American Dreams and College Nightmare: Higher Education as a Source of Hope and Anxiety
This post originally appeared on Compass Education Group’s blog.
It’s happening again.
In the early days of April 2015 headlines like “New York Teen Harold Ekeh Gets Accepted to All Eight Ivy League Schools” (Thompson), “New York Teen Gets Accepted to All Ivy League Schools” (Inskeep & Montagne), and “Long Island High Schooler Accepted by All 8 Ivy League Colleges” (Shapiro) appeared in major news media outlets like NBC News and NPR. As these proclamations appeared, touting the success of high school senior Harold Ekeh, all I could think was: “It’s happening again.”
For those who follow such things, there are particular months in the year when certain types of education stories tend to appear; timed to coincide with the release of admission decisions and the start of a new academic year, profiles on college admission and higher education follow a fairly predictable pattern in American mainstream news media. It was, for example, around this same time in 2014 that headlines like “High School Student Goes 8 for 8 in Ivy League College Admissions” (Morton & Ferrigno) appeared, publicizing the similar accomplishment of Kwasi Enin. In 2013 Americans were exposed to the infamous “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me” (Weiss), an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that articulated a high school senior’s frustration at being told to “be herself” only to discover that that self was apparently not worthy of admission.
Although “To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me” evidenced a particular lack of understanding with regard to the ways in which diversity can function in the admission process, the presence of the article—along with the other stories mentioned—is worth noting as it highlights a particular emphasis on the culture that can surround college admission in America. Beginning with an examination of how some Americans perceive, understand, and talk about college admission, this post will then proceed to offer theories for how some Americans have come to this point in their relationship with higher education before moving on to discuss implications for current and future practices. Please note that this is not designed as a comprehensive overview of the topic but instead aims to offer argumentation in the hopes of engaging readers in informed discussion of the college admission process.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Admission
A close examination of stories surrounding college admission in April 2015 suggests the emergence of two themes that are distinct but related: (1) how students are dealing with their admission decisions and (2) profile pieces that culminate in the attainment of admission to a particular institution or institutions. In some ways, the former is potentially helpful as it can provide some insight into the pressures faced by young people applying to American colleges and universities. The latter, however, epitomized by stories like those of Harold Ekeh, Kwasi Enin, and Munira Khalif, present a rather more insidious danger for they work to perpetuate anxiety even as they proffer hope.
On their surface, articles like “New York Teen Gets Accepted to All Ivy League Schools” offer a form of celebration for a student who managed to achieve a task thought to be particularly difficult. Ostensibly combatting anxieties around declining admission rates at highly selective institutions—anxieties that news media itself sometimes plays a role in amplifying—stories like those of Ekeh and Enin seemingly remind us that the impossible is, in fact, possible. Taking nothing away from the efforts of the students, what is truly being lauded here, however, is not the achievements of the students themselves but rather a reaffirmation of the central American mythos: that, in America, hard work and playing by the rules is rewarded. On some level, perhaps we want to believe that it is possible for anyone—here it should be noted that many of the students who have been profiled are children of immigrants—to come to America and succeed through effort and merit.
If we accept that these sorts of news items work to confirm our beliefs regarding the way the world works and thus offer a measure of solace, the price that we pay is that articles like “High School Student Goes 8 for 8 in Ivy League College Admissions” work to reinscribe a hierarchy that ultimately condemns many more than it glorifies. Instead of leading us to interrogate the current state of affairs, stories like those of Ekeh and Enin can cause us to become staunch supporters of the status quo by propagating a sense of hope for us as individuals, if not necessarily for us as a group. Put simply, the achievements of these few only matter because so many others will try and fail.
Moreover, the structure of these stories matters: written by people like Anne Thompson, who is NBC News’ chief environmental affairs correspondent (i.e., not an education specialist) and reported on in segments like Good Morning America’s Pop News, which features the “buzziest stories of the day,” the fact that they are fundamentally human interest pieces distracts us from being able to talk about higher education in a more meaningful way. We are not asked to question why this hierarchy of elite schools is maintained and to what extent we should internalize schools like the Ivies as the preeminent institutions of higher education. Instead of asking what type of post-secondary experience is best for us or our children, we instead ask our young people to largely conform to a system that puts forth a particular vision of success.
(Re)Framing the Discussion
Part of the problem, as noted in the recent books Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (Bruni, 2015) and Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Better Life (Deresiewicz, 2014) is the way in which, when thinking about higher education, contemporary American culture tends to place an emphasis on entrance (i.e., admission) and exit (e.g., job placement, graduate school acceptance, etc.) but not necessarily on college itself as an experience. Perhaps we focus on these markers because they are more digestible—to talk about acceptance to an elite school acts as a shorthand for a much larger discussion surrounding a specific type of achievement and success—but a fixation on these indicators also shields us from having the much more difficult conversations about what college is for.
To ask, “Why am I going to college?” is not necessarily the same as “What is college for?”—the latter almost inevitably involves a deeper discussion regarding the role and purpose of higher education in American culture along with questions like “What could higher education be?” and “What should higher education be?”
This should not suggest that one’s college experience must necessarily involve philosophical questions regarding the life of the mind and whether higher education represents a space for personal growth but rather that we should, for each of us, achieve a clarity of purpose regarding the time that we spend in pursuit of higher education and even if such a path is indeed right for us! Do we think of college as a type of credentialing process that aids in securing a particular type of job? Do we see college as a space to explore intellectually and to interact with difference in its many forms? Do we want college to serve as a securer of social mobility in America? Do we expect college to produce individuals who can think carefully, act confidently, and become meaningful contributors to their communities?
It is by asking ourselves these types of questions—and thereby gaining a modicum of clarity—that we can then begin to resist the dominant hierarchy of educational institutions in America if we so choose. The answers to these questions are not mutually exclusive, nor should we think that they will be the same for each individual student. By deciding that our values and our goals do not necessarily align with an educational pyramid that culminates in Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, we can then begin the process of searching out which schools are in fact the best fits for us based on what we prioritize the most. For example, we can contemplate what a low admission rate (i.e., being highly selective) means for a particular institution but we must then go one step further to ask ourselves whether this meaning is in fact something that we value; to simply say that a lower admission rate indicates that a schools is “better” in some fashion is to miss the point of the exercise.
A Call for New Assessments
But understanding what we want out of higher education is only one piece of the puzzle: true progress happens when we see an alignment between what we expect of colleges, what colleges expect of us, and how the admission process works to facilitate that match. College admission offices must not only struggle with “What is college for?” but, more specifically, “What is the purpose of my institution?” and, further, “How do current admission practices forward the goals of the university?”
That is, to what extent does the current application structure allow admission offices to determine whether students will embody the hopes that the institution has for them? How does an application purport to assess the skills and talents that students now present?
Early attempts to recognize the media capabilities of students came through efforts like Tuft’s video supplement and, later, Goucher’s video application. On its surface, this move seems to be a positive one, for it recognizes that some of the students in this current generation have learned to express themselves digitally; what resulted, however, was that many of the publically-available supplements resemble reality show audition tapes. And although this might be embarrassing for students, it is hardly their fault: admission offices have largely failed to help students to understand why media literacy and the presentation of the digital self is of value to the school and therefore how the videos will be used and evaluated. Students are therefore left to rely on the logics of attention that they have internalized growing up: reality show audition tapes.
In contrast we might consider the newer efforts of some admission offices like Bennington College, whoseDimensional Application marks a departure from the traditional application in a way that is perhaps more productive. Asking students to be active participants in the creation of their application—and thus the presentation of themselves to the admission committee—ideally causes students to reflect on their own strengths (and weaknesses) and how those might be incorporated into Bennington’s community. In short, the Dimensional Application represents a move toward an interactive choice-based assessment that works to engage students in their own process of learning. Although it is too early to tell whether the Dimensional Application has indeed served its purpose, we might benefit by putting it in conversation with the work of scholars like Daniel L. Schwartz and Dylan Arena, who argue for a movement away from knowledge-based assessment (2013).
Ultimately, the road to a brighter future is not through stories like “Kid Who Got into All 8 Ivy League Schools Didn’t Speak English 10 Years Ago” (Jacobs, 2015) but rather through a careful and sustained conversation about the role of higher education in America, one that does not ebb and flow throughout the calendar year. It will be hard work to disentangle ourselves from the dominant modes of thought that have dictated college admission since the creation of the hierarchy in the late 19th century but the potential benefits are great.
Works Cited
Bruni, F. (2015). Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Deresiewicz, W. (2014). Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. New York: Free Press.
