In the Spring of 2001, Prism magazine, a student-run publication of Amherst College, asked the Admission Office for an essay or response to several controversies surrounding student recruitment and the place of athletics in College admission policies.  My fellow deans picked me.  This essay was edited and approved by my fellow deans and ran in the spring issue.

The Merry Winnower

	I’m a Dean of Admission at Amherst College.  It’s a little unusual for a 23-year-old.  Women tend to be very impressed by it.  Particularly my mom.
	Of course, I’m not the full Dean of Admission.  My actual title is the Eugene S. Wilson Graduate Fellow.  The joke title is “Green Dean.”  I go with that.  First of all, I don’t mind diminutives.  Secondly, I think Green Dean sounds a lot better than anything with the name “Eugene” in it.
	Real deans tend to be married forty-somethings with kids and families.  at Amherst, a surprising number of them have graduate degrees from Harvard.  Green Deans, on the other hand, are recent graduates of Amherst College.  This year there are three: Guy Johnson '99, Ruby Afram '00 and me.  We're the "evolutionary link" between student and administrator.  We walk the line between the dignified and the irreverent, sort of like people who eat Frosted Mini-Wheats.  Our administrator genes make us go to high schools and recruit applicants to Amherst.  Our student genes make us play elaborate pranks on our co-workers with an electric chicken that sings when bumped or nudged.
	I took this job because I've always had a strange but very positive relationship with the Admission Office.  It seemed to me that the deans had bent a lot of rules to let me into the College in the first place.  I felt  satisfied with my education, and I felt a sense of duty to repay the favor.  I also heard they'd fly me to places for free.
	Is it what I expected?  It's hard to say. The job has "seasons" to it, and I was surprised at how varied and distinct those seasons are.  Summer is learning the job and playing video games. Fall is traveling to distant cities and missing all your appointments because streets in Denver change names every few blocks.  Winter is reading applications.  Spring, well, I'm not sure, but I think we get to fly on planes again, so I'm excited.	
	The job doesn't pay much, but there are some nice perks.  I get to stay in nice hotels when I travel.  I can eat anything I want at any restaurant in town.  They rent me nice cars and I even get snazzy business cards.  The only downside is coming home.  Suddenly, I'm a dirt-poor college graduate again.  I share a house with five people, take my girlfriend out to Bueno or Antonio's once a week and can only drive when it's sunny because my car has no heat.  
	The best perk, though, is the sneezing. See, I give a lot of speeches to groups of nervous students and their terrified parents.  They are terrified of college, and they are terrified of me.  Sometimes, when I'm feeling obnoxious, I'll pretend to sneeze.  Invariably, 8 out of 10 people will say, "Bless You!'' How many of you get an 80 percent "Bless You" response when you sneeze?  I've always wanted to turn to a kid and say, "Hey! I didn't hear a ‘Bless You’ from you! What's your name?"  Except the kid would probably die or have a seizure or something, and I'd feel terribly guilty.
	In spite of the perks, there is some guilt in my job.  Amherst admits only 18 percent of its applicants.  We have 5300 applicants this year, so we'll admit about 850 to fill 420 spots (some of our accepted applicants will go to Williams or the Ivies, of course).  My point is, we say "no" a lot.  That's all well and good for you; if you're reading this, you were probably in that 18 percent and you can count yourself a scholar among scholars. I assure you, however, that part of it was just dumb luck.  Right now, I've got stacks of rejected applications on my desk.  Here’s a valedictorian with 1580 SAT's. She was a straight-A student until this year. Her parents are divorcing, and now she's a B student, so we won't take her.  It's not her fault, but why should we waste a “yes” on her when we can give her slot to this other straight-A student?  There are so many extremely qualified applicants that even the slightest imperfection can kill a file.  We'll reject 200 valedictorians this year, easily.  At least a handful of 1600 SAT's won’t make the cut.
	The international applicants are the saddest cases.  Most have fabulous academic credentials, but since they don't pay US taxes, Uncle Sam won't give them student loans. We're not need-blind for these students, so we basically give scholarships to a handful of needy refugees, and then we accept the rich geniuses. Poor or middle-class geniuses get rejected.
	Working this job gives me a real sense of the broad disparities in American education.  One kid exhausted the options at his meager high school, so he spent senior year taking classes at a very prestigious local college.  He only went to high school for gym class, health, and Advanced Placement English. His guidance counselor said that since he was taking only one AP class senior year, he was not challenging himself. This kid gets A+'s in college-level Linear Algebra, and he gets penalized for passing up AP Calculus.  Unbelievable.
	My most memorable experience this year happened on the road.  I was traveling in Philadelphia, my home territory.  I made a point of stopping in the small city of Liston. I've changed the name for the privacy of the students. Liston is predominately African-American and overwhelmingly poor.  I called Liston High School and was surprised to learn that they had recently created a small "magnet" honors school. I made an appointment and idealistically — perhaps condescendingly — looked forward to finding diamonds in the rough.
	Driving through the streets of Liston, even at noon, filled me dread. I was the only white guy in sight. My rental was the only new car. I drove through blocks where plywood windows outnumbered glass ones.
