Safe spaces, "30-something moms"

-Is there a "safe spaces" epidemic on campus? I'm skeptical.

-Via one of the parent-writers I wrote about in that overshare article a while back (and more on her post in a moment), I see that there's this amazing Emily Bazelon article about parental overshare from 2008 that I don't think I'd ever seen before. How had the internet not pointed me to it earlier? I'd first blogged about the topic in April of that year, and this piece was in June, but I guess I wasn't particularly glued to that beat at the time. It's an interesting piece because it gets at the professional-ambition/livelihood angle. There's a difference (if not an infinite one) between a parent who shares tantrum-stories for "likes" and one who does it to pay the bills. Sharing on Facebook... ideally isn't done in a way that humiliates a child, but is the modern-day equivalent of a family album, and 

As for her post, the gist of it is that her detractors, "30-something moms," don't get how tough it was for those a decade older to know where to draw the line regarding online privacy. This seems plausible-ish, and appeared, at first, to be leading to a mea culpa. Which... sort of? She says she's changed the way she posts and now shares less, but then adds that she doesn't regret outing her child's condition: "In the case of mental illness, or any illness, advocacy trumps privacy." She goes on to explain that sharing didn't hurt her son - quite the contrary:

Because I spoke up, my son got effective treatment and is now back in a mainstream school with friends who are totally fine with his bipolar disorder. In fact, they—and I—admire his self-advocacy and think he is brave for speaking out and sharing his story. We were also able to connect to an amazing community of mental health advocates. No one has ever approached us in the grocery store and said, “I know who you are. You’re that mom and kid who talked about mental illness after Newtown. You are horrible people.” It doesn’t work that way.

What she doesn't say is why it was necessary for her to speak up to such a wide audience in order to get this help. If silence and stigma are preventing you from reaching out... to doctors, teachers, friends, family members, etc., about a concern along these lines, then that's a problem. What I'm having trouble picturing is at what point it becomes necessary to reach out to the world at large.

And she also doesn't seem to grasp the harm people are worried about. It's not necessarily about being shamed at the supermarket. (Note that her theoretical example involves her being harmed, not her son.) It's about her son perhaps one day wanting to enter whichever social, romantic, or professional setting as someone whose full medical history isn't easily Googleable. There are a lot of facts about just about any of us - not just illness, certainly not just mental illness - that we have no reason to be ashamed of, but that might not want to lead with. Parental overshare doesn't leave these children with the choice.

Hyper-personal statements

Frank Bruni addresses a topic near and dear to my heart: the fact that college admissions essays are overshare basically by design. "The essay is where our admissions frenzy and our gratuitously confessional ethos meet," he writes, not inaccurately. Or, to (sorry!) quote my own piece, "Even students not the least bit inclined to confessional writing are asked to spill to strangers (and to parents who may be reading the thing over). You’re invited to show your truest self by sharing a story you might normally reserve for close friends."

But that's how it has to be - how can you demonstrate 'obstacles overcome' without spilling re: what the obstacles were? And you have to have overcome obstacles to be an impressive applicant - otherwise you're an example of privilege rather than merit, the sum of all the good fortune you've experienced (even if that fortune was something like having poor but devoted immigrant parents), as versus someone entirely self-made (at 17). It can't just be that a nice-enough home life and good-enough teachers crossed with sufficient raw intelligence brought you where you are today. It has to be that those As were despite some kind of profound difficulties. Not every 4.0 is equal. Students know this, as do the more involved parents. Keeping secrets no longer feels like an option.

"Orangutan sounds"

There are potentially valid arguments against the SAT: that it doesn't measure anything important, or that it simply reflects socioeconomic background.* Then there's Jennifer Finney Boylan's take:

Boylan found the SAT stressful, thus "The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture." While she's by no means alone, plenty of students don't find the test all that torturous. Meanwhile I've had classmates who find any number of assignments too stressful to bear: essays, long and dense readings, lab reports (ahem). Should these, too, be chucked? And this is... supposed to be cute? It can't possibly be serious:

As the mother of two former SAT takers (one a sophomore in college, the other a senior in high school awaiting the result of his applications), I can also point out another problem with the test: It usually starts around 8:30 in the morning. I don’t know if the members of the College Board have ever met a 17-year-old at that hour, but I can tell you this is not the time of day I would choose to test their ability to do anything, except perhaps make orangutan sounds.

