanding what we control and what we don’t gives us power over stress. All of us would be better off focusing on and worrying about the things we control rather than those we don’t.

The college admission process is a journey, perhaps even an odyssey (not the same as The Odyssey, whether the epic poem by Homer or the epic blockbuster film directed by Christopher Nolan). On any journey it is important to stay focused on your destination. You don’t want to miss your stop or your exit. But you also don’t want to be so focused on the destination that you miss the scenery along the way.

For all those in the midst of the college admission odyssey, I wish you success. Even more I wish you serenity.

Last week I talked with the Director of Admissions at a public university in Virginia. He called about another matter, but at the end of the conversation mentioned that his institution has 2000 more Early Action applications than a year ago. The Early Action numbers are half of what he had projected the total application numbers to be, and he wondered what is going on. Are kids applying to more places, and if so, thoughtfully or indiscriminately? Do i have any thoughts?

Do I have thoughts? That question brings to mind an episode from my favorite childhood cartoon show, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. I am enough of a Rocky and Bullwinkle fan that when the NACAC conference was in Los Angeles in 1992 I spent an afternoon in search of the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, a store that sold Bullwinkle memorabilia owned by the widow of Jay Ward, the creator of the show. The search was unforgettable but unfulfilling. The cab driver had a picture of the Ayatollah Khomeini prominently displayed on the dashboard and he dropped us off in a seedy part of West Hollywood. We found the store, open but deserted, making my companion, already paranoid from the cab ride and the neighborhood, convinced there was a salesperson dead in the back room. We grabbed the first cab and returned to the hotel.

In the episode from the show Boris Badenov, the inept villainous foe of Rocky and Bullwinkle, is asked by his female companion Natasha, “Boris, you have plan?” He responds, “I always have plan. They never work, but I always have one.”

Similar to Boris, I always have thought. They don’t always make sense, but I always have one. My answer to the Director of Admissions was that I am not seeing any evidence among my students that they are applying to more schools, but I see forces at play that may bring about that result. There are certainly a few students that try to collect college acceptances as if they were youth soccer trophies. I have also known a couple of students who went on a Common Application “bender” and couldn’t remember the next morning all the places they had applied with a single click. But I’m guessing the increased number of Early Action applications at that university is a by-product of several current admissions practices.

First and foremost is the acceleration of the admissions process, the most significant change I have seen over the course of my career. 25 years ago I was a young college counselor and my first child was due right around February 1. I spent the weekend before writing college recommendations, because February 1 was a big deadline and my last group of seniors were submitting their first applications. Now I expect all applications to have been submitted by that point. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas used to be the most stressful time of the year in my office due to the immense wave of applications that had to be processed for January 1. It’s still stressful, but the tsunami of applications happens much earlier in the fall.

What has changed is not an increase in the number of traditional Early Decision and Early Action applications, but an increase in the number of public universities that now have a variety of Early Action or “priority” deadlines or “final” deadlines as early as December 1. Those earlier deadlines are too often accompanied by mixed messages that play on the anxieties of students and parents, and I suspect that the increase in Early Action applications at the institution above is a consequence of mixed messages sent by different institutions.

Just the other day I attended a counselor lunch sponsored by a different Virginia public university. At both that lunch and at a program for students and parents the same evening, the university President announced that the institution would enroll next fall’s entire freshman class composed of only Early Decision and Early Action applicants. That announcement raised eyebrows among the assembled counselors, given that the Early Action deadline had already passed, and the Admissions staff immediately went into spin control, announcing that the Early Action deadline had been extended due to Hurricane Sandy. Most of us assumed the real culprit was Tropical Storm (President’s name deleted).

Left unanswered were some broader questions. If that is to be the university’s admissions policy, why not tell prospective students up front? Why have regular admission at all if you have no intention of admitting students who apply regular, or why not rename “Early Action” as “regular admission” to reflect the reality of the policy? Better still, why not become a rolling admission school and cut off admission once the class is full? I suspect the answer is that rolling admission doesn’t sound prestigious enough.

Setting earlier and earlier deadlines probably serves colleges well. It allows them more time to read and process applications in a time when increased application numbers are not accompanied by increases in staff. It also reflects the reality that today colleges have to recruit students for yield, not just to apply. The earlier a student is in the applicant pool, the more time the college has to entice the student to enroll.

I don’t think it serves students nearly as well. The acceleration of the application process forces students to make decisions before many are developmentally ready, and encourages quantity of applications at the expense of quality of applications. It also lessens the value of the senior year as a time of intellectual and personal growth.

Applying to college requires investment of time, reflection, and careful thought, and the application process should measure readiness for college. The college search and application processes should be Goldilocks processes, neither too hard nor too easy. They also shouldn’t take place too early or too fast.

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In retrospect: In this piece I touched on several themes I would revisit through the years–the acceleration of the admissions process, the rise of “early” application options and the decline of regular admission, and how college admission issues have affected the senior year of high school. I liked my proposal to rename “Early Action” as “regular admission” if in fact applying early was being turned into the normal way of applying. I also found a way to mention both Goldilocks and Boris Badenov.

The first, of course, was the terrorist attack on our nation on September 11, 2001, now known simply as 9/11. Friday brought back visceral memories of that day. Most of us will never forget where we were when we learned that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. On Friday morning I received a text from the friend I was with when we learned about the attack. We had attended a college breakfast in downtown Richmond (Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Duke, Georgetown) and were in her car on the way back to our schools when her husband called with the news.

As the nation went through that day in shock, mourning, and fear that other attacks were imminent, my family was in the midst of its own tragedy. My mother-in-law was in the hospital dying after having been diagnosed with a brain tumor seven weeks before. We spent that afternoon and evening between her hospital room and a nearby lounge to watch the latest news on the terrorist attacks, feeling grief on two fronts. She passed away the next day.

I will leave it to others smarter and more eloquent than I am to reflect back on 9/11 and what it meant for our country. It was in many ways America’s worst moment, and in others an example of America at its best, with shining examples of bravery and self-sacrifice. All of us felt the pain and grief of that day, but the families and friends of the more than 3000 who lost their lives felt it more intensely and intimately. I knew only one of the victims, the wife of a former student whose wedding I had attended.

In some ways that day seems like yesterday, and in other ways like long ago, in a galaxy far away. In the days following 9/11 we were united as a nation in a way that seems impossible to fathom today. We were warmed by and grateful for the hospitality of our Canadian next-door neighbors who welcomed, took in, fed, and comforted the 7000 airline passengers grounded in Gander, Newfoundland when American airspace was shut down, a heartwarming story commemorated in the Tony Award-winning musical, Come From Away. Our desire for justice and retribution ultimately led us to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were justifiable but turned out to be ill-conceived.

Have we learned any lessons from that time? Now we have returned to war in the Middle East for far flimsier reasons than the WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) we were falsely assured that Saddam Hussein possessed, and our government has decided to antagonize and troll the best next-door neighbor any country could ask for.

As I remembered and relived 9/11 and my mother-in-law’s death this past weekend, I found myself thinking less about world events and more about the intersection of personal and shared memories.