Inskeep, S., & Montagne, R. (2015, April 20). New York Teen Gets Accepted To All Ivy League Schools.Retrieved April 20, 2015, from NPR: http://www.npr.org/2015/04/20/400929870/new-york-teen-gets-accepted-to-all-ivy-league-schools
Jacobs, P. (2015, April 20). Kid Who Got into All 8 Ivy League Schools Didn’t Speak English 10 Years Ago. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/stefan-stoykov-accepted-to-all-eight-ivy-league-schools-2015-4
Morton, L., & Ferrigno, L. (2014, April 2). High School Student goes 8 for 8 in Ivy League College Admissions. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/01/us/new-york-student-accepted-ivy-league/
Schwartz, D. L., & Arena, D. (2013). Measuring What Matters Most: Choice-Based Assessments for the Digital Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Shapiro, E. (2015, April 5). New York Teen Harold Ekeh Gets Accepted to All Eight Ivy League Schools.Retrieved April 20, 2015, from ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/US/long-island-high-schooler-accepted-ivy-league-colleges/story?id=30108451
Thompson, A. (2015, April 7). New York Teen Harold Ekeh Gets Accepted to All Eight Ivy League Schools. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from NBC News: http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/harold-ekeh-17-long-island-gets-accepted-all-eight-ivy-n337506
Weiss, S. L. (2013, March 29). To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me. Retrieved April 20, 2015, from The Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654
He Chose Poorly, You Have Chosen Wisely
In April the rhetoric surrounding college admission inevitably comes to embrace the notion of choice as many students weigh their options prior to the National Candidates Reply Date on May 1. To be sure, the month of April is a portentous period for college-bound students and their parents as families begin to transition and necessarily start to contemplate a change in their configuration. Emotions run high as excitement and hope twine with a nervous energy that, in part, stems from a fear of missing out (FOMO, if you must). Here it would seem that much of the work of counselors lies in our ability to help students and families retain perspective through this process, validating their concerns even as we try to reframe them. On a practical level, individuals are often concerned with selecting the “right” college to attend and yet I cannot help but think about the invocation of “choice,” its assumed power, and its relationship to young people.
Back in 2012 I taught an undergraduate class on marketing ethics for USC’s Marshall School of Business and I began to cause a minor fuss over a recent Old Navy commercial that I had seen. Ostensibly aimed at a demographic that was of my age or older, I began a rant over how a company had come to appropriate the notion of choice in order to sell jeans that were functional but not necessarily noteworthy (which, I mean, is the whole purpose of commercial advertising). Although my students were generally too young to understand the original reference, I began to explain to them that I was upset because this move represented a blatant effort to wrest agency away from persons, presenting them with the illusion of choice while absconding with its power.
Taking a different approach, I had the students read the Beverly Hills, 90210 “I choose me” scene against the love triangle presented by Twilight—and the relative impossibility of readers aligning with Team Bella—to think about how the presentation of choice has changed in recent years. Young Adult (YA) fiction, in particular, has become an interesting place to explore the concepts of choice due to its relatively recent mainstream popularity and the rise in dystopian settings, which are often concerned with people making difficult choices and their ability to do so. Although some of my thoughts regarding the theme of choice in YA are reflected in a piece for Slate that reads Harry Potter against Divergent with respect to clans/identity/choice, what is more directly salient is not just the relative importance of choice but the implications of being asked to declare a binding allegiance as a young person. While useful as entry points, I also encouraged students to push back against the presentation of choice in Harry Potter and Divergent as both tended to focus on the connection between innate qualities and group identity, legitimizing individualism and genetics over context, environment, and existing social structures.
In spite of my occasional quibbles with them, I still think that there is a way to use YA texts like Divergent and Harry Potter (or, if you like, Enclave and Quarantine) to think about what it means for young people to make a decision that is, for them at least, often perceived as life-changing and somewhat irreversible. At its core, what does it actually mean to make a choice—in this case perhaps the choice of which institution to attend—in the college admission process? Is there merit to reframing the discussion in order to deemphasize the name of a school in favor of highlighting what the experience itself might bring? How can we change the college-going culture so that young people (and their parents) feel better equipped to make choices when they are presented? How do we get students and parents to complicate the notion of choice in order to consider that while an individual decision might be their own, the range of choices that they have are often influenced by external factors—for example, while an institution’s ranking might not be important in which school a student ultimately attends, a larger view also considers how the logic of ranking infiltrates education and makes particular avenues more salient for particular students in the first place—while remaining cognizant of the information overload that already exists? In what ways must we be self-reflexive as we guide students and parents toward making particular choices? Put another way, how do we, like Old Navy, encourage students to make particular kinds of choices in favor of others and what are the potential implications of our actions?
For me, the answer begins with a critical examination of choice: I want to support the ability of students and families to make informed choices but the question always remains, “A choice to do what?”
I want students to choose wisely.
Race and Education (Again)
One of the biggest challenges that I faced in helping students to think critically about pop culture and the world around them at large was helping them to think through the role that anecdotes played in their thought processes. “To what extent,” I would ask, “can or should a personal account constitute proof and how many data points are necessary to make a case?”
The answer was always, “It depends.”
A story can be a form of qualitative evidence but the question is always “evidence of what?” What I tried to convey to students was that what counts as evidence depends on what question(s) you’re asking: arguing that something can occur, does occur, and consistently occurs are all very different propositions and students would often conflate the three.
It is with this background that I considered Kevin’s blog post for today along with the larger story that it gestures toward. It comes as no surprise that various entities are using the story to meet their own ends, often employing it in order to confirm what they already know about the world but yet I am worried about the same thing that troubles Kevin: I fear that students and families will confuse what is possible with what is probable.
My worries about Enin perpetuating the model of the all-star student aside, I have spent some time thinking about the invocation of race in response to the original stories. I have not yet delved into the bowels of College Confidential (because that takes a special kind of fortitude and I might need to go wine shopping), but the comments on Reddit have been rather interesting to follow. Indeed, it is sort of difficult not to think about how discussion over Enin comes to stand in for a larger set of issues that surrounds race given the temporal proximity to the controversy surrounding #CancelColbert.
Without taking anything away from Enin or his achievement, I am saddened that the media coverage of the media coverage of him has focused on this case without largely incorporating the ways in which the story is already being invoked in conversations about affirmative action (see, for example, the comments of Valerie Strauss’ “Can we stop obsessing on the Ivy League?”). More importantly, how do we read this story against items like a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that confirms the continued existence of the achievement gap? Or the way in which “black” and “male” intersect with education in America? Additionally, even if we were interested in limiting the scope of our inquiry to a sample that looked at high-achieving black students, how does the focus on this one part of Enin’s story override the very real discussion that need to happen about the experience of minority students in these settings? Or the challenges that Enin might face in college, at a school like Harvard?
Ultimately I think that this story can be used to think through the ways in which dominant American culture can work to cultivate aspirations while systemically undermining those hopes. In recent years, I have been influenced by Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism to think through the promise of higher education in America and the connection between structures of hope and political passivity.
Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College
Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College
Chris Tokuhama
Bibliography
Ferguson, A. (2011). Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Author
Andrew Ferguson, currently a senior editor at Weekly Standard, is a political journalist who has written for publications such as Time, The LA Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. Ferguson was also a speechwriter for George H. W. Bush.
Summary
Written by a reporter from the perspective of a parent, Crazy U manages to combine some of the elements of both approaches into a readable book that follows a year in the college admission process. Although Andrew Ferguson’s book manages to avoid many of the pitfalls of the parent memoir, the work does not seem as thorough as other journalistic enterprises, although it benefits from a mind that is trained to ask contextual questions. Although nods to the larger landscape of Higher Education are mentioned in sections, Ferguson’s retains a focus on selective college admission. Strongest in areas where external information is readily available (e.g., the SAT), Ferguson’s book is also weakest in explaining the workings of the admission process (e.g., application review and discussing meaningful differences in evaluation between private and public institutions).
Notes
Introduction – Ferguson takes pains to note that the situation described in his book is, in some ways, atypical as the vast majority of students are able to be accepted to college and attend for a cost that is not exorbitant. American students, Ferguson notes, already have advantages with regard to education when compared to their peers around the world and that the popular imagination is concerned with “high-class problems” (3). This contextualization of the process for an individual student is helpful to maintain perspective. Ferguson evidences a humor twined with an understanding of a broader picture (e.g., with respect to history or to global higher education) that seems both palatable and educational. Additionally, Ferguson describes his own college experience not only in terms of academic experience but also social and life experiences, which suggests that his approach to the subject of college admission and college attendance might differ from the typical “fear-based” tactics designed to capitalize on anxiety
Perhaps the most significant contribution here is Ferguson’s provocation that, despite the attention and money lavished on it, we don’t really know what we expect out of Higher Education.[1] Ferguson notes that Americans tend to focus on things (9), which seems astute although “tangible outcomes” (i.e., job, graduate school, etc.) might seem like a better term.
Chapter 1 – In discussing Katherine Cohen, Ferguson touches upon an important point with regard to the industry that has developed around college-going: to what extent do entities incite anxiety in order to profit from offering a solution?“That’s what Kat[erine] was selling: the kind of expertise that could only come from a professional who had helped make the process mysterious in the first place” (16). Discussion of this is of course related to a larger set of cultural practices (e.g., television news and advertising in general) that manufacture anxiety in order to peddle “solutions” but we must also consider how college-going can represent a high-stakes one-time transaction and, as such, present a temptation to maximize profit at the expense of relationships.[2]
Although he does not go into depth, Ferguson does take readers through a miniature case study (18-22), which, via Kat, gives readers some insight into the criteria used to evaluate an application in a holistic review process. In response to this, Ferguson notes, “It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive, while pretending thy weren’t” (23) and his statement is important to keep in mind as we consider the ways in which “authenticity” is perceived, manifested, and valued in the college admission process. The intertwining of a malleable teenage identity, expectations set by college admission, and branding—“So the first great task consuming our children as they step into the wider world is an act of marketing, with themselves as a product” (23)—is an important issue to wrestle with as we think return to the question of what we want Higher Education to do.[3]
Continuing to show that he has some sort of perspective on the process, Ferguson also observes that college admission can become less about students and more about parents’ egos, writing “children quite often served as proxies for status and parental self-worth” (26-27).
