Getting In


From Yreka to La Jolla, high school seniors have just found out if they are going to Berkeley or not next fall. I know a few young people who know that they are not among the lucky ones. Although Emily Dickinson was right when she said, "Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed..." it is a bitter pill, especially for those who really deserve that for which they have worked so hard.

Take for example, the case of a young man named Miguel, who has a grade point average of 4.2. (The fact that several of his classes are Advanced Placement and "Honors" classes makes this sort of like an A++). Needless to say, his SAT scores are equally impressive. Miguel did not, however, get accepted at Berkeley. Another boy, David, from the same school but with lower numbers did get in. How? Dave had participated in more extracurricular activities and sports, (according to the admissions counselor).

There are two problems with this modus operandi as an admissions policy however. First of all, Miguel is both an extremely talented artist as well as an excellent scholar -- and, in fact, he does belong to the "art" club. But he is not satisfied with mere membership in some club. He is an artist throughout every fiber of his being. He lives, works and studies for the sake of the lonely vigil before the muse. One can meet with the student council and then slide over to the glee club and then run out to football practice. One cannot run into the studio and put a few daubs of blue in the sky and then run over to the next extracurricular meeting. One wrestles with a painting for weeks and months...alone, full of insecurities, fears and rare triumphs. Crowds do not come into the studio to cheer one on. When the work is done it usually goes in the corner while one begins another. In Miguel's case, he has had his work in a few student shows but probably completely unbeknownst to his colleagues at school and certainly not known to the admissions people in Berkeley.

Secondly, Miguel happens to be an unusually serious student. I too believe in eclecticism, the myth of the Renaissance Man, the celebration of the extracurricular being, but I also know that we must carefully nourish the unsung scholars, those few, especially here in sunny California, who really, sincerely, just love to study, to learn, to probe and understand the depths of knowledge; to not just parrot a few snippets from Kant, a few lines of Shakespeare, a few homilies of Frost, but to really know what those great thinkers were all about. This can be achieved only one way and that is by the lonely adventure of reading and contemplation, the two great anomalies of modern America. I speak as a teacher of twenty years. Believe me, I know. It is with profound chagrin verging on physical pain that I tell you I have had college-bound students at my home not know who they were looking at as they stood in front of photographic portraits of Albert Einstein and Albert Swhweitzer. Oh yes, they had "heard of" Einstein, but who was this Schweitzer "dude?"

Knowledge does not come from television, school plays, the gridiron or the glee club. Sociological, psychological, personal-growth experience come from those things, but not Knowledge. "Knowledge is recognition of something absent..." (George Santayana) Any great thinker will tell us unhesitatingly, that knowledge comes mostly from books. And books are read slowly, and only in quiet, unobserved solitude, far from the "madding crowd." There is no place in the college application process where one might suggest this kind of learning; no place to show that one has gone miles beyond the superficial textbook memorization of data. Yes, World War I "began" in 1914 and "ended" in 1918; but because he went home and read Hajo Holborn's Political Collapse of Europe, and Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, Miguel would know that World War I really began with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, or the revolutions of 1848, and surely with the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. And, because he went on to read Nicolson's Peacemaking, 1919 , and Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he knows that World War I did not end in 1918 but in 1945. This is the kind of scholarship that cannot be recognized with mere grades and standardized test numbers!

I am happy for the well-rounded young man who will matriculate at Berkeley next fall, very likely leaving his extracurricular activities behind him. But I am sad for Miguel; that the admissions people in Berkeley probably reflect what I perceive as a national indifference to an increasingly endangered species -- the thoroughly, uncompromisingly serious, individual, student-scholar.