Back in my freshman year in college I read, not by choice, one of the volumes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series. I had made the mistake of scoring high enough on my French placement exam to place out of the intermediate course that most freshmen took, but not well enough to place out of French altogether, so I ended up over my head in the highest-level French course offered at the college.

I didn’t understand, much less enjoy, Proust. It would be easy to blame that on the professor, but it was probably more about me. At that time, and perhaps still today, I was not enough of an aesthete to appreciate the book or the author. My one takeaway was the scene where dipping a cookie (a madeleine, I believe) into a cup of tea instantly triggered childhood memories. Perhaps it would have made more of an impact on me if it had been a chocolate chip cookie.

The 25 year commemoration of 9/11 brought to mind memories of three other national tragedies intertwined with personal or professional memories I have of those days. Proust would be both proud and vindicated.

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I was nine years old when President Kennedy was assassinated. I learned about his death walking home from school (the school had obviously made a decision not to stop classes to announce the news). Up until that moment it had been a good day. I had been selected to be on safety patrol, a high honor for 4th graders at my school and perhaps my greatest achievement up to that point. That weekend I learned the meaning of “somber” and “mourning” implicitly. I recall that the National Football League played its full schedule of games two days after the assassination on grounds that “the President would have wanted the games to go on.” Thankfully they didn’t make the same mistake after 9/11. I finally removed safety patrol from my curriculum vitae and LinkedIn profile a couple of years ago.

On the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded I was at home from school on a snow day. My first child was due in less than a week, and that was where my attention was focused. I’m not even sure I was aware that there was a shuttle launch, even though the crew included “teacher in space” Christa McAuliffe. That day I juggled two emotions, national sadness and impending personal joy.

When the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed in 1995, introducing the concept of “domestic terrorism” into our cultural lexicon, I was visiting Denison as part of the Ohio private college tour. Denison was one of five colleges on the bus tour (the other four were Kenyon, Ohio Wesleyan, Wittenberg, and Wooster), and on the first day I sat toward the back of the bus with Steve Singer from Horace Mann in New York City. We shared a similar sense of humor. As the week went on, our circle grew, and by the final dinner at the end of the week the counselors on the tour had bonded to the extent that the colleges lost control of us. That was one of the last college caravans I was invited on, and I have often wondered if I was placed on the “no fly-in” list by colleges. In the succeeding 30 years, several of those colleges have thrived and others struggled, and Wittenberg finds its home town of Springfield, Ohio under attack from forces trying to deport the Haitian refugees (remember “They’re eating the dogs”?) who have made that town their refuge and home as well.

In each of those instances, remembering the national tragedy triggers and brings to life a more personal involuntary memory not all that different from Proust (or his character) eating the madeleine. But those personal memories can also trigger another iteration of memories.

On Friday, when recalling the circumstances under which I learned about the terrorist attack, I remembered another, earlier Harvard et al breakfast that is perhaps the most memorable college breakfast I ever attended. One year that counselor breakfast was scheduled on a day when a hurricane was forecast to hit Richmond later in the day. Schools were closed throughout the area, and I assumed that the breakfast would be cancelled, but when I called the hotel it was still on, probably because the food had been ordered and paid for. I went and was one of three counselors to show up.

Because there were so few of us, the college reps skipped the formal presentation and we had an honest and substantive conversation. The Harvard rep that year was none other than Bill Fitzsimmons, and I have never forgotten a comment he made that day. “The selective admissions process is eminently rational,” he said, “but not necessarily fair.” That is both poignant and a level of honesty that few admission officers today share in public. Colleges use the admissions process to help achieve strategic institutional goals, and while they don’t intend for the process to be unfair, they act out of self-interest. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder.

This summer I spent a week in Maine visiting a couple of retired counselor friends, and experienced two other examples of how memories can be triggered without warning. I flew into Portland, which has a “jetport” rather than an airport, and as we were landing I suddenly remembered that two of the 9/11 hijackers started that day in Portland before flying to Boston for the flight that ultimately crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Later that week I attended a performance of “Frozen” at the Maine State Music Theatre on the campus of Bowdoin. The performance was great, but I realized that the plot of the musical made about as much sense as reading Proust. In any case, they noted that the next production was Come From Away.

I’m convinced. Proust was right about how easily memories can be triggered. I remember the memories listed above like they were yesterday. Then again, I don’t always remember yesterday all that well.

I majored in philosophy, a discipline that values questions more than answers (because, according to critics, it possesses no answers). But if I am honest, my fascination with questions comes from watching Jeopardy, the game show whose shtick is that “the questions are more important than the answers,” ever since the pre-Alex Trebek days when the correct response for the clue “Jeopardy host” was “Who is Art Fleming?”

Raising questions without having to come up with answers is the essence of punditry and commentary. No one expects David Brooks or George Will to broker peace in the Middle East or come up with a plan for lowering grocery prices. No one in their right mind would think that a weekend host on MS Now or Fox News possessed the qualifications to make policy decisions for the country.

Recently Angel Perez, the CEO for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, published an op-ed in the New York Times. The title of the piece was “I’m a Former Dean of Admissions. Colleges Shouldn’t Be Paying Rich Kids to Enroll.” Angel has assured NACAC members that he wasn’t responsible for the headline. Those of us in the profession already surmised that. NACAC long ago established that our work is singular, “college admission,” rather than “college admissions.”

Angel is someone I respect, and I am grateful for his leadership at NACAC in a challenging time for professional associations in general and our profession in particular. I am always glad to see coverage of college admission issues in the Times, particularly when it is about something other than the hardest year in college admissions history or the government’s attempt to intrude on and dictate college admission practices at the Ivy Plus institutions. I agreed with many of Angel’s points, but at the end of the day I found the article unsatisfying. I don’t blame Angel for that.

The argument in the article is two-pronged, tying together two separate issues. The first is the increasing use of merit aid to entice wealthy students to enroll, and the second is the loss of funding for higher education. But it also poses some interesting broader ethical questions.

Angel refers to merit aid for students with the ability to pay as “a signing bonus, a cash incentive to attract the most desirable students.” That’s a metaphor I wish I had come up with. He bemoans the fact that merit aid for wealthy students has increased at the same time that need-based financial aid has “dwindled,” but adknowledges that as a Dean of Admission he was guilty of the very same practices he is criticizing. Does that help or hurt his argument?

We can all agree that taking resources from the poor and giving them to the rich seems counterintuitive and wrong. It’s the equivalent of advocating for trickle-down economics when you know the wealth never actually trickles down, cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits for the poor to give billionaires tax breaks and calling it a “Big, Beautiful Bill,” or rooting for the Sheriff of Nottingham to apprehend Robin Hood. Higher education has always marketed itself as an engine for access and opportunity, a path to the American Dream. Is that view now countercultural? Has the world changed or are colleges simply being more honest that it’s all (or mostly) about the money?

But have the underlying assumptions about merit aid really changed? Angel writes, “So who counts as desirable? These bonuses were originally intended for students with exceptional academic achievement, people who could contribute to the campus environment and who have many admissions offers to choose from.”