Chapter 2 – Ferguson includes a brief history of the development of American Higher Education (33-35), which is important as it allows readers to understand how the democratic promise of education in America became ingrained in our collective psyche: citing milestones such as 1862’s Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges, and 1944’s G.I. Bill, which caused a resurgence in college attendance after World War II, Ferguson underscores how social mobility became linked to higher education in the popular imagination. Ferguson goes on to suggest that one consequence of the democratization of higher education was an effort to reestablish social stratification via a hierarchy based on brand name, which in turn created a sense of anxiety about which college a student would attend as opposed to if a student would attend.[4]
Harkening back to the American focus on tangible results, Ferguson notes that the development of the U.S. News & World Report rankings in 1983 reflected a cultural shift in an emphasis on credentials over learning (38). Linking the development of the rankings to an earlier “Most Influential Americans,” Ferguson highlights the role of perception and reputation in a metric that would otherwise purport to be objective (41).[5] The existence of the rankings facilitated—but did not create!—the transformation of education into a commodity serving as a de facto Consumer Reports for higher education. Ferguson suggests, however, that U.S. News & World Report isn’t solely to blame for focusing the public’s attention on particular metrics as institutions could do more to share information about student outcomes as collected through things like the National Survey of Student Engagement. More important, however, is the parallel between the ranking system’s effect on colleges/universities and the college application’s effect on students with regard to the way in which the affected parties pattern their behavior after what is perceived to be of value (49-53).[6] Finally, although one can conceptualize the rankings as an agent of commercialization, one cannot ignore that the rankings also hold value as they represent one of the ways that outsiders can begin to make sense of the college admission process.
Ultimately, the larger issue that the mention of U.S. News & World Report raises is the role of commerce and commercialism in education, which is traditionally seen as a space that is removed from outside influence.[7] American institutions of higher education are of course influenced by corporations and donors in ways that range from athletic teams, named buildings, and endowed chairs but the perception is that higher education continues to exist in some kind of bubble.
Chapter 3 – Throughout this chapter, Ferguson continually touches upon the theme of information management. In discussing the titles of various books related to college admission, Ferguson introduces the important notion of the rhetoric used to promote or sell college admission; parsing out self-help elements and inevitably invoking insider/outsider dichotomies, Ferguson also notes that the guides are directives that aim to remove uncertainty or contradiction (59-60). College guides in particular seem subject to use of the term “insider” (61) and Ferguson also notes that the popular college books like Fiske Guide rely on faulty methodology[8] based on potentially small sample sizes and prone to investigator influence (60, 63). Of particular importance here is the way that guides package and present information to an audience who might not be equipped to make sense out of the data themselves. Noting that “discrepancies usually arose only on matters of objective importance” (62), Ferguson suggests that the books’ almost universally similar tone resulted from their desire to function as reassurance or validation (63). What these books recognize, and cater to, is the perspective that an individual parent/student has on this process as little effort is made to encourage critical reflection on how an individual institution can be compared against others and if any one particular way of doing so is the “best” way. Reassurance, then, seems like the antithesis to individuals being challenged in a way that may ultimately be beneficial for them, if stressful.[9]
In a similar vein, a discussion of College Confidentialshowcases the way in which a desire for “on-demand” information undercut by a lack of critical thinking skills[10] can produce less-than-helpful results for users. Perhaps unkindly, if not untruthfully, Ferguson describes College Confidential as follows:
What it is, is a Web site where people from all walks of life, from every income level and background, create a communal space without fear of reprisal and in a spirit of perfect openness, so they can spread misinformation, gossip, and lunatic conjecture to people who are as desperate as themselves. (66)
Ferguson cuts to the heart of the matter, suggesting that many of the threads on College Confidential are really inquiring about how a student can get into college and the tragedy is that the vast majority of the responses are informed by nothing more than anecdotal experience (66).
Chapter 4– Although not explicitly stated, Ferguson connects the simplistic/direct thinking of College Confidential with a larger practice in the space of college admission: the kind of thinking that students must demonstrate in order to succeed on the SAT is not about embracing subtlety or complexity—counter to how things often are in the “real” world—but rather one of conviction and single answers. But perhaps Ferguson’s real contribution is his identification of the SAT as “a flash point where questions of class and culture, wealth and politics, race and gender, the purpose of higher education and even our varying definitions of merit rub against one another” (77). As example, Ferguson includes statements by Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, that point to the SAT’s early history and the ways in which the test was used in order to maintain structural inequality (79-80).[11] Ferguson helpfully goes beyond this and broadens the scope via mention of Christopher Jencks and David Riesman’s The Academic Revolution (1968) in order to suggest that the test may also reflect structural inequality in American life (81-82). One must then question whether the test is revealing inequality, creating inequality, or both. In recounting a brief history of the SAT(82-88), Ferguson notes that the “holistic” method employed by many selective schools today has roots in discriminatory practices that arose in response to unintended consequences of standardized achievement testing in the 1930s (83). Later, this position would be challenged by James B. Conant as he assumed the presidency of Harvard and championed the ideal of meritocracy. In effect Conant shifted the focus from achievement—which reflected existing inequality based on opportunity—to aptitude in the form of the SAT; here Conant wanted to focus on the ability to learn rather than mastery of material itself.
Ferguson also raises the question of how accurately the SAT measures anything meaningful, while also hinting that a more careful consideration of the interplay between testing and curriculum must occur (92). Reports from the College Board have indicated that SAT scores are correlated with freshman year grades but also that high school GPA alone is a better predictor than pure SAT scores. Ferguson also suggests that the SAT, like all contemporary measures of merit, reflect income inequalities (94, 99-100). In response to criticism, the focus of testing has again shifted in an attempt to capture “noncognitive skills” (95) and non-traditional intelligences.[12]
Finally, the mention of standardized testing’s role in the college admission process underscores that making sense out of large amounts of data is not a problem unique to applicants and their families—the origins of the standardized test were in a system designed to sort and classify a large number of applicants and the question then becomes how those criteria reflect the values of entities that make the test and use the test. In a parting anecdote Ferguson also demonstrates the power of the test for, despite his criticisms, Ferguson refuses to disclose his score on the Math subsection!
Chapter 5 – A major theme of this chapter is the rhetoric that surrounds college admission, from the way in which parental anxiety manifests in the college admission process to college slogans—currently more concerned, it seems, with a student’s journey and the abstract notion of success than any particular ideals—and viewbooks that tap into a structure of affect as opposed to facts. The invocation of feeling harkens back to Chapter 1’s themes of presentation/reputation and marketing.
Although the public might be resistant to conceptualize Education as a consumer good (at least initially), we can use the discussion of branding to consider how institutions must endeavor to distinguish themselves when their “products” are ostensibly of similar quality. On some level, each school has an identity comprised of things like color, slogans, and mascots but the messaging for selective colleges seems quite similar (117). Furthermore, on the opposite end of the spectrum, one might argue that despite institutions’ expressed desire for diversity the challenges of the application process at selective schools tends to ensure that students share a core set of traits (124).
Chapter 6 – Largely concerned with the difficulties of conveying oneself to admission committees via an intermediary (i.e., the college application), this chapter tries to get at the question of what schools are really looking for and how they go about collecting this information on the application itself. Ferguson notes two things of interest here: the first is question whether the nature of the application favors extroverts[13] and the second, more important observation, is that the identification and presentation of an “authentic” (as deemed by readers!) self is challenging for young writers.[14] Ferguson argues that this entreatment to “know thyself” gained popularity as Baby Boomers began to occupy positions of influence.[15] Later, Ferguson also suggests that the type of introspection required by college admission essays stands in direct contrast to the way in which white, middle-class culture in America structures the lives of teenagers (139).
Although Ferguson does not consider what admission offices want out of the personal essay, I suggest that the form’s popularity has something to do with the dominant ideology of “fit” and that while readers may not be actively reading an essay in order to determine fit, they are interested in feeling like they got to know the student a little bit better. Rightly or wrongly, this particular stance by readers might result from the way in which admission officers are often tasked with advocating for students in the admission process and memorable applicants can provide the foundation for a case to admit. Ferguson’s inclusion of the Georgetown University prompt (“write about a current world crisis and propose a solution”) begs the question of whether essay prompts can be focused on demonstrating critical thinking and subsequently gaining a sense of passion.
Chapter 7 – Ferguson mentions that college tuition began to rise faster than inflation beginning in the 1970s but does not provide a reason for this other than an observation that health care and education are the two perennial growth sectors in America. Although Ferguson makes a comparison between car salesmen and the tuition discounting practices of institutions, the analogy seems slightly off as it seems more likely that colleges and universities are looking at budgets across the class as opposed to a series of individual transactions. Nevertheless, the more pertinent issue that Ferguson raises is that colleges are not necessarily obligated to, or interested in, reducing student debt. Via a conversation with Richard Vedder, a professor of Economics, Ferguson also suggests that much of the additional money has come to be spent on institutional bloat (177). Finally, in discussing the value of a college degree, Ferguson suggests that a diploma has become used as an unofficial signifier in the hiring process with the abolishment of employment tests (179).