Yes, how terribly unfair. How biased in favor of morning people. Never mind that work tends to start in the morning, as do plenty of college classes. As does high school. The ability to suck it up and accomplish something in the early morning isn't some abstract skill of no use later, but quite handy if, say, you find yourself living in Central NJ and commuting into NY. If all the SAT measured was the ability to show up for the SAT at groggy o'clock, this would probably measure something worthwhile.

*While the socioeconomic thing is a good point, I never cease to be amazed by the frequency with which those who repeat that argument turn out to be advocating on behalf not of the underprivileged, but the snowflake, hidden-genius children of the upper-middle class.

Cluttered thoughts about "holistic" and campus assault

Rape on campus is in the news again, because, presumably, of the prestige of the campus where the rapes in question happened. Whenever the topic of violence along these lines comes up, at whichever school, I always want to say the same thing: skip the school, call the cops. This is true whether or not fraternities are involved. (For more on the Flanagan article, see Miss Self-Important.)

My advice, then, to any college students reading this: If something goes wrong, you'd be better off thinking of yourself as an 18-19-year-old who just happens to live in whichever jurisdiction than as a member of your campus community. At least at first. Once things have been sorted out, you can then bring up issues relating to the culture of the campus, or the student status of the young man in question.

So why don't young women in such situations just call 911? Why is the first thought to go to the school? Maybe it's something idealistic about wanting to change a misogynistic culture at whichever institution, or maybe it's the disillusion over the fact that a school that offers however many courses in gender studies somehow allowed this to happen. Maybe it's that some such instances are sufficiently ambiguous (i.e. tremendous amounts of alcohol were involved all around) that a young woman is correct in thinking her claim wouldn't stand up in court, but does point to a problem with how campus social life is organized. 

Maybe this, maybe that, but ultimately, there are plenty of clear-cut cases - not just of rape, but of other forms of legally-defined abuse - that go to the school rather than the cops simply because, if you're barely out of high school, and have been fed a certain myth about what college is all about. College isn't just the place you take classes. It's your all-encompassing, holistic community. It's your gym, your dining hall, your social life, your movies and musical performances.

That warm and fuzzy community, for which everyone's been - if we're talking an even slightly selective school - hand-plucked for their impeccable character, well, that community includes whichever man gave or is giving you criminally-actionable problems, if he's also a student. He won't merely be innocent until proven guilty as in a court of law. He may end up never really charged, just charged with breaking school policy, which at the end of the day doesn't mean anything. The school might agree that an incident occurred, but simply not do anything about it.

"Holistic" has, in a sense, replaced in loco parentis. By definition, nothing terrible could happen at college, among students, because of the impossibly high bar set to be a student at whichever institution. Once every student is officially of upstanding character, as vs. merely someone who met whichever academic requirements, it becomes that much more complicated to make sense of how students can be criminally terrible to one another.

Character

It's always good to know you've had an impact on the world. Mine thus far consists, in part of course, of being cited on a college-admissions-coaching website. One with the optimistic name, "The Ivy Coach," located in the snow-heap that is De Blasio's neglected Upper East Side.

Anyway! The people who will get your child into HarvardYalePrinceton appear to have missed that my objection to holistic admissions was based on the argument that colleges can't actually make them. Not shouldn't - can't. "What on earth is wrong with judging personality and character?," asks the Coach. Nothing - but how on that same earth could people who only have access to admissions materials - and that may include notes from an interview - do anything of the kind?

But then it gets interesting. Their defense of holistic admissions centers on... the Unabomber. "Some admissions officer(s) at Harvard mistakenly judged the character of Ted Kaczynski and offered him admission to their university." The post is illustrated with a photo of Kaczynski in handcuffs. College should judge character, I *think* the argument goes, because if not, they'll get Unabombers. Or even if so, they may misjudge (or, like, fail to predict the behavior of an applicant many years after graduation), but they should still try. After all, ever since the Unabomber, Harvard's stock has plummeted, right? But really - how could schools spot future Unabombers? Wouldn't this mean going down a potentially dangerous path of stigmatizing those with certain mental illnesses or radical political viewpoints? Was the Unabomber's issue really one of character?