What is most telling is the second part of that quote. Merit aid has always been about “desirability” rather than “merit,” about enticing those with multiple options to choose your institution. Today the ability to pay has become more desirable than academic achievement..

So is ability to pay a form of merit, or at least a measure of merit? Most of us would recoil at that, but there is some evidence beyond Angel’s “signing bonuses” to suggest that belief is more widely held than I wish was the case. Consider the fact that Raj Chetty’s research on admission at the Ivy Plus universities, institutions with enough cachet and demand that they don’t need to award merit aid. Even among students with comparable SAT scores, applicants from the top income levels are admitted at disproportionate rates. There have been attempts to explain that away as wealthy students having advantages in recommendation letters and extracurricular activities. But it could mean that wealth itself is considered a measure of merit, with those who are wealthy seen as 21st century examples of John Calvin’s “Elect.” Certainly the wealthy see themselves not as fortunate, but as deserving.

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Angel states that “bidding wars for wealthy students are inherently distasteful.” That is a courageous stand for the CEO of NACAC to take when many NACAC members feel the need to play the “merit aid” card as a tactic. If it is an important enough issue to raise in the New York Times, should NACAC take a stand against the practice?

At one time the provisions in NACAC’s Statement of Principles of Good Practice (SPGP) were mandatory and enforced. That disappeared in the wake of the DOJ investigation of NACAC’s ethical rules as anticompetitive, and the association has since been hesitant to serve as an arbiter of ethical issues. What is now the GEPCA (Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission) no longer consists of enforceable rules but rather best practices. Is NACAC ready to declare that best practice requires that institutions not engage in bidding wars for wealthy students?

But are signing bonuses unethical? Within ethics there is always a tension between idealism and pragmatism. Our ethical principles and standards reflect our ideals, but are worthless if they are not capable of being applied pragmatically. Colleges and universities today are facing economic challenges unseen in my lifetime. The enrollment cliff, the decline in federal and state support for higher education, and the forced decline in international students coming to the U.S. to study have created a crisis that is existential for many institutions. Avoiding bidding for students able to pay the freight is certainly ideal, but is it practical in this environment? If Angel and I were Deans of Admission, we might hold our noses, but I suspect we would be utilizing merit aid to maintain our enrollment and our jobs.

In the article Angel proposes two solutions to address the funding gap facing higher education. One is increased federal support. That is a great idea, but what’s the likelihood of increasing funding given the current administration and Congress? Even if the Democrats take control of Congress in the mid-term elections, is restoring funding for college more pressing or important than restoring funding for SNAP benefits and health care?

His other proposal is for increased philanthropy, calling on college graduates who received financial aid to attend college to pay it forward by donating to their alma maters.

I agree that philanthropy is an answer, but calling for increased alumni giving doesn’t go far enough. We should be more aspirational, asking and even demanding that the billionaires among us live up to Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” and give back, providing scholarship funds for succeeding generations to pursue and live the American Dream.

If that seems naive (and it might), there are precedents. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie argued that the wealthy have a moral obligation to use their wealth to make society better, and he, John D. Rockefeller, and other robber barons made huge investments in libraries, universities, and other cultural institutions. Did they do so out of the goodness of their hearts? Probably not. It is likely they were more concerned with their public reputations and their legacies. What will Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos ultimately be remembered for? It is likely that history will remember Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, more favorably for her Yield Giving initiative making impactful gifts to community-based organizations and underserved institutions such as HBCUs.

We also have a more recent model to follow. Several weeks ago Dolly Parton died at the age of 80. She has been described as the most popular public figure in America, and she has been lauded as a songwriter, as an entertainer, and as a cultural icon. But she was also a philanthropist. Her theme park, Dollywood, was an attempt to provide jobs and raise the economic conditions of her community in East Tennessee. Her foundation helped reduce school dropouts in her home community and provided college scholarships. And her Imagination Library project has provided more than 300 million books to children worldwide. In 2022 Jeff Bezos and his current wife, Lauren Sanchez, gave Dolly’s foundation $100 million dollars for her philanthropy efforts, so there is an example to follow there.

What if there was another 80-year-old with more money than he knew what to do with and an obsessive need to be loved and remembered? How might such an individual ensure his legacy and place in history? Following Dolly Parton’s example might be a good start. Rather than name a bunch of sh…things for himself or build gaudy monuments, a better legacy would be making a true difference for our country by funding scholarships (that could certainly be named for him) for students to build better futures for themselves and society.

We need our billionaires to become our better angels, giving as well as taking. They may not care. But Dolly would.

Last week U.S. News and World Report moved George Washington University to the Unranked category in the 2013 “America’s Best Colleges” rankings. The move came in response to GW’s admission that it had misreported data regarding class rank for entering students, both on its website and to U.S. News (see previous ECA Retro post).

I must admit that my first response to the news was simple and without nuance. Does anyone care? Should anyone care? Does anyone think less of GW because it lost its U.S. News ranking (which is not the same thing as asking if anyone thinks less of GW because it misreported information)?

“Upon further review” (to borrow National Football League replay language), I realized that:

“Simple and without nuance” makes for short blog posts;

This incident is an opportunity for introspection not only for George Washington University, but also for U.S. News and World Report.

I am hoping that the introspection is taking place at GW and guessing that it’s not at U.S. News. I would be more than happy to have U.S, News and World Report hire me as a consultant to evaluate the methodology and assumptions underlying the rankings, but as a public service here are some questions and recommendations for consideration and introspection.

Question: Should U.S. News rank colleges utilizing information that is unverified?

U.S. News relies on information self-reported by colleges in compiling rankings. The fact that there have been three incidents in 2012 alone involving reputable institutions misreporting data would suggest that the Honor System is not working. One of the foundations of reputable journalism is fact-checking.

Recommendation: Spend some of the considerable profit U.S. News makes from the rankings and hire an auditor to verify data.

Question: Is it time to get rid of the peer assessment reputation survey?

The U.S. News rankings began in 1983 as a magazine article (the rankings have outlived the magazine), and were based exclusively on a survey of college presidents. I was a college faculty member at the time, and the joke on our campus was that no one was sure the President knew much about our campus, much less any others. Through the years U.S. News has incorporated other data into the rankings, but the reputational survey remains the biggest component, counting 22.5 percent. Provosts, admissions deans, and high school counselors (I choose not to participate) are now surveyed in addition to Presidents. How reliable is the peer assessment? The percentage of respondents is relatively low and has been declining, reputations may lag behind realities, and Presidents and other officials receive incentives for improving an institution’s ranking, leading to revelations of several Presidents ranking their own institution higher than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Recommendation: Get rid of the peer assessment altogether or publish it as a separate ranking, making clear that it reflects opinion rather than fact.

Question: Do the input measures used by U.S. News tell anything about output, a college’s success in educating students?

U.S. News doesn’t pretend to measure educational quality, although that fact is hidden in the fine print if mentioned at all. Output is too hard to measure, and colleges are hesitant to share publicly their results on measures such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the National Survey of Student Engagement survey. Is the assumption that selectivity=quality valid? Focusing on admission stats such as selectivity and SAT scores and other stats like Alumni Giving, all of which can be manipulated, is like ranking “America’s Best Churches” without regard for spiritual growth.