Chapter 8 – Although the justification Ferguson provides for the high turnover rate in college admission is a bit misleading, his mention of the age gap (i.e., “missing middle”) in the profession deserves further examination (182). If Ferguson is in fact correct about the age demographics of the profession—no data is provided—we might speculate that such a structure would have implications for the enactment of admission policy: what does it mean, for example, to have a process that is overseen by committed individuals but who delegate the day-to-day to recent graduates who might not have a real interest in admission?
Also frustrating is Ferguson’s assertion that a form of reverse affirmative action is taking place (184-185) without providing data to support this claim. Although anyone following Higher Education can likely affirm the concerns over the shortage of males (generally, although there are exceptions in fields like Engineering) the charge that the white men receive an advantage remains unsubstantiated. Ferguson also relies on anecdotal data from an unnamed “ex-counselor” to describe enrollment targets (185) and this same ex-counselor mentions the importance of a hook, which should be related back to the purpose of the admission essay in Chapter 6.[16] It seems, for example, that one might produce a productive discussion by reading the concept of “fit” against the perception of having a “hook” and the crafting of a class.
Toward the end of the chapter, Ferguson seems to engage in a bit of the speculation that he decried in Chapter 3’s discussion of College Confidential as he retells the fate of a friend’s daughter (194). Also problematic is the way in which Ferguson equates a “safety school” with “undesirable” in a way that reinforces the prestige hierarchy (195). Ultimately, although Ferguson raises some interesting questions, it seems evident that his knowledge of the actual college admission process is the weakest element of the book.
Finally, Ferguson also includes a brief section on the ambiguity of “likely letters” and the additional stress that they can cause. For those in the industry, the language of the letter makes it exceedingly clear what it is (and what it implies) but Ferguson’s anecdote should be taken seriously as a warning about how official materials can be interpreted by their intended audience.
Chapter 9 – Recalling the discussion of the value of a college degree in Chapter 7, Ferguson asks readers to wrestle with the tension created by increasingly customizable majors—driven by student/customer demand!—and the ability to track what that major actually represents (210).
[1] This is actually a very pertinent question that has been discussed in publications like Times Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and in multiple articles in The New York Times, including a series titled “What Is College For?”
[2] Ferguson later expands upon this duality, noting in Chapter 2 how university/college administrators will often engage in practices that they claim to be harmful (e.g., rankings, reliance on standardized testing, pricing out the competition, etc.) as a result of being locked in a sort of arms race for students and the tuition that they represent (38).
[3] The potential far-reaching effects of this are suggested later in Chapter 2 as Ferguson writes “And childhood now was a matter of setting life goals and arranging your activities in pursuit of them” (30).
[4] I think we must complicate this picture a bit by thinking about how the established American universities also served as the basis for the development of social networks that would intersect with social mobility and class. The aspiration, then, to attend a top tier school might have existed prior but the motivation for such an endeavor may have changed as a result of the democratization that Ferguson describes.
[5] The rankings have been criticized as a sort of “popularity contest” as 22.5% of the ranking comes from a school’s reputation among its peers. See also the Institute for Higher Education Policy’s “College and University Ranking Systems” for additional information. For its part, U.S. News & World Report argues that reputation has value (46).
[6] See also page 44.
[7] The exception to this, as Ferguson notes in Chapter 7, is in matters of financial aid.
[8] Thinking about this in conjunction with the controversy surrounding U.S. News & World Report, one might ask a deeper question about the “correct” way to go about quantifying the college experience. Given the current discussions in Higher Education, it seems as though the American public has yet to come to a consensus.
[9] The question then becomes how one goes about working to infuse “good information” into the public’s consciousness and, more importantly, how to encourage a culture in which college admission becomes talked about in a rational manner.
[10] For example, in message boards like College Confidential readers must invest an extra amount of work to try to think critically about who these posters are in a process that can include researching a poster’s history, looking at the frequency distribution of posts in order to detect possible paid posters, and the sometimes next-to-impossible step of determining a poster’s credibility on a particular topic. For similar discussion with respect to Amazon reviews, see an episode of Slate’s Culture Gabfest.
[11] For example, we can consider how the Educational Testing Service (under contract from the College Board) validates its test questions: it assumes that high-scoring students should get a particular item correct, which means that the values and perspectives of these particular students become ingrained in the test in a tautological process. See also recent evidence that racial bias in SAT questions persists. See also page 89 for more information on developing questions.
[12] See Robert Sternberg’s “Rainbow Project” and Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
[13] Later Ferguson also mentions “narcissism” and “exhibitionism” (142).
[14] See also, “Some kinds of passion wouldn’t appeal to the admissions committees” (141).
[15] Although this claim is unsubstantiated in the text, one might be able to make a case that an increased focus on the inner life has certainly manifested in culture with the introspection of the hippies to New Age thinking in the 80s to a focus on feelings in the present.
[16] Although it is entirely possible that the percentages quoted by the anonymous source on page 185 are correct, there is no way to know whether this numbers are generalizable across institutions.
The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT
The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT
Chris Tokuhama
Bibliography
Stier, D. (2014). The Perfect Score Project: Uncovering the Secrets of the SAT. New York: Harmony Books.
Author
Adapted from Debbie Stier’s Perfect Score Project biography (which seems very similar to the one provided in her book and on other websites): Debbie Stier’s book publishing career has spanned two decades, most of it spent in public relations. Debbie regularly speaks on topic pertaining to social media and technology as well as, most recently, standardized testing. Stier has written a piece in Time that largely supports testing and published drafts of her book chapters in Psychology Today.
Summary
The Perfect Score Project presents a peculiar amalgamation of memoir and test preparation guide. Although the book is largely focused on detailing Debbie Stier’s “project,” it also contains inserts of advice about various aspects of the SAT. The advice presented is reasonable but nothing new and this suggests that this book represents nothing more than a repackaging of old information with a veneer of self-improvement memoir in order to make it friendlier to readers. Furthermore, the stark contrast between the “experience” and the advice—it should be noted that Stier’s only claim to credibility is having taken the SAT seven times and having endured multiple preparation courses—demonstrates a lack of engagement with the fields of testing, college admission, and higher education by Stier. Indeed, Stier’s use of outside references is somewhat questionable throughout the work, seemingly relying on a relatively small body of work and failing to provide citations for claims in multiple instances. What Stier seems continually unable to do is to understand that scoring well on the SAT is not a grand “project” but rather a straightforward (if not easy) process of internalizing a strategy based on the logic of the SAT. To save time, one should just seek out the inserts if one is looking for information about test-taking strategies for the SAT. In reading her book, it becomes increasingly clear that Stier is not interested in dismantling the anxiety that surrounds testing, nor is she invested in dislodging testing’s place in college admission. Ultimately, this book evidences a missed opportunity to meaningfully reflect on the way that high-stakes testing can impact the parent-child relationship.
Notes
Prologue – Stier establishes a college-going environment that is suffused with anxiety that results from economic concerns and lack of information about how to prepare for the application process. Stier notes that the impetus of the book was a belief that high SAT scores could lead to scholarship money for a student, her son Ethan, who was otherwise mediocre—here the reader must pause to question the validity of this assertion—and that what follows is a result of that position. Although one might sympathize with Stier’s desire to aid her son’s ability to go to college (it is yet unclear whether and to what extent her son is actually interested in college), one also questions whether Stier’s efforts are really about effecting change or if they are instead primarily focused on creating advantage for her son at the expense of others. The larger question here is to what extent The Perfect Score Project legitimizes the SAT—and standardized testing as an extension—as part of the evaluation matrix for college admission; by focusing solely on standardized tests it seems that Stier is prone to overemphasizing their impact.[1] It seems evident that Stier is not initially interested in challenging testing culture although she might have an interesting angle as she would be able to contrast the ways that testing impacts her son as a student who is diagnosed with ADHD with testing in the form of the SAT/ACT.
Chapter 1 – Stier writes “I was ‘modeling’ the behavior that I was hoping to cultivate in my son” (11) but one wonders if this behavior is really results-oriented thinking. Stier would argue against this, as, for her, “project” indicates that “it’s about the journey” (13). And while the moral of this story might be that perspective has allowed her to understand the benefits conferred by this experience, we must question Stier’s truthfulness as her stated goal was to obtain scholarship money through higher testing (9). Here, it seems as though Stier wants to benefit from the “fix it” rhetoric that pervades America in an era of popular makeover and renovation shows while avoiding the negative connotations of over-attentive parents.[2] We can see how Stier’s book indicates that it will conform to some of the tropes of the genre near the end of the chapter as she writes on page 15:
Looking back, maybe I should have called it “The Perfect Do-Over.” But that insight didn’t come until much later. At the time, this was about how I could salvage Ethan’s thirteen years of education, at the very last minute, with the SAT.
Here, Stier makes clear that what comes next—what the book is about—is about a journey for her and not necessarily a story about how her son developed in his relationship to testing or to college admission. In spite of this, perhaps the most valuable piece of this short chapter is the way in which Stier reminds us the degree to which parents can feel powerless in the process and how this impulse can lead to reliance on things like checklists that function to give parents a sense of control (13). Remaining unexamined are the possible reasons for this anxiety and whether the actions taken by parents on behalf of their students are truly beneficial. As the above quote indicates, this “project” seems much more about the Stier than it does about truly helping her son.
