Was it Cambridge?

Dear Reader,

Winter approaches ... and so, sadly, does the end of this summer school story. Even in a place as target-rich as Cambridge, it inevitably becomes difficult to find anything left standing after watching as many missiles take off as we have been launching here.

No doubt, Cambridge harbors many further points of interest we might have set our sights upon. The responsibility for all omissions falls upon myself. But remember -- I was only there for three weeks. And as the correspondent quoted in my last^[1] observed, it was probably best for all concerned that I forswear any temptation to extend my stay.

Yet my story may live on, if you think of me occasionally, as fresh follies burst unabashedly into view in your own life. Some of them may well bring threads of this story to mind.

Such follies as these I doubt I'm in any imminent danger of witnessing, you may rejoin with a complacent laugh.

Perhaps you are in a more rarefied environment. Although Cambridge has more Nobel Prize winners than any other institution, I concede it is not the best university in the world. That distinction, according to the "widely used" ranking of the world's universities relied upon by The Economist magazine in a feature on higher education appearing last month, belongs to Harvard University.

But if you're at any other university in the world, don't laugh too hard at #2 -- one Cambridge University.

As for Harvard, who understands the mysteries of attaining world preeminence? It's not a straightforward matter of aiming for the smarties in admissions, as the current New Yorker magazine reports:

By the 1960's, Harvard's admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. Information from interviews, references, and student essays was used to grade each applicant on a scale of 1 to 6, along four dimensions: personal, academic, extracurricular, and athletic. Making academic achievement just one of four dimensions diluted the value of pure intellectual accomplishment. The most important category was that mysterious index of "personal" qualities. According to Harvard's own analysis, the personal rating was a better predictor of admission than the academic rating. Those with a rank of 4 or worse on the personal scale had, in the 1960's, a rejection rate of 98%. Those with a personal rating of 1 had a rejection rate of 2.5%. When the Office of Civil Rights at the federal education department investigated Harvard in the 1980's, they found handwritten notes scribbled in the margins of various candidates' files. "This young woman could be one of the brightest applicants in the pool but there are several references to shyness," read one. Another comment reads, "Seems a tad frothy." One application--and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile--was notated, "Short with big ears."

[Edited excerpt from Getting In, by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, October 10, 2005.]

Harvard's attentiveness to big ears and other danger signals is apparently a legacy of a "Jewish crisis" that engulfed the university after it adopted academic criteria as the principal basis for admission in 1905. The same article tells us:

That meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard's freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: "The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate ... because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also."

The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell's first idea--a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body--was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell--and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton--realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Sociologist Jerome Karabel, in The Chosen, a history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.

The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant's personal life....

Western observers of China tend to laugh at some of the primitive social issues that are controversial there -- for example, a requirement that women applying for government jobs in Hunan Province demonstrate that they have symmetrically shaped breasts. (Law Should Curb Job Discrimination, China Daily, September 9, 2005.) But in light of the New Yorker piece, it's entirely conceivable that the West's topmost academic institution also bars biased boobs -- just not so openly.

Harvard should open its well-formed ears to the China Daily:

[D]iscrimination [based on height, gender, age or physique] is a stark violation of human rights. People are born equal.

But it's appalling. Even this late in the game, I'm still inflicting these digressions upon you.

There is an outstanding issue we must confront. We have to examine it, weigh it, analyze it, attempt to resolve it -- without fear or favor, as usual. Were I only a more adept writer, we'd have done it closer to #1 than to the other end. But at least I'm not going to sweep it under the rug, as someone more attuned to zones of sensitivity might do.

It's an issue that came up repeatedly in the "Uriel at Cambridge" discussion on the electronic forum run by the Cambridge graduate students' union. (That discussion, incidentally, is where I was condemned as a "a scandalous cynic"^[2].)

The issue was raised in the very first response when I initiated the discussion last August by posting a copy of my letter #1, Uriel at Cambridge:

Wow, I couldn't bring myself to read all that ... it was dull.

What on earth this has to do with Graduate students at Cambridge, or prospective Graduate students, is beyond me. Study on the [Cambridge] Summer Schools is not the same as study at Cambridge University.

Delusions of grandeur? Methinks so. Go troll elsewhere.

Another respondent raised the issue as well:

[Y]ou aren't a member of [St. Catherine's College], you're a twit who paid the university for a summer school / playscheme - you have as much academic credibility as those flat-pack furniture salesmen conferences who use colleges for conferences.

It's remarkably reminiscent of grianne & co., the guttersnipes from that other forum^[3], isn't it? Except these are Cambridge graduate students, not summer visitors.