Recommendation: Start a conversation with college and other educational leaders about measures that might measure how much education is taking place on campus.

Question: Do the year-to-year changes in rankings reflect actual changes in institutional quality or tweaks to the methodology to produce different rankings?

I don’t have an answer to that question, just a suspicion.

Question: Does U.S. News want to be in the news business or the entertainment business?

Years ago I attended a NACAC conference session where Bob Morse, the man behind the numbers for the U.S. News rankings and author of the “Morse Code” blog, described the rankings as a “good product.” He took umbrage when I asked him if it was good journalism. The question is just as relevant today. Is U.S. News reporting the news or making news?

The plethora of stories each fall about the new rankings would suggest that U.S. News has become a newsmaker, perhaps even a trendsetter, rather than a news outlet. In fairness to U.S. News, though, that is consistent with the direction that journalism, and particularly television journalism, has taken. Today journalists are celebrities who socialize with those they are supposed to be covering, and career advancement is more tied to Q rating or ability as an entertainer rather than ability to sniff out news.

I would argue that U.S. News chose entertainment over news as early as 1983, long before it became clear how closely the U.S. News brand would become tied to college rankings. The original rankings article listed only top ten lists in the National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges categories and ignored the real news story. The #10 school in the National Universities category was Brown. The fine print showed that Brown was considered one of the top ten schools by only 25 percent of those responding, meaning that 75 percent didn’t think that Brown belonged in the top ten. The real news from the survey was the diversity of quality schools in American higher education and how little agreement there is about top schools beyond the top three or four.

Recommendation: Add a disclaimer to the rankings, either “For Entertainment Purposes Only” or “Your Results May Vary.”

Question: Do the rankings help students and parents make more thoughtful college decisions?

U.S. News states that “The intangibles that make up the college experience can’t be measured by a series of data points,” then proceeds to rank America’s “best” colleges based on a series of data points. The U.S. News rankings are part of a balanced college search the way Sugar Smacks or Count Chocula are part of a balanced breakfast. The balance comes from everything other than the product.

There is a lot of helpful information in “America’s Best Colleges,” ranging from the topical articles to the use of Carnegie categories to divide schools. The attempt to rank colleges negates most of those benefits. College rankings provide a precision (“We’re #6”) that leads students and parents away from thinking about the quality of the college experience. They also simplify a process that should be both complex and personal.

Recommendation: Expand the “Unranked” category to include not only George Washington University but all other colleges and universities as well.

In retrospect: This was the first time I wrote about the U.S. News rankings, and I think it holds up pretty well. This gave me a chance to develop my criticisms of the assumptions behind the rankings, and I continue to think that the question about whether the rankings are news or entertainment has not been examined enough through the years. I still like having referenced Count Chocula. The biggest difference from 2012 to now is that Bob Morse has retired.

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Most of my teaching and counseling friends are familiar with the drill that comes with the opening of school, aided by the phenomenon known as teacher work week. I have always believed that week, along with other professional days, is designed to make us appreciate actual school.

The opening of school gets no respect, except among those who hate summer or love routine. There is no rock and roll anthem about the start of school that compares to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out for Summer,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” or Steely Dan’s “My Old School.” But the start of a new school year can be, like New Year’s Day, a time for reflection and goal-setting. I’m not suggesting school year resolutions, given that most of us are not that good at keeping them. But the coming of a new year is a good time to think about what you want to accomplish and what you need to improve.

It’s also a good time for some of us to give advice to others that we don’t need to follow ourselves. So here goes.

If you are a high school student, recognize that every year is a reset, a chance to start anew. Your goal should be “upward trend.” Each year your schedule should be more challenging and your performance better. But recognize that some transitions are harder than others. A colleague of mine has pointed out that earning a B as a junior requires more work, both quantity and quality, than did sophomore year. Then there is that creature known as the AP (Advanced Placement) course. My definition of AP courses is that they are designed to be your sole commitment in life (International Baccalaureate and Dual Enrollment courses may share some of the same characteristics). How many sole commitments in life can you handle at one time?

You will make the most of your school year if you remember two things. One, focus on what you are learning rather than grades. If you love learning, the grades will take care of themselves. Second, pay attention to your relationships with friends, family, and teachers. When all is said and done, it is our relationships that are most important.

If you are a high school senior, congratulations. You have arrived at the end of a long journey through elementary, middle, and high school, and you will have a chance to make some important decisions about your future this year. You may feel some anxiety about that, but it is also something you should be ready for and excited about. The college process will consume a good amount of your time, focus, and energy this year, but senior year is about far more than applying to college. The year doesn’t end once you are admitted to college. This should be your best year, one you never forget. That doesn’t just happen. It requires focus and awareness, or what some call mindfulness.

When my daughter was a senior in high school, we developed our own personal ritual. Whenever she had a big game or a big test or some important event, I would write her a letter and then hand deliver it to her when she was on her way to class. The first couple of times I did it, she rolled her eyes with that combination of pity and embarrassment that all of us who are parents of teenagers know all too well. I have had parents tell me, “They think we’re stupid.” “No, they don’t,” I respond, “but they’re happy to let you believe that.” One might even argue that it’s part of their job on their path to becoming their own person.

Eventually my daughter looked forward to the special deliveries and was disappointed when I didn’t have a letter for her. There was a common message in each letter. I encouraged her to try to live in the moment, to enjoy being a senior while she was in the midst of each experience. Rather than get uptight about the big game against the archrivals, enjoy the opportunity to be part of a rivalry that is special. Instead of worrying about grades, enjoy your classes and enjoy your classmates. Rather than worry about college admission, enjoy the opportunity to make decisions about your future.

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There is a term originally used by the Latin poet Horace that captures the spirit of what I tried to say to my daughter. It is Carpe Diem, and it is most commonly translated as “Seize the Day. Carpe Diem was the catch phrase from one of the great movies about school, Dead Poets Society, which starred Robin Williams as a charismatic English teacher.

Carpe Diem makes a compelling theme for a movie because it is so contrary to human nature. We seem programmed to focus on the future (or, at a certain age, the past). Life will be so much better when the weekend comes, I finish that big project, once I’m in college, or (insert your own example). Looking ahead is perfectly natural, and perhaps inevitable, but it’s also not all that healthy. Like the bear who went over the mountain, once we reach the summit we find another mountain to anticipate and focus on. The danger is that in focusing on the future we fail to appreciate and make the most of the present.

One of the great American plays is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, an account of life in a small fictional town, Grovers Corner, New Hampshire. In the last act, one of the main characters who has died is given the opportunity to relive a day in her life, and she picks her twelfth birthday because she remembers it as such a happy day.

She is appalled at what she sees. She and her family are so focused on mundane details of ordinary life that they don’t pay attention, really pay attention, to each other. She cuts her visit short, and as she returns to the graveyard, she asks the stage manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?” His answer is interesting. “The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.”