At this point it should also be noted that despite being a single mother, Stier is the beneficiary of some luxuries that other parents might not benefit from: being able to afford the cost—both in time and in money—of taking the SAT seven times along with the discretionary income to purchase domain names indicates that Stier is approaching this problem from a very particular vantage point. While keeping in mind that this situation may present very real stress for students and parents, how sympathetic should we be that she has not saved for her student’s college education?
Chapters 2 and 3 – Although Stier continually indicates that the woman she was at the start of this process is not the woman who she is now, it becomes evident that Stier privileged her perspective over that of her son. In writing, “Thinking about my son, I didn’t remember any ‘trauma’ or ‘unresolved issues’ or ‘test anxiety’ from my own SAT experience. Why would I? Low scores or not, I had gotten into college,” (17) Stier seems willfully ignorant of her own experience as a teenager, having mentioned earlier that she developed a story about her past to in order to diffuse the impact that standardized tests had on her. Stier goes on to mention how unearthing old letters challenged this view but does not indicate how her attitude toward testing, her project, or her son may have changed as a result of this. Later, in Chapter 3, Stier begins to hint at the importance of empathizing with students going through the process[3] but does not, at this point, address the point explicitly.
Chapter 5 – A prominent theme in this section is realigning the efforts and perceptions of students and parents, understanding motivations for each group and how these particular drives manifest in terms of behavior. Complicating matters is Stier’s conflation of projects that involve making something (e.g., building a car) with her own efforts at improving standardized test scores[4]—although this is part of a much larger discussion, the way in which critical thinking and analysis manifests in “projects” that gesture toward a DIY or maker movement differ from the thought processes involved in studying, generally, or test taking, in particular.
Stier also unfortunately cites work by Neufeld and Maté[5] to suggest that parents are pitted against peers in a battle to influence young people (46). In addition to creating a simplistic—shouldn’t “media” also be included at the very least?—and antagonistic dichotomy, Stier’s misunderstanding of attachment theory leads to the development of a perspective that largely ignores how youth culture functions[6] and how the values of the peer group impact an individual student’s understanding of himself or herself. Although Stier advocates for parents to be involved in the life of their child (47), what she proposes is an ignorance of the way in which parental influence and peer culture can work together to spur a student on. Exemplifying the unhelpful nature of Stier’s contribution, she writes, “Honestly, I’m not sure what level of parental engagement is necessary to be an effective motivator. […] I’m pretty sure any level of warm and connected parental participation is a good thing and has the potential to be a powerful source of teenage motivation” (48).
Chapter 6 – Earlier in the Prologue it was noted that Stier does not seem invested in challenging either the primacy of standardized tests or the anxiety that surrounds them and Stier does nothing to subvert this assertion in her discussion of College Confidential, an online forum that often serves as a breeding ground for speculation. In fact, Stier’s account exemplifies how the kind of discussion that can occur on College Confidential is actually not productive or helpful, nor does it encourage students to engage in the critical reflection that is often involved in the “projects” that Stier cites earlier in Chapter 5.[7]
Stier does note that the standardized test can advantage particular groups of people—although this topic deserves a much richer treatment than given here—but also makes assertions that while possibly true, without additional support, seem racist (e.g., Asians are better prepared in Math). More problematic is the way in which Stier fails to address the larger issue of bias in testing, which calls for an interrogation of what the standardized test purports to measure, how it claims to do so, and whether its method reflects particular biases toward what is measurable.[8]
Chapter 7 – Stier’s failure to engage in the larger conversation about testing further hurts her as she talks about the recentering of SAT scores in 1995: although Stier notes that there is a correlation between SAT Verbal scores and school curriculum (although she seems to lump all curriculum and all SAT-taking students into one category) she does not question whether SAT scores are actually an accurate measure of verbal ability.[9]
Also frustrating is Stier’s inability to link her embarrassment over her test score to an earlier quote about self-confidence in American students (52). Had Stier engaged in thoughtful reflection about cultural factors that informed this emotion—which is unfounded as she writes that SAT scores do not matter as an adult—she might have rethought the adult/peer dichotomy that she embraced in Chapter 5.
Additionally, Stier’s writing on the SAT suggests that she does not understand how the scores are actually used or interpreted (i.e., in a national context) and continues to think about scores from an individual perspective. Further in writing “Superscoring is what the colleges do with your Score Choice—to position themselves in the college rankings” (68) Stier showcases her surface-level understanding of the use of standardized test scores in college admission: had she dug a little deeper, the reasoning for superscoring—again related to an understanding of the test as a measure and how its components operate—would have become apparent as would the reason that superscoring occurs on the SAT but not the ACT. Finally, Stier misunderstands the debate over optional test scores entirely (70): her logic regarding the impact that optional test reporting has on U.S. News & World Report rankings is deeply flawed and insufficiently considers how the test optional nature of an admission process can alter the demographic of the students who apply to that institution.
Chapter 8 – The extent to which Stier buys into the system is shown on page 72 as she writes about seeking advice for test preparation: “Plus, [Mark] graduated from MIT, so I figured he was a reliable source. Obviously he’d done well on the SAT.” Not only does this quote exemplify the degree to which Stier upholds the traditional hierarchy of education in America, it also runs counter to Stier’s own observations about the changing nature of the SAT. Even if Mark did in fact score well on an older version of the SAT, there are no guarantees that his prowess is in any way translatable to advice on the test’s current iteration. Mark may provide good advice but that is because he is the founder of a test preparation company and not because of the institution that he attended or because of his SAT scores.
Although Stier raises valid questions about the relationship between the SAT and test preparation (74) and includes a brief history of the test itself (75-76), she continues to fail to consider whether the SAT actually measures what it purports to (i.e., innate ability) or how these measures are reconciled against a test prep industry that largely teaches students how to take the test rather than content that will be on the test.
Throughout the course of the chapter it becomes increasingly obvious that Stier’s intended reader is a parent like herself: the person who simply wants to be told what to do in order to get through a problem.[10] For this reader, Stier’s book functions as nothing more than an extended review of various test prep products, with common advice sprinkled in.[11] For Stier, the “project” continues to focus on product/outcome instead of focusing on how to actually work with her son through the process. Further supporting the perception that The Perfect Score Project is really nothing more than a prep book in different packaging is Stier’s inclusion of a “recipe for success on the essay” (80).[12] Stier’s information isn’t necessarily bad here as the score of the SAT’s essay is entirely determined by a scoring rubric but, at the same time, this information is hardly a “secret.” A carefully considered work would, for example, take advantage of an observation that homemade vocabulary flashcards work better (88) in order to comment on engagement, practice, and learning—ideally, the themes that should be highlighted in the conceptualization of a “project.” It is additionally ironic that Stier writes about a revelatory moment where gained perspective on what she was doing in a moment where she is still focused on the mechanics of answering questions (92).
Chapter 9 – Stier’s lack of critical thinking continues to be an issue, deciding to employ Dr. John Chung’s SAT Math prep book despite the fact that she knows that she holds an irrational belief regarding the book’s effectiveness. Perhaps the most generous comment can make at this point is an observation about the power of the anxiety surrounding testing and how it can encourage undesirable behavior. The larger, and more interesting, theme would seem to be a discussion of “learning” in studying for the SAT and to what extent this process mirrors the process of learning that takes place in schools.
Chapter 11 – It seems evident that Stier has completely lost sight of her goal in this process as she fixates on her scores and the corresponding percentiles.[13] What becomes increasingly obvious is that Stier is engaged in “project” designed to provide validation and redemption for her anxiety over her perceived lack of preparedness with regard to college admission. Not only focusing on scores but how they make her feel—as opposed to using this as an opportunity to better understand her son’s frame of mind—seems indicative of the way in which Stier approaches this endeavor.
It is further telling that Stier is a devotee of Stanley Kaplan’s approach to test preparation, including the quote “To say you can’t improve scores is to say you can’t improve students” (115) without comment. Kaplan’s words create a false equivalency here, assuming that improving standardized test scores indicates something about improving students, when the two are not necessarily linked in a causal relationship. Here we can again see how Stier’s inability to contextualize standardized tests—or testing culture for that matter—in a larger environment of education leads to misguided thinking.
Chapters 13, 14 and 15 – One must seriously question the extent to which “learning” is equated with “higher scores” throughout this book; it would seem that any amount of perspective would teach one that scores on the SAT do not readily translate to anything beyond success on the SAT. Additionally, Stier’s fixation on score is also highly at odds with a desire to actually learn anything meaningful. In Chapter 14 Stier further evidences inappropriate conflation between the two, noting that “Learning was the easy part…it was remembering that was hard” and that “understanding is remembering in disguise” (158-159).[14] At the conclusion of the chapter Stier records her latest round of scores, noting a 30 point gain in Critical Reading, a 40 point gain in Math, and a 90 point drop in Writing—Stier’s failure to really understand the scoring system, however, leads her to focus on her victories (i.e., “motivational rocket fuel”) despite the fact that these scores are within the variable range for her based on her testing history.