(The post goes on to make a comparison with dating - the very comparison that most demonstrates the problem of "holistic" in an admissions context. "If you don’t feel it, you just don’t feel it. It’s that simple." Yes, on a date. But what does an admissions committee "feel"?)

What does it say, though, that an Upper East Side tutoring firm is so devoted to holistic? For one thing, it suggests that holistic is - as I've suspected - more about benefitting the academically-mediocre children of the rich than it is about serving as a cover for quota-based affirmative action, or recognizing achievement in the face of obstacles. It could also be that for a place like this to get customers, it needs students (parents) to believe that anything's possible. That your child - who you, of course, think is special - is special, and will be recognized as such by any college that gets to know them.

Obstacle course

Given how long I've been holding forth on "holistic" (I'm against it, but not because of any ill feeling towards affirmative action, which is, I suspect, the usual reason people might oppose it, so, to be clear, that's not it) you may think I'd put all my thoughts about it on WWPD, but no! There's more. So much more, in fact, that I didn't get to everything.

In a longer version of the piece, I'd have gotten into the question of whether colleges are actually capable of measuring obstacles-overcome. Also a previous WWPD topic, but it's an important one. Yes, colleges can and should take into account what they can, and certain things absolutely can be known - Duffy Muffington III from Andover, captain of the lacrosse team (assuming they have one) and participant in many a philanthropic vacation program, is coming from a different place than someone whose home address is the Red Hook projects. It's rarely that obvious, however, and a lot of people hold a more patchwork place on the advantage spectrum. In an ideal world, all advantage and disadvantage could be known and given its due, but that will never happen. That doesn't necessarily mean not taking disadvantage into account where it's most straightforward.

But we do need to consider that knowing to speak up about an obstacle - and knowing which obstacles will make you be seen in a more flattering light - is itself a form of advantage.

There are, to reiterate, a bunch of reasons someone might not share a totally valid and major obstacle - whether this means coming to a teacher when trouble at home is impacting a grade, or when applying to college. But to stick with college admissions, the obvious one is, what if your great obstacle involved your parents being legitimately terrible people? (Abuse, etc.) But say their terribleness doesn't manifest itself as a lack of interest in your essays, or in helping pay for college. The applicants in question won't bring this up, yet a messed-up home life is probably one of the biggest obstacles teens face.

But one might say, so be it. The issue is in part measuring whether Student X's 3.5 GPA is more or less impressive than Student Y's, but it's also about righting societal wrongs. The messed-up-family-havers aren't a class, right?

There are other obstacles - invisible disability, illness, or LGBT status in this not-yet-post-homophobia age -  where you wouldn't want whichever class of person discriminated against, but for so many reasons (a sense of privacy, a belief that something will be a liability that might actually be anything but, and where acknowledging whatever it is might help pay for college...), this is probably often left off an application.

There are still other obstacles that aren't particularly sensitive in an obvious, family-secret-type way, but that someone might be shy about. The idea that if a college pities you, you're more likely to get in, isn't necessarily universally known, nor are all people going to be OK with this. Some might feel patronized, or like it's better to get in on your own merits independent of idiosyncratic circumstances, or like even asking for this kind of break is on the cusp of begging.

Long, sleepy point being, as great as an idea as it is in principle for schools to consider individual circumstances, the logistics of doing so, beyond the broadest categories (race and family income), are not only complicated, but potentially going to benefit students who need the boost the least.

Hypocrisies

-The discussions here and elsewhere about Bard's new admissions essays have gotten me thinking about precisely what it is about "holistic" that I find unsettling. (I do see the value in affirmative action, so it's definitely not about that.) And it's the following: I don't like when concern for the academically-mediocre children of wealthy families disguises itself as concern for underprivileged youth. And I find that fairly often - not always! - opposition to standardized tests follows this pattern. It comes across as well-meaning and progressive to oppose these tests, because there's this implicit 'they only show who has rich parents.' When there are in fact plenty of kids who've had all the advantages and still do poorly on these tests. And who should not be demonized (as they sometimes are, as if it's somehow an act of entitlement to have advantages and not parlay them into conventional academic success), but whose cause isn't exactly a social-justice emergency. But the plight of the unconventionally-intelligent, undiscovered-genius rich kid (and we all know the adage about how a rich kid who does badly in school or is disruptive is a secret genius, esp. if male) ends up weirdly conflated with that of the poor kid with low scores but high abilities.