Not many of us are poets, and even fewer are saints. Living in the moment, often called “mindfulness,” is a staple of pop psychology, and there are numerous articles, courses, and exercises that claim to show you how to achieve it. I’m skeptical of most of them, even as I am convinced that we should all strive to be more aware of our surroundings and appreciate what we have rather than longing for what we don’t have.

The beginning of another school year is a sign that you have begun another stage in your personal and educational journey. Make an effort to remember to live in the moment, to seize the day. It won’t be easy, but few of the things in life worth anything are easy. On any journey it’s important to focus on your destination. You don’t want to miss your exit or stop. But you also don’t want to be so focused on the destination that you miss the scenery.

Carpe Diem–seize the day! Carpe Annum–seize the year!

That story caught ECA’s eye because the proposed academic standards include minimum test scores of 1000 on the SAT or comparable scores on the ACT or the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery). Apparently Army ROTC is the only one of the reserve officer training programs that currently doesn’t require test scores for admission.

According to the Post article, ROTC programs are the largest source of officers for the Army, with the number ranging in recent years from 40-70 percent. Hegseth may have special interest in ROTC because he is a product of ROTC at Princeton before commissioning as an officer in the National Guard. Princeton may not be all that proud of that fact. A confidential source told ECA last spring that the university was on pins and needles that Hegseth would decide to show up and conduct the ROTC Commissioning ceremony.

So what should we make of this story? Is this a new front in Hegseth’s battle to redefine standards within the military? He has been open about his desire to rid the officer corps of “fatties” and “beardos,” and some of his actions suggest that blacks and women may be on that list as well. He recently announced a policy to address “low T” (or testosterone) in our servicemen. Is low (SA)T next?

It is entirely possible that this story is nothing more than an internal war (or skirmish) inside the Pentagon. Hegseth and Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll may be engaged in a testosterone-waving contest. Depending on the day, rumors have Driscoll as either about to be fired or as Hegseth’s replacement. According to the Post, the memos about the changes did not cross Driscoll’s desk before being released, and he was not on an internal email chain prior to release of the new policy. That may explain why the policy was paused for further analysis.

Enough about the politics. I am more interested in the assumptions and implications associated with the proposed use of test scores in the new policy.

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The first issue is that the initial proposed policy did not have equitable standards among the three tests. The standards called for a minimum SAT score of 1000, a minimum ACT score of 20, or a score in the 50th percentile on the ASVAB. It is probably only a matter of time until the Classical Learning Test is added, given that Hegseth has referred to it as the “gold standard” in a post on X and ordered the service academies to begin accepting the CLT as a testing alternative beginning with the coming admission cycle.

The problem with the proposed use of the SAT and ACT is that the ACT minimum score is higher than the SAT minimum score. According to the concordance developed by the two testing agencies back in 2018, a score of 1000 on the SAT equates to an ACT composite score of 19. A 20 on the ACT is comparable to a 1030-1050 range of the SAT. Even if the proposed policy achieves concordance between the two tests, there is still an important question to be answered. Does the minimum score need to be achieved in a single test administration or can it be met through superscoring multiple administrations?

The inclusion of the ASVAB presents other issues. It is a different test, not designed for college admission purposes, and is considered by many observers to be an “easier” test. There is no published concordance with either of the other two tests, although both Google AI and at least one online tool place a 1000 score on the SAT as comparable to a 48th percentile score on the ASVAB. That means that both the ACT (20 minimum) and ASVAB (50th percentile) have slightly higher thresholds than the SAT.

That raises a larger issue. Is what the Army is proposing an appropriate use of those tests? The ASVAB is at least designed to predict vocational success in the military, but is it designed to predict who will be an effective officer? According to the Post article, a “senior Pentagon official” stated that one of the driving forces behind the new policy was reports of ROTC cadets who are unable to write a coherent sentence. But if that’s the concern, the Army shouldn’t be using the SAT and ACT, both of which are designed to be college entrance tests, but rather some sort of exit test that shows what a college graduate commissioning as an officer knows. That measure used to be grades, but in this era of rampant grade inflation they have ceased to be a reliable indicator.

But neither are the tests. The appeal of standardized test scores is that they are a short cut for measuring aptitude or intelligence or merit, captured with false precision in a single number. Even if there is some value in the tests, it is inappropriate and unethical to use test scores as a minimum cut score, something I’m sure the non-profit College Board would be pointing out if the new policy didn’t promise to be a new source of revenue and profit.

There is, however, an irony at play here. The SAT is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. The very first administration of the SAT was on June 23, 1926. If there was a celebration of the centennial, I missed it. The College Board should have had an exhibit at President Trump’s Great American State Fair held at the National Mall, with an opportunity for attendees to take the SAT for free. After all, what’s more American than the SAT, except perhaps the ACT, which had “American” as part of its name before both testing agencies decided that both acronyms stand for nothing. The irony is that a direct descendent of the SAT is the Army IQ test administered to two million recruits during World War One. One of the first institutions to use the SAT in its admissions process was West Point. So perhaps the use of the SAT for Army ROTC applicants, if not defensible, is at least nostalgic.

That is not the only irony found in the New York Post account. That same “senior Pentagon official” was quoted in the article as stating that “We don’t want stupid people leading our soldiers.” Has he or she met the people running our military? In the words of Garland Greene, the character played by Steve Buscemi in the movie Con Air, “Define irony.”

Test scores may or may not measure intelligence, but they also don’t necessarily measure or prevent stupidity.

The number 3 carries with it a power and significance that few other numbers possess. In Christian theology there is the Trinity, and in hockey there is the hat trick. There are three wise men, three musketeers, three tenors, three little pigs, and three stooges. In baseball you have three strikes and three outs.

There is also an old saying that bad things happen in threes. Those of us in the college admissions better hope that bad things happen only in threes after the news this morning that for the third time this year a prominent institution has admitted to inflating and misreporting admissions data.

Today’s culprit is George Washington University, which has updated the famous quote from its namesake, “I cannot tell a lie” to “I cannot tell a lie (any longer).” According to today’s Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education, an internal investigation showed that GW has been submitting incorrect data regarding class rank. For the current year GW reported that 78 percent of incoming freshmen were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes when the actual number was 58 percent. The discrepancy comes from the fact that rank was estimated for some outstanding students coming from schools that do not provide class rank. According to the Chronicle, only 38 percent of GW freshmen had class rank reported.

I don’t find the revelations about GW quite as egregious as the manipulation of SAT scores reported earlier this year for Claremont McKenna and Emory. (I will follow-up this post with some thoughts about the Emory situation shortly.) I concur with my St. Christopher’s colleague Scott Mayer , who said this morning upon learning about GW, “It’s a shame that schools get into trouble for doing stupid stuff.” Implicit in his comment is that the real shame is doing the stupid stuff in the first place.

Calling it stupid is not excusing it or lessening judgment that it’s wrong. The estimating of class rank was not an accident but deliberate, a form of institutional cosmetic surgery designed to make GW look more attractive. It’s also not clear whether rank was estimated for every student from schools that don’t rank, or only those likely to raise the percentage. The latter would make the deception more ethically offensive.