Stier’s paternalistic attitude remerges in this chapter as she takes her children to Kumon, writing, “nor did I know that it was critical for their well-being for me to reclaim my place as their respected mother” (163). Although Stier’s parenting style is not necessarily called into question here, it seems evident that Stier’s book would benefit from an examination of how her attitude as a parent intersects with her motivations for her “project” and who all of this is really for. Although this attitude eventually results in her children moving out of the hose, Stier remains staunchly unable to think critically about what this rupture means for her and her family; the lesson here seems to be about how to navigate the parent-child relationship (Stier solves this by deciding that her family can bond over television) and to endeavor to understand children on their own terms. Instead of understanding this, Stier notes that her son “matured” when he became to exhibit behavior more in line with Stier’s idealized version of who he should be.[15]
Chapter 15 also further evidences shoddy thinking as it conflates “intelligence” with the SAT (170); as previously noted on pages 75-76, although the SAT was originally conceived as a measure of aptitude and based on models of intelligence tests, the current iteration claims to evaluate “developed reasoning.” Stier’s reasoning for equating IQ tests and SAT tests (176) is based on an incomplete analysis of the test’s history and, again, a failure to fully consider the test in its modern context.[16] Stier correctly notes that Kumon reinforces skills but skills are not the same as cultivating intelligence or actually learning material (although one might make the case that there is a residual effect as one learns how to learn). Later, Stier also describes undergoing neurological testing and incorrectly labels this as related to “intelligence”—one might possibly be able to link this to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, but an explicit connection was not made and one gets the sense that the way in which Stier’s evocation of “IQ” is in alignment with the most colloquial use of the term.
Chapter 17 – Steir’s treatment of K. Anders Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice is tricky for while the tenets of Ericsson’s work may apply generally to SAT prep, it seems likely that Stier was exposed to the concept as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. The evolution of the idea is important here as Gladwell employed the “10,000 hours” mantra in a specific way in his book The Outliers and this interpretation is not necessarily congruent with what Ericsson put forth in his original paper. Furthermore, the concept of deliberate practice has been contested in stories by the BBC and Time, among others[17]
Chapter 18 – This chapter prominently features a section on testing accommodations, making an unsupported assertion that the number of students testing with accommodations has increased since 2003 (222). More curious—and further demonstrating a lack of thoroughness—is Stier’s failure to mention the controversy over over-diagnosing of ADHD and its relationship to standardized testing given that her son has ADHD!
Characteristically, Stier also includes some less-than-flattering information but does not pause to reflect on what this might mean for her or her family: on page 232 Stier writes that she would only learn later that feeling like you know something and actually knowing it are two different things and that it’s best for students to choose their own goals in order to increase motivation. Of these two, the second is more problematic as it upholds the way in which Stier continually privileges her perspective, wants, and desires over that of her son. Stier goes onto write:
The real magic of the project, though I didn’t know it at the time, was that what I thought about the SAT became more important to Ethan than what his friends though. I embedded myself in my teenage son’s life at the very moment when those forces of nature—the peers—are most powerful, and most dangerous.
In many ways, the parenting style that Stier continually exhibits—as told in her own words!—continues to run counter to her ideal of an “authoritative” style and seems generally much more aligned with “authoritarian” parenting.
Chapter 19 – The repeated invocation of Ben Bernstein in reference to test anxiety (Stier also mentioned him early in Chapter 3) might suggest that particular works have been highly influential for Stier and that she does not necessarily consider multiple views on a particular subject.[18]
The more important theme here, however, is one unaddressed by Stier herself: the lack of knowledge regarding testing conditions/locations, SAT II versus SAT testing, and differences between College Board policy and enforcement by schools all point to the way in which cultural capital can have an indirect impact on scoring.[19] What Stier should point to here—but does not—is that individuals can have advantages that have nothing to do with testing ability.[20]
Finally, Stier’s perspective on her own parenting is again called into questions as she relates an anecdote about her son’s absorption in World of Warcraft in order to assert that “The best part of the project was the fun I was having with Ethan” (253)—a claim that while possibly true, receives little support in the stories that Stier has chosen to tell thus far.
Chapter 20 – Stier’s research skills are again called into question as she notes that The New York Times called Advantage Testing’s score gains “stunning” (257) as an Internet search returned no results to this effect.[21]
What becomes most obvious in this section is that any improvement in Steir’s family life was incidental to her project and not a result of it. One must again question Stier’s interpretation of this situation as her understanding of familial intimacy seems directly correlated with her son’s positive attitude toward her; noting that her son was “loyal,” “stricken at seeing his mother sad,” and “he’d become more me than me” (273), Stier makes clear that bonding is significant only to the degree in which it is related to her.
Furthermore, Stier does not reexamine her assertion that high SAT scores equal scholarships—one deeply suspects that she simply had not done her research at the outset—for although she notes that the University of Vermont offered her son merit (and not need-based as she points out) aid, the highest scholarship for that school only requires an 1800 combined SAT score for out-of-state applicants.
Stier concludes with recommendations that seem to stem largely from her own experience and are not necessarily grounded in any actual data. Her call for a “coherent curriculum in mathematics” (279, for example, seems directly related to Stier’s own deficiency in the subject. Moreover, Stier notes that “a good SAT course can offer a coherent curriculum in the SAT”(279), a statement that should cause her to rethink the entire book and the value of the SAT and its scores. Stier’s call to consider the foundations developed in American schools is a valid one but her insistence on tying this advocacy to measures like the SAT without acknowledging the greater ongoing discussion surrounding testing (at the very least, No Child Left Behind and the Common Core should enter into the fray at this point) evidences a narrow focus that is ultimately unproductive. Stier’s understanding of college-going is also suspect and the larger picture that emerges is that she and her son would have benefitted from having better discussions with their college counselor earlier in the process.
Perhaps most unfortunate is Stier’s complete lack of perspective about how this “project” worked: Stier notes that she got to know her son better by reading his essays (281) and one can readily see that this bonding has nothing to do with getting a perfect score on the SAT (which ultimately really seems much more like a gimmick than anything else). Throughout her book Stier continually indicates a disinterest in getting to know “youth culture” and understanding where her son is coming from—had she felt differently, she might have realized that “The Perfect Score Project” was entirely unnecessary.
[1] It should also be noted that, at this point, the types of colleges that Stier and Ethan are interested in applying to. It seems likely from the connection between standardized test scores that Stier is talking about some level of selective college but this important detail is missing for the importance of test scores varies across institutions.
[2] Here we must also consider the extent to which this works fits into the larger genre of self-help/discovery memoirs that tend to be written by 1) women 2) of a certain age.
[3] It seems like a much taller order to ask teenagers to assume the perspective of their parents although this does not mean that they should be kept in the dark.
[4] See also earlier notes in Chapter 1 about the implications of conceptualizing this effort as a “project.”
[5] Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers (2006).
[6] Stier actually seems to have a disdain for youth culture as she writes that her son was “not even fazed enough to look up from whatever inane thingymabobber he happed to have been wasting his time on at that moment” (82). At best, she seems unwilling to engage in the nuances of the teenage experience (107). See also the way in which gamication goes uncommented upon and Stier’s comment about Grockit, “state-of-the-art technology, gaming, adaptive learning (none of which appealed to me, of course)” (134). See also, pages 202 and 233.
[7] See also the equation “SAT = college” on page 275.
[8] For example, we must consider how the Educational Testing Service (under contract from the College Board) validates its test questions: it assumes that high-scoring students should get a particular item correct, which means that the values and perspectives of these particular students become ingrained in the test in a tautological process. Stier touches briefly on the vetting process for questions on pages 142-143 but does not interrogate what the “ability” criteria, which, according to Stier, states, “All questions must allow the testers to distinguish between a high and low scorer” (142). What Stier fails to mention is that the College Board designates a “high scorer” based on how a student did on other sections of the SAT—thus the logic here is that students who answered previous questions correctly should be able to answer future questions correctly, and not that these questions are necessarily accurate measures of anything else. Furthermore, Stier evidently has not done thorough research on the topic for she does not account for recent evidence that racial bias in SAT questions persists. See also the equating of “nonobjective” with “nonbiased” on page 78.
[9] Stier’s observation on page 190 that “The focus [of Critical Reading passages] is on the author’s meaning or intent, which is not necessarily what is taught in most high school English classes” seems like the perfect opportunity to launch into an investigation about the validity of the SAT but Stier makes no such effort.
[10] This mentality results in Stier’s confusion over the conflicting advice offered by different test preparation companies; although Stier briefly acknowledges that test prep companies are training you in a systematic approach to the test, not necessarily actually teaching content, the implications of this are not discussed. Stier philosophy toward the test can further be seen through her desire for “standardized advice” (137) and assertion that she was “dying for someone [she] could trust to just tell [her] what to do” (139).
[11] Further cementing Stier’s purpose is her conceptualization of her reader as part of a “market” (103).
[12] As further example, we can see that although Stier cites a study by Les Perelman that correlates an essay’s score with its length (110), she does not use this moment to challenge the legitimacy of the essay’s score as a measure of writing ability but instead proceeds to provide tips on how to game the scoring system.
[13] Stier also fails to mention the range in section scores (which are reported on the results!), which the College Board cites as ±30-40 points for each section. See also page 135.
[14] Specifically, Stier seems to confuse “automaticity” with learning/mastery.