-As irritating trendlets go, top of my pile would be the oh-so-serious exposé of the evils of the modeling industry that are illustrated with a photo of the now-adult model in her modeling prime. Exhibits A and B; I know there are more, but this will do for now. Sometimes, granted, the image won't be a photo of any specific, traumatized model, but just of Some Random Model(s), or maybe an only moderately-traumatized one. But the ones where you're getting a photo of the author or profiled woman, as a young model, are the worst. Why? Because the gimmick is, the far-too-thin, far-too-young girl is the clickbait. That image is still selling something, even if the something it's selling is an earnest story about how terrible it is that models are so vulnerable. And it's kind of the same as the item above - the progressive-concern box gets checked, while the usual remains that which is promoted.

10,000 words

Which, just off the top of your head, sounds like a better way to get a diverse student body: Requiring that applicants do well on the SAT and get good grades (the former evidently relating to family income,  and then there are the families paying for tutors; but the latter by necessity opening things up to students from all schools), or asking them to write 10,000 words of research paper? 

Bard's new way... strikes me more as a way to make sure applicants consider your college their first-choice school, than a way to make that college more accessible. I get that as with all applications, the college applicant must appear to believe that they'd flourish best and contribute most at this one institution, while at the same time applying to a bunch. Which means, if nothing else, getting the name of the school right for each essay. But anything that asks a student to demonstrate enthusiasm by turning applying to that school into an extracurricular activity of its own seems... potentially more about selecting the kids who, to put it generously, are the best match for that school, than about avoiding the evils of the standard-issue college application process.

But then there's the diversity question, ostensibly at the heart of this, but the most dubious. Would essays bring in more disadvantaged students, or just more academically weak but quirky rich kids? Most obviously, anything that time-consuming will be tougher to pull off for the kid with lots of household responsibilities. And are we really thinking parents aren't at all going to help with these essays, and that this won't alter the outcome? 

I suppose the idea is that the assignment is just this pure way of looking at how different people think, it seems unlikely to play out like that: 

Bard’s audition is open book: Along with the menu of 17 questions, the college’s Web site will provide all the relevant source materials — from a Nobel lecture about prion disorders to the United Nations Charter to an Aeschylus play — with which to address them. (Additional research is permitted if properly documented.) Mary Backlund, Bard’s director of admission, said that that access will place students who may not have encountered the subjects in school or do not have good local libraries on equal footing with those who attended elite high schools.

Note the parenthetical bit. Kids who appear to be doing graduate-level work (citing scholarship, etc.), aren't they just that much more impressive? Or on a simpler level: kids who cite outside sources seem more committed to attending Bard. Kids who demonstrate existing contextual knowledge about the topics are bound to come up with something more impressive. The ability to write at the college level while still in high school seems like a good proxy for how nice of a high school you've attended. (You'll have an edge if you were in Mr. Gern's Stuyvesant English class, it seems, because by coincidence he assigns the same poetry as the Bard application. While yes, just reading that passage was a bit jarringly high-school-flashback, it's always nice to see a former teacher be the voice of reason.)

But to return to the main issue here, it's just bizarre to think that fairness is achieved by throwing primary sources at kids from all backgrounds, as if the ability to write a long essay on a complicated topic without any particular training is something equally distributed throughout the population. I understand the appeal of eliminating "potential" from the equation, but the way of doing so can't possibly be expecting college-level work (the real deal, not what APs cover) from those who haven't yet dealt with the steep learning curve of first term freshman year.