The broader, recurring question for all of these cases is how meaningful these measures of institutional “quality” or “prestige” really are. What do admit rate or yield or mean SAT scores really tell us, and is any potential meaning mitigated by how easily they can be manipulated? In the case of class rank, is there any point in reporting what percentage of freshmen are in the top 10 percent of the class when two-thirds of applicants come from schools that don’t rank?

A year ago, at the NACAC Conference in New Orleans, I was a presenter on a panel devoted to “College Admission and Counseling in the 21st Century.” My fellow panelists were Jerry Lucido, Executive Director of the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California, and Lee Coffin, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Tufts.

Jerry’s remarks at the session referenced an article he wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education in January, 2011. That article called on colleges to rethink the metrics they use. He argued that colleges and universities would be better served measuring their success in:

–educating first generation and low-income students

–habits of mind and skills developed

–student participation in research, international experiences, community service, and interdisciplinary study

Lee talked about the selective admissions process, and differentiated between “data” and “voice.” He argued that voice is far more important because so many students have strong data (grades, scores).

That’s true for institutions as well as for students. Colleges and universities focus on making their data look impressive but ignore or fail to find their voice (or the focus on manipulating image through data reflects their voice). The college experience, as well as the college admissions business, is far more about voice than data.

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In retrospect: When I started Ethical College Admissions less than two months before this post, I had no idea that manipulation and falsification of admissions data would become huge issues in the 2012-13 school year. This ended up being the first of several posts responding to news stories about institutions misrepresenting admissions statistics, in some cases costing respected admission deans their jobs. What was surprising was that the institutions involved were more often than not reputable, good places that found themselves ranked below the “top” tier in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. It was an early warning sign of the changing admission landscape and the resulting pressure on seasoned members of our profession to push ethical lines.

This post was also the first, but far from the last, time that I referenced Lee Coffin’s distinction between “data” and “voice” in the selective admissions process. At the time that he drew that distinction during a NACAC session where we were both panelists, Lee was at Tufts. He has since moved to Dartmouth. His argument that voice is more important in the admissions process at highly-selective institutions because every applicant has strong data is a point I made often in meetings with students and parents. But it may be even more relevant today, because one of the assumptions underlying the Trump administration’s attack on higher education is that only “data” should count for “merit.” It is also the case that the introduction of AI tools has called into question the value of essays, a central part of voice.

I was never an REO Speedwagon fan, but I love the title of their seventh album, “You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish.” Lyle Lovett’s biblically-inspired “Joshua Judges Ruth” was both a great title and a great album.

The classic Christmas movie, “A Christmas Story,” about a boy’s wish to receive a Red Ryder air rifle for Christmas (and genesis of the catchphrase “you’ll shoot your eye out”) has its origins in a collection of essays by radio humorist Jean Shepherd with the catchy title, “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.” That is one of my two favorite book titles along with Lewis Grizzard’s “Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.”

Recently current trends in college admission, higher education, and the world at large have led me to remember another book title.

As we enter a new school year and the mid-term elections, not a day goes by without some discussion of artificial intelligence in the news. The stock market is propped up by hopes that someone will figure out how to monetize AI (or what Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has referred to as “A1”) before China. Communities across the country are banding together in the NIMBY movement against data centers which consume gluttonous amounts of power and water.

In higher education there is a debate about how colleges and universities should incorporate AI into teaching and scholarship and whether AI savvy should be a graduation requirement. That comes at the same time that there is concern that student use of AI might turn academic integrity into an endangered species. And last spring any commencement speaker mentioning the wonders of AI was booed by graduates worried that their ability to secure employment may disappear.

Of course college counseling and college admission aren’t immune from the influence of AI. An article last January in the New York Times suggested that students and parents may be increasingly turning to chatbots rather than counselors for college advice. This fall a number of colleges and universities are eliminating or cutting back supplemental essays, presumably because they can’t be sure that the essay is the student’s work and not that of ChatGPT or one of its cousins.

At the same time, some institutions are using AI to evaluate transcripts or score essays, some openly (Virginia Tech and UNC-Chapel Hill) and others far more surreptitiously. At its best the use of AI tools is more efficient and immune to implicit bias. At worst it is impersonal. Would students (and those of us in the profession) prefer an admission process driven by humans or algorithms?

As all of us enter into and try to navigate this brave new world, there is one question I haven’t seen addressed or even asked. And that brings us to the third clever book title.

In 1968 the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote a novel with the intriguing title, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” I haven’t read it, but it’s set in post-apocalyptic San Francisco where animals have become scarce and as a result, status commodities, replaced for the average person by androids. The book is the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner.

The philosophical underpinning of the book is what distinguishes humans from machines, and that question has never been more relevant than in the age of AI. We have already seen it play out in higher ed, where STEM is king and the humanities are fighting for their existence.

The question posed by the title of Dick’s novel seems relevant for college admission as both applicants and colleges are tempted to rely on AI tools in composing and reading admission essays. Our ethical instincts and moral code tell us that essays should be a student’s own work. But, referring back to the title of Dick’s novel, if androids dream of electric sheep, how do we know that the AI tools evaluating application essays won’t give higher ratings to essays written by AI rather than humans? My daughter recently told me that she uses Anthropic’s Claude to write her resumes and cover letters when applying for jobs, partly because companies are using AI as a first reader to cull through applicants’ credentials.

Could we see the rise of a new form of “speciesism”? Speciesism, or belief in the superiority of one’s species, gets less attention than other “isms” such as racism and sexism, but it has been in existence as long as homo sapiens have existed. Speciesism is at the heart of the book of Genesis, where Adam and Eve are given dominion over nature. “Dominion” could certainly be understood as stewardship of the natural world, but it has too often been defined as other species existing for human needs and wants, and that’s a dangerous world-view. If climate change were real and not a hoax, and humans were responsible for contributing to climate change, then the Garden of Eden might be experiencing wildfires, melting glaciers, and extinctions of “lesser” species.

Of course speciesism creates its own logical and ethical conundrums. One is in the area of testing on animals in the development of medicines and cosmetics. The justification for animal testing is that we are clearly a superior species and that animals don’t feel pain in the same way humans do. But if animals are so different/inferior, what are the benefits of animal testing for humans?

The deeper question here is whether AI qualifies as a species. Or is it a genus, with Claude and ChatGPT as species? Either way, while AI tools can perform some functions faster and more efficiently than humans, AI isn’t human. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, Philip K. Dick described the essential quality differentiating humans from machines as the ability to have empathy. At this point Artificial Intelligence hasn’t yet shown the capacity for Emotional Intelligence. Then again, one doesn’t have to look far to find world leaders who appear to lack both empathy and intelligence.

An invasion by alien civilizations is one of the most common tropes in science fiction films ranging from Independence Day to War of the Worlds to (arguably) the Planet of the Apes series. Those movies feature not only a clash of civilizations but a clash of species. There are examples throughout history. Did homo sapiens prevail over Neanderthals because we were the superior species? European conquest, colonization, and the slave trade were based on the idea that white Europeans were biologically superior to indigenous peoples who stood in the way.