	LHS is a gargantuan, monolithic high school with 2500 students.  Small windows.  Metal detectors.  Armed security guards.  Barbed wire.  The only difference between it and a prison is that prisons don't dismiss the inmates at 3 p.m.  The guidance counselor's office had maybe ten college posters in it, none from more than 25 miles away.  The shelves for "armed forces" and "trade schools" were much fuller than the shelf labeled "colleges."  The guidance counselor was a sweet, matronly lady. She told me that the "magnet" high school, for the top 200 students, was in the old administration building across the street. I should feel free to head over there.
	My spirits sank; it's customary for the counselor to have interested students waiting to see me in the guidance office. Was I supposed to wander the halls and tack up some business cards? Resigned, I walked across the street.  A short Asian woman, who looked as out-of-place as I felt, approached me.  A history teacher, she greeted me and pointed me towards an unused classroom, where I was to make my presentation to whomever showed up.
	Pretty much the whole world showed up.  There were 55 students in a classroom designed for 30.  They were loud.  They were rowdy.  They were unsophisticated.  They were wonderful.  It turns out that I was the first college representative to visit them that year.  All the others just visited the regular high school looking for nursing students or auto mechanics.  All the pent-up college curiosity that they had burst out in that session.  As loud as they were, most of their comments and questions were serious ones about college.  I told them about the open curriculum.  I told them our average class size was 19 students.  I told them they could take classes at the Five Colleges.  One hundred percent financial aid for needy students.  Free cable.  Cheesy potato soup.  The works.  I told them that, should they wish to visit the campus, we would mail them complimentary train tickets for Students of Color Open House.
	The highlight of the whole presentation came from this kid who looked like a gangster straight from Central Casting.  He asked me to clarify my comments about no credit for AP tests.  He had already scored a perfect five on the BC Calculus exam. Math was his favorite subject, and he wanted to skip the introductory classes.  Plywood on the windows, and there are kids out there getting fives in AP Calculus.  God bless America.  They took every single book, card, brochure and catalog I had.  I left the school walking on air.  We were going to get 55 applicants from this school, and I was going to fight for them.
	We received a grand total of one application from Liston Magnet High School this year.  She had a combined SAT score of 840.  Verbal score was 360.  B's and C's for most of her classes.  She was in the top third of her honors high school with those credentials. I rejected her. Can you imagine what Austin Sarat or "Chick" Chickering would say when he read her first paper?  It would have been grossly unfair to accept a student like her.  My greatest success was my greatest failure.
	I haven't yet addressed the areas of greatest concern.  In recent years there have been a fair number of controversies either pertaining to or centered around our admission policies.  The rumor mill paints us in dark tones of casuistry and caprice.  The reader no doubt wants to know the secrets.
	Well, let me explain.  We are willing to accept any varsity athlete with an SAT score of at least 900.  For football players, we'll take anyone with a pulse.  All of our financial aid is based on need; if we need a cello player, she gets financial aid.  We gladly allow alumni to purchase space for their dumb kids.  We pass over exceptional Caucasian students and give egregiously off-kilter preference to this week's current flavor of disadvantaged minority. And we go out of our way to accept only the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, because we think that class warfare makes for a very amusing spectacle.
	Crap.  You know it's crap, too.  Or you should know it, seeing with objective eyes.  Yes, we give preference to athletes.  We also give preference to artists.  Such people have talent, and we want our student body to have many talents.  Yes, we give preference to alumni; most of you are on financial aid, graciously paid for by alumni's annual donations.  And, remember, you'll have kids someday, too.  We give preference to people who have had horrible childhoods so that their stories will educate you as to your own great fortune. You want evidence of preference?  It's all over the place; no point in denying that the elephant is in the kitchen.  One should not infer, however, that we're giving away the store.
	We are accepting 18 percent of our applicants.  Selectivity brings with it a certain luxury: the luxury to pick and choose only the very best.  This is a school where one in three was a National Merit Semi-Finalist.  One in five was a valedictorian.  Three in five were varsity athletes in high school.  We are full to bursting with class presidents, yearbook editors, debate captains, concert pianists and Eagle Scouts.  Face it: Amherst College is as close as you'll get on this earth to an ideal society.  It is far from an ideal society, I know, but I think that that says a lot more about this earth than it does about Amherst College.
	Yes, there is bigotry here. There is racism and sexism and elitism. There is arrogance and a sense of entitlement.  There is apathy and cynicism and torpor.  We accepted you all, not always knowing your faults, but agreeing in good faith to take the bad along with the good.  Maybe our admission criteria are flawed; surely they are not perfect.  Believe it or not, we welcome most of the criticism the students level at our office.  Debate is healthy, educational and necessary.  We know this.  You see, we're intellectuals, too.  Quite a few of us are Amherst graduates, after all.
	It has been a thrilling novitiate, but I think one year is enough.  I do love my job, but I think that's why I'm leaving it.  It saddens me to reject deserving students.  It breaks my heart to see bright kids hobbled by uncaring teachers and underfunded schools.  Cream rises; most bright kids will succeed with or without an Amherst education, but I can't help but feel that Amherst would have been a great help to so many of the people I've rejected.
	I got what I wanted out of this job; it has been a great transition from college, I learned about the idealism behind the instruction, and I learned a lot about myself. All that, and free plane tickets, too.