Holistic and its victims, sympathetic and otherwise

Gawker reports that a scorned college-applicant has taken to the Wall Street Journal to complain that "just be[ing] yourself" is not enough to make the cut at Harvard or whatever. (Maybe Princeton, where she might have been a freshman by the time Princeton Mom's younger son made it to senior year. The life she might have led!) The op-ed is intended as humor, which Gawker conveniently ignores, which is maybe fair, given that it's not all that funny.

The one useful, general point that comes out of this (one girl's resentment at not being marginalized enough to get into college being, well...), which is that some kids/families take "holistic" seriously, and don't realize that "holistic" is only the difference between why one perfect-SATS-and-grades kid has an edge over another.

We might want to separate out this particular girl giving the impression that she wants to appear in an encyclopedia section for "entitlement" from the fact that likely a lot of kids make this mistake. And mostly kids who aren't so advantaged. "Holistic" isn't a problem because it keeps entitled but unimpressive well-off white kids out of top colleges. That's arguably holistic doing its job. It's a problem because it makes it so that only those who have it together (or realistically, whose schools/parents do) will understand that you need to check whichever boxes to get in.

Holistic's winners and losers

Miss Self-Important has a post up on affirmative action and holistic admissions. WWPD readers may be familiar with my apparently bizarre stance - in favor of or at the very least neutral to affirmative action, but not in favor of holistic college admissions. I don't think racism is over. I do, however, think there's something ridiculous about telling 17-year-old applicants that they do or don't get into a school on the basis of what they're like as a person. What I've said about this in the past is that it's then unnecessarily devastating to kids when they don't get in somewhere. It's not that you flaked out on too many math homeworks to get into Yale. It's that Yale examined your deepest soul and found it wanting.

But what I hadn't considered was what this process does to those who do get in. MSI nails it:

[T]he opacity of admissions is actually an asset for the most selective schools, a kind of metaphorical analog to the statistical reality. [....] It's because we Harvard students are all so amazing that you can't ever prove that you deserved to dwell among us. No one deserves such favor; it is a pure act of divine sovereign grace to be admitted.

Rather than taking pride in the achievements that got them in, those admitted to top colleges are basically asked to believe they were selected as individuals and are simply better people than the other high-GPA, high-SAT applicants, better in an unquantifiable way. Not more/better leadership positions, sportiveness. No, just plain better. What does this mean for the egos of the meritocratic elite? Can't be good.

A safe space

Amherst is evidently one of several elite colleges incapable of properly dealing with sexual violence. Going by what I've read and my own anecdotal evidence, it's the same story all over the place, at least at the more elite schools: young women are given the impression that the school has replaced somehow both parents and police, and when problems arise, the obvious authority figures are campus administrators. Who are not, in fact, police, and who do not necessarily do whichever basic things would be necessary to remove whichever imminent threat. (Does it build character to keep a girl in the same dorm as her rapist?) Schools may have some infrastructure or bureaucracy aimed at reassuring victims, but they may not want to or have the authority to meaningfully address the problem. I'd be curious if anyone's anecdotal evidence doesn't match this, but I understand that it's a sensitive topic, so I'm not necessarily soliciting comments.

Anyway, I think that "holistic" once again enters into the equation. Schools first admit not an applicant but a whole person. This, in turn, gives admitted, matriculated students the impression that they don't merely attend a residential college, taking classes for credit while living with fellow students. They are an intentional, hand-picked part of a community. It seems inconceivable that something scary could happen on campus. It seems straightforward, then, if something does come up, to deal with campus authorities, or with deans, when maybe the regular ol' police would be the way to go. (Or maybe not. Eep.)

There's even such a cliché of the liberal-arts-college male, the guy who's so hyper-sensitive that he will apologize profusely if he says transgendered rather than transgender, and will beat himself up over this for weeks to come. How could such a Nice Guy, one who's had seminars on the significance of holding a door open for a woman, do anything wrong? He should be posting earnest pleas to be a good person on Facebook, not, you know, raping his classmates. And yet. All of these carefully selected individuals, whom experts have picked to balance harmoniously, are nevertheless fallible, at times seriously criminal, human beings. Maybe - and I'll admit to cynicism here - what needs to happen is, rather than beefing up on-campus façades, we need to remember that students are members not only of a campus community, but a broader one, as well as a jurisdiction of some kind.