Sadly we are seeing a rise in the attitude of superiority that undergirds speciesism. Speciesism is an appealing doctrine as long as you’re the dominant species. Is AI the next speciesism battle? If so, it would be the first time human beings are in a war with a species that we created.

With any leap in technology there is always a tension between what we can do and what we should do. So it is with AI. But it’s also an opportunity to rethink concepts like speciesism.

If “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” puts a different perspective on the issues surrounding AI, the other two book titles mentioned earlier also offer insight and wisdom at this time in our history. “Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself” serves as a lament many of us feel, while “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash” finds the perfect balance between faith and pragmatism.

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Last week NACAC members received an invitation to participate in a research survey aimed at gathering information about decision-making among college admission professionals.

The survey is being conducted by Ashley Floyd, a student in the Ph. D. program in higher education at the University of Alabama. Ashley’s day job is as the Director of International Fellowships and Scholarships for the Honors College at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She moved there in September from Samford University, where she served as Associate Director of its Fellows Honors program, but began her career at Samford in admissions working under my good friend (and current NACAC Board member) Phil Kimrey. At Samford she also taught a course on Calling and Leadership.

I met Ashley at the NACAC conference in Denver, and have taken the survey, and think her research looks promising and worthwhile. I look forward to seeing the results, and am particularly interested in what her research might show with regard to ethical reasoning in the profession.

The deadline for completing the research survey is November 8 at midnight. It takes about 45 minutes to complete. I urge my professional friends and colleagues to participate.

In Retrospect: This early post turned out to be an outlier in two different respects. It was substantially shorter than the average ECA post, which tend to be 1100-1300 words (although they seem to be getting longer since moving to Substack). It also differs from the usual format of commentary on some issue in the news, but when this was published I still didn’t have a clear view of what form Ethical College Admissions would take. Ashley is now Dr. Floyd, Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at Florida International University. She is the university’s Director of Prestigious Scholar Development, assisting students in applying for competitive national scholarships such as the Fulbright. She is the co-editor of a book published by Harvard Education Press, Ethics in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Inclusion Through Case-Based Inquiry. I attempted to reach out to her unsuccessfully to ask how the survey informed her later scholarship.

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Early last summer a student who had enrolled in the Class of 2029 contacted the college and asked to defer enrolling for a year. Most colleges are open to students deferring admission for a year if the student has a clear plan for how they will spend the year (that doesn’t include earning college credits at another institution). Nowadays a number of colleges offer admission to some students on the condition that they defer enrolling for a semester or year, often through programs like Verto.

This particular deferral request felt a little different, not passing the smell test with flying colors (or, to avoid mixing metaphors, odors). The student was planning to spend the year as a post-graduate at a boarding school, an unusual choice for a student asking to defer admission for a year. The student didn’t need the year for any academic reason, as he was a strong enough candidate to have won one of the college’s competitive merit scholarships. The request to defer acknowledged that the plan was unusual, but couched the PG year in terms of personal growth, developing independence, and clarifying academic interests and career goals to better take advantage of the college experience. There was also a reference to building leadership through “competitive athletics,” leading my admissions friend to suspect that a major motivation of the PG year was the chance for the student to play one last year of a sport for which he was not a recruit at the college.

The admissions office approved the deferral request on the condition that both the student and the college counseling office at the boarding school confirm his commitment to attend the college the following year and agree not to submit any additional college applications. Both confirmed their understanding of the conditions, with the boarding school stating that it had confirmed the plan with the student’s parent. It stated that the student would be assigned a college counselor but would be counseled according to the terms outlined in the deferred enrollment. Eight months later, in February of 2026, the student informed the college that he was withdrawing for the opportunity to play his sport at another college.

The situation left a bad taste in my friend’s mouth. He recognizes that every year a few students defer and then do not follow through, but he feels like the college went out of its way to work with the student and to be clear about its expectations both with the student and with the boarding school.

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Let’s try to sort through the ethical dimensions of this case study.

It is certainly the student’s right to take a gap year. There is a school of thought that every student would benefit from a gap year, especially one tied to some sort of universal service commitment. In this case there was no indication that the student needed an additional year academically, but I have known students who on paper looked like superb college candidates but needed time to mature socially or to deal with personal or family issues.

The decision to do a PG year at a boarding school is less clear, but it provides a way for the student to move away from home with more structure in place than would be present in college. I’m sensitive to the student’s desire to have one more year to play his sport competitively. For many students playing a sport is a part of their identity, their DNA, and giving it up, by choice or because they have reached the end of the line, is not easy.

The interesting question here is whether the student asked for the deferral in good faith, fully intending to enroll the following year, or asked for deferred admission as an insurance policy while he pursued other options. As my admissions friend recognizes, circumstances and students’ minds can change over the course of a year. W. H. Auden observed that it is easy to say “I will love you forever” and harder to pledge that “I will love you next Tuesday.” That is just as true with committing to enroll a year from now.

In this instance the student didn’t need to ask for a deferral. His academic credentials were strong enough to be admitted with a prestigious scholarship, and he would almost assuredly have been admitted had he simply reapplied. The question is whether he knew that, or more accurately, whether others advising him recognized that. I have heard parents verbalize the Suburban Legend that colleges will hold it against a student if they turn down an admissions offer and then later reapply. I have also seen adults, especially those who are lawyers, argue that failure to follow through on a commitment to enroll is not a big deal because the commitment is not legally binding. But the student shouldn’t have asked for the deferral unless he intended to follow through.

There are several ethical principles that apply here. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant considered keeping one’s promises the paradigmatic ethical act, in that breaking a promise damages our trust in each other. In asking for the deferral and agreeing to the college’s conditions, the student has made a promise. That doesn’t mean that the promise can’t be broken under any circumstances, only that it should be done only in extreme cases. It is not clear that those circumstances exist here.

There is also a duty of gratitude. The student didn’t have a right to defer admission, but the college granted a favor by allowing the deferral. The British ethicist R.M. Hare has argued that ethical obligations arise out of relationships. The relationship between institution and applicant should impose ethical obligations on both parties.

I would argue that the greatest principle in this case is a duty to communicate truthfully. The student can be excused for withdrawing because of what he perceives as changed circumstances, but there is no excuse for not being upfront with the college the minute the circumstances have changed. As soon as the student submitted other applications, or considered other options, he had broken the commitment and should have communicated with the college. Might the college backed out of its commitment at that point? Yes, but the agreement had already been breached by the student.

I am also curious about the actions of the boarding school. It knew about the deferral agreement between the college and the student, and had promised to counsel the student in line with the agreement. How did the college counseling office act when it became clear that the student was having second thoughts?

It is certainly possible in these days of the Common Application and self-reported grades that a school might not know that a student has submitted an application. It is also unrealistic to expect in litigious times that a school counseling office will be able to refuse to send transcripts and other materials to other colleges because of the student’s commitment to the college. At one time that would have been mandatory due to the NACAC ethical standards, but today those standards are “best practices.”

