The Ivy Dilemma

Unfortunately, while the acounts I've linked of the Penn women swimmers' dilemma outline their near-impossible choices very clearly, my sympathy extends only so far. The conventional wisdom is that the swimmers are being denied the chance to compete fairly in women's competitions by allowing a male swimmer to skew the results, and on top of that, they're being subjected to sexual harassment when the male exposes his genitals in the women's locker room. But if they complain -- indeed, if they go even so far as to report the indecent exposure to law enforcement or follow policy and complain to the campus sexual harassment coordinator -- they face loss of scholarship, dismissal from the team, and loss of future career prospects.

But this is simply a microcosm of the larger Ivy dilemma, which has been around since the late 1940s when the Ivies became selective and at least in theory "meritocratic". At least, David Brooks thinks that way. The more or less direct effect of this was to create a rat race for the suburban middle class and their children; the media stirred up a need for families to have their children attend "the college of their choice", which was just a way of saying an Ivy. The route to this was felt to be via SAT scores, grades, and extracurriculars, an intense and consuming effort that began during the elementary grades.

I recall during my own early teens I was beginning to display behavioral problems in school that caused Dr Callahan, the middle school principal, to call my parents in for a conference. I'm not entirely sure if my parents even told me about this before they went in. Indeed, the odd thing was that the person who said the most to me about it was Dr Callahan, who called me in the next day, shaking his head.

"You need to understand something," he told me. "Your parents are . . . panicking. They're focused completely on how you can get into the college of your choice. They're ignoring everything else." The impression I have in hindsight is that whatever issues in my behavior may have caused Dr Callahan to call my parents in for a chat, it appears my parents' attitude must have struck him as some cause of the problem itself, and any attempt to reason with them was impossible.

The "college of my choice" was Dartmouth, about which I knew nothing. As it happens, the day I was born, my father called them to see if he could enroll me at Dartmouth right then. Trust me, I know from college admissions rat race.

Several aspects of the Ivy experience have stayed with me. I remember an odd discussion in our dorm lounge one night in which several Dartmouth faculty turned up to lead a discussion on "cognitive dissonance". They cited psychological experiments in which subjects were told that they were about to have a "meaningful" or "valuable" experience, but then were subjected to various levels of meaningless and progressively unpleasant activity. The result was the more unpleasant the meaningless activity, the more "meaningful" and "valuable" the subjects rated it.

The professors went so far as to compare these results to the Ivy admissions process -- that the meaningless and unpleasant activity of compiling a successful admissions dossier enhanced the perceived value of the Ivy experience. (They didn't day so, but my own view has been that the Ivy undergraduate experience is itself a meaningless and unpleasant hazing -- I need point only to the Penn women swimmers forced to tolerate a man exposing his genitals. Penn's position appears to be that this is a meaningful and valuable experience as well.)

But what about those professors who conducted the dorm lounge discussion? They were telling us right out that we'd been manipulated into thinking we'd successfully negotiated a difficult, but meaningful and valuable gauntlet, and that this said something good about us. Didn't this say something about those professors as well, that they themselves were complicit in a cynical and manipulative process? Apparently the subtext of the whole discussion was that you're being screwed, relax and enjoy it.

My own reaction to the Ivy undergraduate experience was effectively to tune out. It was just as well; for at least 20 years after I graduated, my main intellectual preoccupation was discovering the need progressively to unlearn all the comfortable certainties I'd been taught there.

The problem for the Penn women's swimmers is that they've been caught in some version of the hazing that makes up the Ivy experience for just about everyone. Hazing is bad and unjust. Colleges generally have anti-hazing policies that they observe about as faithfully as their anti-sex harassment policies; such things notwithstanding, pledges and teammates still routinely pass away from hypothermia or alcohol poisoning from hazings that theoretically don't take place.

The Penn women's swimmers have been convinced that at the end of this process lie successful careers, successful lives. Much as they hate the hazing, they're going to put up with it. Things must certainly get better; they shouldn't rock the boat. The problem is that this isn't an education. Nothing remotely close. The people who might actually benefit from an education there are almost certainly not the ones on the women's swim team. By the time they find themselves in that sort of dilemma, they're already a lost cause.