There was, thankfully, some evidence of mental life on Planet Cambridge. One contributor, responding to one of the numerous jeering posts, denounced those who,

like you, have responded to his post without dealing ON THE MERITS (is this so foreign to Cambridge academic discourse?), let alone intellectually confronting, his very thorough substantial comments. Are you people this idiotic? I have no knowledge of whether he is right or wrong, I do know the responses to his post are worthy of kindergarten.

One of the responses to my post gives us a glimpse of Cambridge in other seasons:

Remember that middle-aged American woman you mentioned in your post? Sadly, by far, many graduate students here share the same (a) anti-rational or/and (b) sycophantic (yes, if Cambridge were to fart, they'd deeply inhale, insisting it was perfume) or/and (c) diversionary techniques (let's not deal with your original post, let's see what you have to say about China). This is the level of academic discussion at Cambridge in certain departments (thank God the high sciences, maths and law are not part of this rampant academic idiocy).

Nonetheless, that nagging issue remained. It was expressed again in a later discussion on the Cambridge forum:

My wife and I have looked at the Cambridge summer schools brochures for years. I never gained the impression that these were anything other than a way to use the buildings during long vacation and generate a small profit for the university thereby. The lecturers are from many institutions in the UK and for the most part are plainly not affiliated with the university faculties. There are no substantive 'admissions' requirements. It is not graduate school.

The summer schools are a vacation, for heaven's sake, not a prelude to a phd.

In fact, quite a few of the summer students themselves held similar views, insisting that the summer schools' raison d'etre was to pump the Cambridge brand to make money for the university. This is not Cambridge, I heard numerous times.

In a discussion at my last dinner at Cambridge, my fellow students Jacques and Ludmilla were strenuously insisting to me: These are not even real Cambridge teachers.

But the assertion, which they didn't explain, didn't seem to make sense. Seven of the ten people teaching the summer literature courses appeared to be entirely genuine Cambridge University teachers, with descriptions in the program literature like, "Member of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge." And of the three others, one was described as "Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature and English, The American University of Paris"; another as "Formerly Professor of English, University of Sussex."

Thus 90% of our teachers seemed to at least have the requisite credentials. Had these scholars signed up to take part in a cynical, money-making charade?

The school's description of the program, which had helped draw me to Cambridge, stated:

The University has been running a specialist English Literature Summer School for nineteen years. It is designed to meet the needs of graduate and undergraduate students, teachers, professionals and others with a specific interest in this discipline. The programme offers a unique opportunity to live and study in surroundings which have sustained a long and distinguished literary tradition. Former students at Cambridge include poets, playwrights and novelists such as Spenser, Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, Marlowe, and more recent figures such as Rupert Brooke, E M Forster, Ted Hughes, Christopher Isherwood, Malcolm Lowry, Sylvia Plath, Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard. Both I A Richards and F R Leavis studied and taught at Cambridge, which continues to be an important centre of literary creativity and forum for critical debate.

Was the program in fact "designed to meet the needs" primarily of Cambridge? The need, that is, for cash?

A lot of people seemed to think so -- even students like Jacques who had been in the summer program several times before and were back again for more. (Several opined that this year's program marked a significant decline in quality over previous years.)

Some people took this to be so self-evident, I wondered whether I'd been a fool ever to imagine the summer program would be academically serious.

Annette was a young German woman who ate meals at St. Catherine's but was not involved with the summer program. (She was there to use the libraries for research for a graduate program at another university.) As I discussed the program with her over breakfast one day, she seemed genuinely puzzled. I was from Canada. Why had I come such a distance for a Cambridge summer program? Didn't we have literature courses in Canada? She just couldn't understand.

Stephen, the Hawaii professor who explained how committed owners of prestige cars are to the wisdom of their purchases^[4], laughed at the idea of taking a program like ours seriously. He may have had some insight into Cambridge's money-making methods -- the son he was visiting worked at the university as a fundraiser.

"Extension programs" like ours existed purely to milk the brand, Stephen felt, and he had an anecdote about this too: During a visit he'd once been making to Vietnam (he teaches Vietnamese language and literature), he'd run into a fairly senior official who was in a highly inebriated state, at an hour of the day when such intoxication was unusual.

"Where have you been? Stephen asked him.

"Oh! I'm just coming back from Harvard." And the fellow flashed business cards he'd been given, emblazoned with the Harvard crest.

#1, it seemed, had an extension program in Vietnam; and it too was not forgoing the benefits of brand.

(Continued....)

[2]     as quoted in letter #14, Tate Too

[3]     quoted in letter #8, Dark Musings

[4]     letter #7, Light and Dark