[15] See also, 197.
[16] To add frustration, Stier even includes a quote from a verbal tutor that says, on page 181, “The SAT is not a literature test. It’s a vocabulary-based reasoning test.” In short, Stier needs to be much more specific and explicit in her definition of “intelligence.” Stier also goes on to reference Advantage Testing in Chapter 19 (256), a company whose representative would later write an opinion piece for The New York Times on the SAT titled “Not an I.Q. Test.”
[17] To be fair, the Time and Huffington Post pieces may have been published once The Perfect Score Project’s manuscript had been locked but the BBC piece is from 2012 and its position should be accounted for in a responsible treatment of the subject.
[18] See earlier point with Ericsson/Gladwell in Chapter 17 and Stier’s reference to Gladwell on page 247.
[19] Stier also includes a list of preferences for test center amenities but, unhelpfully, only mentions how one is supposed to determine what facilities will be available at a given test center 13 pages later.
[20] This is perhaps not surprising given the way in which Stier discusses Advantage Testing, a private test prep company, in Chapter 20. Stier mentions that Advantage has not turned anyone away because of ability to pay (according to the founder) but does not discuss the very real class implications of this kind of testing.
[21] The one result that did come back was not complimentary toward private SAT tutors like Advantage Testing. Advantage Testing also seems to misrepresent its coverage in the press, selectively picking quotes from a Wall Street Journal piece, for example, that is not exactly complimentary.
Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process
Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process
Chris Tokuhama
Bibliography
Toor, R. (2001). Admission Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin
Author
After a career as an editor in academic publishing, Rachel Toor worked for three years in undergraduate admission at Duke University before eventually becoming an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University. Despite the positions that Toor makes evident in her book Admissions Confidential, Toor has not made significant contributions to Higher Education or college admission reform despite working for The Chronicle of Higher Education, a platform whose audience would be highly interested in such a discussion. In fact, Toor’s recent work for The Chronicle centers mostly on writing—which makes sense given her background—and does not touch upon the issues that she seemed so passionate about in her book. (Toor did write an article called “Picking the Right College is a Vital, Unimportant Process” soon after her departure from Duke that is essentially a reprinting of material that appears in Admission Confidential.) More damning is Toor’s decision to work as a private college consultant, charging up to $200/hour according to a 2006 article in Business Week, indicating that while she remains associated with the profession, she has no real desire to change it. Toor’s book is also cited in a piece by Daniel Golden in The Wall Street Journal about relaxed admission standards for wealthy applicants; Golden would go on to write The Price of Admission on this same subject.
Summary
Although she expresses a desire for her work to compel the public to ask informed questions about the process, Toor does not actually structure her book in a way that is conducive to this. Instead of using examples as an entrée to a topic that should be interrogated, Toor often includes unsubtle jabs and then, at the conclusion, suggests what she would like to see without offering any productive means of how to achieve her idealized vision. Admissions Confidential contains sections of seemingly solid advice, mired in work that can be described as self-indulgent. Ultimately, Toor’s project would have been better served had it endeavored to answer the questions that she raises in the final pages.
Notes
Introduction – At first glance, the introduction seems to indicate that the following book adheres to many of the tropes of the volumes in the “insider’s guide” genre: featuring a fresh-faced (i.e., inexperienced) staff member who uses a smattering of jargon to establish competency and authority, Admissions Confidential offers readers the chance to glimpse the inner workings of a process that many Americans are keenly aware of and yet rather unknowledgeable about. Of note is the way in which the author’s tone indicates her position relative to the profession of college admission: confessing that she sought job in admission due to a desire for something “not as intellectually demanding” (5) and writing that, after a meeting with the Director of Undergraduate Admission, “it seemed clear to me that I was going to be offered a job” (7) suggests that Toor holds a modicum of disdain for her former colleagues and their vocation.
What becomes clear, in retrospect, is that Toor holds herself in higher esteem than she should—ironic, given her later comments about her colleagues—as she aspires to ascend to the ranks of prestige conferred by the status of being an academic. On page xii Toor writes, “Ethnology is the discipline of looking closely at a specific culture, trying to get a sense of what you can learn not only about that narrow strip of interest but also what that might ultimately tell us about ourselves” and, in doing so, displays her two major flaws. Throughout her book Toor makes it clear that academics, in general, exhibit a sort of higher-order thinking that Toor regards as superior and the definition of ethnology employed in this way only supports this position. Worse, however, is that while the quote points to the very valuable practice of attempting to understand a culture on its own terms and being self-reflexive about one’s positionality relative to the group in question, Toor herself frequently fails to embody this practice.
Chapter 1 – Toor evidences a position that is contradictory, if not hypocritical, as her opening critiques the hierarchy of the University and the mystique surrounding it (noting on page 16 that “smart people” can be found elsewhere) while simultaneously repeatedly making a point about the credentials of her colleagues. For example, Toor’s observation that “none of the associates had gone to elite schools” (18) could be used as the foundation for a larger point about the ways in which choice of college does not determine success in life, the juxtaposition of that statement with Toor’s prominent story of her own undergraduate education at Yale yet again points to a measure of elitism on the part of Toor.[1] Toor also seems to be quite ambivalent toward privilege, describing her own in an uncritical fashion (31) while taking pains to point out that of others (24, 29-30). Toor also fails to mention the ways in which she was complicit in a process that she feels is inadequate (23) and one also begins to suspect how good Toor was at her job (24, 28). In contrast to Toor’s approach, however, is Victoria,[2] a former PhD student, who seems to embrace the idea of a good admission counselor as one who is also an educator.[3] Although one can see how an instinct to be a teacher may cause friction with elements like file review or time constraints, the instinct seems to be aligned with the most helpful and professional service. In and of itself, Toor’s attitude is not necessarily an issue but the lack of self-relexivity weakens Toor’s ability to make a substantive argument about the state of college admission. An observation about class and age on page 31, for example, could have been parlayed into an interesting critique on how a lack of diversity in the admission committee might affect the committee’s values but it is unsurprising that Toor does not expand upon this given her shortcomings in being critical about her own perspective. Ultimately, Toor’s unwillingness to grapple with the implications of her unexamined biases are only problematic as her work aspires to be more than a memoir about her experiences as a college admission officer.
Toor also makes bold claims like, “If you gave the actual statistics about who, when all is said and done, gets into highly selective schools, people would walk away not only discouraged, but disgusted” (18) As exemplified by the quote, the largest issue here is that much of Toor’s writing remains at the level of opinion or observation and fails to transcend to the level of well-argued critique. Condemning everything from the information sessions to the quality of the tour guides, Toor seems to be writing toward an audience who already views the college admission process as she does: with suspicion and contempt.[4] Worse, however, is Toor’s failure to provide adequate support for her assertions, phrases like “From what I understand” (22) indicate a lack of due diligence and a mind that is not highly interested in fully understanding the topic that is being written about. Ultimately, what becomes apparent is that while she writes about college admission based purely on personal experience—a limitation acknowledged in the introduction—Toor does not have perspective on the field as a whole or, more importantly, how college admission functions in the larger landscape of higher education.
Chapter 2 – In describing her school visits, Toor demonstrates a marked unwillingness to engage in relationship building (39) or to use her time in order to get to know the nuances of the schools that she will be responsible for (42). Toor’s recounting also evidences a lack of self-awareness regarding the role that she plays in the context of the admission profession—indeed, everything seems to be about her. In some ways, this tendency might be excusable if Toor was, like many of her colleagues, in her twenties but it does not seem unfair to expect more from a woman who, at the time, was in her mid-thirties. It is no surprise, then, that Ezra Stiles Prep’s purport to focus on character—here Toor does not deign to comment on the extent to which this is actually true in the school’s culture or how similar qualities may manifest at other institutions—resonates strongly with Toor in manner that goes uncomplicated.
It should be noted however that Toor’s description of the holistic review (45-53) is quite good but is also prefaced by a comment that her packaged message to students regarding the process is not quite true (44). In this, we again see Toor’s proclivity to make statements in the form of asides that remain unsupported, although they may represent interesting lines of inquiry or critique.
Chapter 3 – Toor seems intent on indicating that she is better than her fellow admission officers, beginning the chapter with an anecdote about how her Sunday runs provide an opportunity for her to engage in stimulating conversation with academics (the implication being that her colleagues do not provide this type of interaction). The remarkable privileging of how Toor views the world is reaffirmed through the recounting of an admission presentation for students on page 63: Toor not only manages to convey a sense that her truth is more salient than what she says on behalf of Duke but also demeans the intelligence of her audience by suggesting that they are either too apathetic or ignorant to pursue the real situation.
Given Toor’s frequent ambivalence about the information conveyed in her speech, one begins to question why she is even working there in the first place. While one cannot fault Toor for failing to internalize the message used to sell Duke, one must also wonder why, if the practice was dishonest and/or abhorrent, Toor remained in the job for three years. Harkening back to chapter 1, there is a way in which Toor refrains from commenting on her complicity in a process that she seems displeased with and, more importantly, fails to extrapolate from this experience into a larger argument about the state of college admission at the time.
Toor’s limited understanding of her job and its potential also manifests in her conceptualization of herself as a “good recruiter” (71) and nothing more. Misunderstanding the opportunity for providing a service as a counselor or a teacher when faced by applicants who might initially appear less competitive, Toor further entrenches the notion that her perception of what she does limits what she might otherwise do.