Just like the student, however, the boarding school has a relationship with the college, and that implies ethical obligations. The primary obligation is truthfulness.

I never faced this exact situation, but certainly ran into cases where students were rethinking commitments they had made whether to a college through early decision or to coaches who were recruiting them. I always insisted that students reach out to those other parties and communicate honestly and transparently, making it clear that I also had an obligation to be truthful and to protect the school and future students who might be applying to the college in question. I had the same policy with regard to honor and disciplinary offenses committed after a student had applied. There was always fear and consternation about having to communicate, but I never had a case where telling the truth hurt the student’s admission.

From everything I can tell, the college in this case handled things correctly. My correspondent stated that the college had no intention of punishing the school, although it was tempting. That is refreshing after several cases where universities published innocent applicants from schools where previous applicants had not lived up to early decision commitments. Could the college have done anything differently? The only thing I can think of would have been to require a significant deposit to hold the place in the Class of 2030.

There is a larger issue here, of course, and that is the erosion of commitment as a foundation of our societal interactions. The word “commitment” in athletic recruiting has a very different definition from what most of us think of as commitment. Our government is led by someone whose success in business was built on breaking commitments, stiffing vendors and others he had committed to pay for services, and our foreign policy seems built on not wanting to be seen as trustworthy. Last week Todd Blanche was confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General after assuring Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn that the DOJ slush fund he championed for Trump supporters who assaulted police officers on January 6 was dead in the water. Why do some of us suspect the slush fund will reappear in the water like the algae in the reflecting pool?

The college admissions process is not just about matching students and colleges, but also about building and modelling character. I hope we won’t lose our belief in the fundamental importance of commitment.

Thirty years ago this fall I was teaching ethics at my alma mater, Randolph-Macon College. I had a one-year appointment as a sabbatical replacement, and my classes had a freshness and electricity that come from the combination of ignorance and terror. I loved that year, and have often wondered if I could have sustained the magic in subsequent years.

One of the case studies I used for the class was Bakke, the 1978 Supreme Court case dealing with affirmative action in college admissions. On that issue, as with others, there were two extremes that I needed to watch out for in my students. Some of them knew what they believed so passionately that they had a difficult time understanding or appreciating differing positions. Others saw both sides of an issue too clearly and struggled to figure out what they believed.

I found myself identifying with the second group when I read the transcript of the oral arguments for Fisher v.Texas, the affirmative action case that the U.S. Supreme Court will be deciding during the current term. As I try to sort out the complex issues associated with affirmative action, my mind is a mass of contradictions (which may explain why it’s taken me a week longer to write this than planned), with more questions than answers.

What is the proper balance between giving every applicant fair and individual consideration in the admissions process and meeting institutional goals and needs?

Does an individual have a right to attend a particular college or university, and when is not being admitted evidence of unfair treatment?

How much discretion should colleges and universities have to determine the composition of their student bodies?

Are admission preferences wrong even when done for the right reasons?

Why are those who would have found nothing wrong with racial discrimination in the 1950s so exercised by affirmative action?

At what point will affirmative action no longer be necessary?

In the coming months I hope to discuss in more detail some of the issues and arguments related to the Fisher case and the larger issue of affirmative action.

The most interesting thing coming out of the oral arguments for Fisher was discussion about the concept of “critical mass.” That discussion is the next step in the evolution of the affirmative action debate over the past 35 years.

In the 1978 Bakke case, the Supreme Court issued the judicial equivalent of a boxing match split decision, declaring unconstitutional a quota system used by the medical school at the University of California at Davis whereby minority applicants competed for 16 of the 100 places in the class in a separate admissions process. The deciding vote came from Justice Lewis Powell. In an opinion joined by no other justice he recognized a compelling state interest in allowing race to be taken into consideration in admissions in a narrowly-tailored way to promote educational diversity. That was a monumental shift; prior to that point the sole justification for affirmative action programs had been as a remedy for past discrimination.

Fast forward to 2003, when the Supreme Court heard two affirmative action cases, both involving the University of Michigan. Gratz v. Bollinger challenged Michigan’s undergraduate admissions process that gave minority applicants bonus points in the numerical system used to determine admission, and the Court ruled it unconstitutional. Grutter v. Bollinger (Lee Bollinger, then president at Michigan and currently president of Columbia University), challenged a law school admissions policy designed to produce critical mass in the ethnic composition of the entering class.

Grutter produced a divided court. A five-member majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor accepted the argument that a critical mass of diversity is necessary for educational reasons. The other four justices had strong reservations, with Chief Justice Rehnquist calling critical mass “a naked effort to achieve racial balancing” and Justice Anthony Kennedy (widely seen as the swing vote in the current Court) concluding that individual evaluation of each applicant was sacrificed for the cause of diversity.

That brings us to today. The argument for critical mass is that a diverse student body produces educational benefits, and that there must be a critical mass of students from an underrepresented group in order for individual students not to feel isolated and not to be seen as spokespersons for a single “minority” viewpoint.

I accept the continuing need for affirmative action and buy the critical mass argument in theory, but found much of the discussion before the court underwhelming. Here are some observations about critical mass and the Fisher oral arguments:

The wrinkle in the Fisher case is that the University of Texas operates under a state law requiring that 75 percent of in-state admissions rank in the top ten percent of their high school. That law raises its own set of issues, but it produces diversity. Why, then, is affirmative action needed on top of the 10 percent program? At one point the attorney for UT seemed to suggest that affirmative action was necessary to attract minority students from advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, an argument Justice Samuel Alito claimed he’d never heard advanced before.

“Critical mass” is applied selectively by the University of Texas. If it is so important, shouldn’t it be utilized for a whole range of minority groups, rather than a couple?

Texas argued that achieving a critical mass was important due to “shocking isolation” in the classroom, but under questioning didn’t seem to have collected evidence to support that.

Minority enrollment at UT is calculated based only on information self-reported by applicants.

Critical mass is not tied to the population of a state.

How do you define “critical mass” and how do you know when you’ve achieved it? Sensing entrapment, both lawyers dodged that question like they were in a presidential debate. If you answer with a fixed number, that’s a quota, outlawed by Bakke. Grutter seemed to outlaw the setting of goals, although I would argue that what is wrong is not setting a goal, but rather manipulating the admissions process to achieve a particular result, which seems to be Justice Kennedy’s primary criticism in his Grutter dissent.

Justice Sacalia and Solicitor General Donald Verrilli agreed that the term “critical mass” assumes some sort of numerical measure that may focus the issue in an unhelpful direction.

The multiple attempts to avoid defining “critical mass” brought to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”

And a final thought–this case reminds us that the most profound outcome of a Presidential election may be the opportunity to make multiple Supreme Court appointments and determine the direction of the Court for a generation.

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In retrospect: The last paragraph was prophetic, although the election that changed things was four years later, in 2016. When this was written it was hard to imagine that a Supreme Court would be so willing, even eager, to throw out precedent on thorny, divisive issues like abortion and affirmative action. The landscape for race-based admission policies is very different today, but the underlying issues of fairness, access, and opportunity reman unresolved.