Chapter 4 – It remains unclear why Toor chose the job of college admission given that she does not seem to have any particular interest in students who are not relatable. In reference to deferring Early Decision students, Toor writes, “Some—the ones who are most persistent and annoying through early December—I argue to have denied, rather than deferred, so that I will not have to endure more months of pestering” (82).
Regardless, Toor makes two important observations: that Early Decision tends to favor students who are knowledgeable about the college admission process (84)—here, again, Toor makes a point about privilege but does not expand upon the implications of this and/or wrestle with the various ways that privilege functions in college admission— and that files might present differently when viewed individually and when read against the pool as a whole. Toor goes on to provide a solid general overview of the admission evaluation criteria at Duke (88-107) but seems unable to refrain from inserting her own asides, in a way that indicates that she is not really truly interested in trying to understand the trends that she sees before her.[5] Toor’s information, though generally accurate, is not necessarily helpful as its presentation creates a kind of checklist for highly anxious parents and students; although the mechanics of evaluation are similar at many selective schools, Toor’s description supports a mentality that is geared toward gaming the system instead of trying to think about what the rating systems are designed as incomplete measures of. Toor feeds into the fixation over quantitative measurements—things like standardized test scores, class rank, and GPA, from the outside perspective—instead of working to explain that admission committees seek certain values and have come to use particular markers as support of the existence of those values.
Chapter 5 – Toor’s insistence on inserting herself into the writing as some sort of character continues with the introductions to chapters. Often providing little purpose other than talking about the state of her romantic life or, more often, discussing some aspect of running, these asides are, at best, self-indulgent. In some ways, however, this focus on self is instructive for it reminds the reader that admission files are read by individual officers and that each of these readers is also a person, replete with quirks. Without knowing the readers personally, it is rather impossible to predict what will resonate with a particular individual.
The evaluation is not completely subjective, though, as Toor nods to auto-admit and auto-deny criteria. Although Toor refrains from noting that these criteria are generally used more as guidelines to help readers focus on files that need deliberation, she also demonstrates here that she is not, in fact, an advocate for her students as she does not take the time to understand an unusual grading system (120). Unsurprisingly, Toor includes a sample of essays (125-139) that resonated with her but does not delve into why these particular essays were memorable. Worse, Toor fails to use her skills as an editor to deconstruct and analyze the patterns present in these essays in order to provide lessons for readers about how teenagers tend to write college admission essays. There are, for example particular types of appeals that applicants tend to make and particular styles that are seen or understood as more successful (by both applicants and readers).
Chapter 6 – Focusing on the preliminary stages of the review process, Toor emphasizes that readers consider applications in the context of school group. Although it seems unlikely that school group represents the only context in which applications are considered, it seems fair to suggest that school group is the primary context in which applications are considered when they are up for deliberation. Toor presents the inclusion of athletes’ file—noting that they are often near the bottom of the school group in terms of GPA—with a rather even tone considering her stance on development and legacy but conveniently forgets to point out that while athletes may not always seem to be the smartest students, they possess an irreplaceable institutional value for particular colleges and universities.[6] Characteristically, Toor does not connect her own love with Duke basketball—evidenced through the anecdote that opens the chapter—with the value of athletes on campus. Moreover, that Toor views an athlete as being admitted “behind her back” (155) suggests that she sees herself at the center of a process that is fundamentally not about her; as an admission officer Toor serves on a committee that is tasked with bringing in a class and Toor has been delegated responsibility on behalf of that committee but does not mean that she is privy to the entirety of that committee’s operations.
Interestingly, Toor does not seem to be completely unaware of herself as she mentions that, “I am notoriously bad at certain kinds of details” (153) and it is to her credit that she attempts to structure her work in such a way that mitigates this.[7] What would be more valuable, however, would be Toor’s expounding on the implications of understanding one’s limitations as a reader, both for her and for the profession as a whole.[8]
Again missing an opportunity to demystify the process, Toor mentions that “with so many qualified applicants, all they need do is give us one small reason to doubt them and we’ll just pick someone else” (158), which goes against the philosophy of reading to admit and being the student’s advocate (45). There is of course a way in which a reader is looking at the application with a critical eye and must ultimately render decisions about who will be admitted and who will not but Toor’s tone here suggests the attitude of a jaded admission officer.
Toor ends the chapter with a brief discussion of independent counselors and raises the point that some families might be obtaining the services of these individuals out of a fear of being disadvantaged. Toor does not, however, expand upon this point to consider the implications of fear in the college admission process and how this might drive a host of actions that she has observed; ultimately, it is this failure to develop a “big picture” view of the process that prevents Toor’s work from adding anything significant to the conversation around college admission.
Chapter 7 – Although Toor does not address this directly, this chapter asks readers to wrestle with the notion of what it means for files to be presented by a territory manager in committee—hence the notion of advocacy introduced earlier in the book—and how quickly this process takes place.[9] Toor fails to touch upon the important message for students that time constraints both in the file review and committee process mean that students must think carefully about what parts of their application are going to be salient to a reader; a useful exercise might be to think about what information can be gleaned from the application in a review that takes less than fifteen minutes and how the student’s application can be summarized to a committee in a very brief amount of time.
Toor also mentions Duke’s positive stance on affirmative action, but subsequently notes that most of her colleagues in the office may have struggled upholding this. Here Toor fails to address why her colleagues may have had difficulty internalizing Duke’s position on race in college admission—the age and relative lack of sophistication among new staff along with a possible discussion of latent racism in the South seems pertinent—and also misses an opportunity to juxtapose the attitudes of her colleagues with her own opinions regarding athletes and legacies.[10] Ultimately, Toor comes across as elitist as she sees herself as the sole enlightened member but this belief is perhaps without merit for although Toor notes that there are philosophical underpinnings for affirmative action, she does not discuss what they are. Furthermore, Toor continues to demonstrate her scholarly inadequacy through her inability to convince her colleagues to reconsider their positions on the subject; one suspects that although Toor feels otherwise, this situation speaks largely to her deficiencies as well as possibly those of her colleagues. Toor’s points about the nature of the college experience for minorities (184) remains valid but should be placed in a larger context about education as it is not merely relevant to college admission. Toor further evidences her shortcomings at the end of the chapter as she writes, “In some idealized imagined future, there would be no need for a weekend like BSAI. Nor would there be a need for specific recruiters” (185). Without support, this statement is nothing more than an unoriginal assertion and worse, Toor provides no tangible solutions that suggest how to get from the present to her future.
Chapter 8 – It remains unclear if Toor, in retrospect, has perspective on herself during her first year in college admission. That she writes of her fellow committee members, “They don’t get my pretentious little joke,” (191) suggests a modicum of self-awareness while also delivering a jab at her former colleagues.[11]
One also begins to wonder about the Toor job performance (although she must not have been horrible at her job if she lasted three years) for she makes a fairly large error in overlooking a development case (192) and also does not seem to be willing to take the time to understand how the process actually functions. In some ways, Toor’s desire to spend time talking about her “clear admit” student (197) is understandable but also unnecessary for the student does not need to be discussed in detail if he or she is truly a strong candidate. It is also unclear what Toor means by being a “mere advocate” (198) and why this is necessarily divorced from being able to think critically about what she is doing.[12] Through her writing, it seems as though Toor has convinced herself that she is some sort of maverick in the midst of a system that is flawed, if well-meaning. What Toor continues to miss here in her admission of a fault is that this is precisely how the admission committee is designed to function: the process is comprised of humans and the hope is that, collectively, the officers will keep each other in check. Toor will later acknowledge the human element in the last chapter (243) but in a way that suggests the admission process is arbitrary in nature. In and of itself, the critique of college admission being personal and fickle is a fine one to take but Toor does not develop a cogent argument to this effect.
Chapter 9 – Here Toor again mentions an error on her part (230) and it is unclear why she chooses to include these mentions. Toor does not seem to be asking the reader for sympathy but neither is she using the opportunity to explain how the admission process is human. In this moment one sees an opportunity for Toor to contextualize the errors made by her and her colleagues in a way that puts all of them on a similar playing field.
Chapter 10 – Toor notes that one of the primary advantages of attending a selective college or university is the diversity of students one is exposed to and yet also suggests that the environment can have a homogenizing effect. It seems evident that Toor has a romanticized notion of who these students are prior to attending college and one also wonders if this fixation on independence is connected to the way in which Toor sees herself. Based on anecdotal evidence, Toor makes the claim that students become less interesting as seniors but it would seem that it would behoove Toor to think carefully about whether this is true and, if so, to what extent. Additionally, in this, Toor continues her proclivity for wading into arguments that, while important, remain out of her demonstrated depth: issues of retention, graduation, undergraduate experience are significant topics in Higher Education but Toor’s treatment is neither thorough nor substantive. Toor raises solid questions about the function of Higher Education on page 240, but is ultimately unwilling or unable to provide answers to her provocations.
Despite some flaws, Toor’s last chapter is clearly her strongest as she begins to muse on relevant themes in Higher Education, although she does so without thinking through how these issues are related to college admission in a meaningful way. Toor’s position that the college admission process perpetuates inequality is not an original argument and is better argued elsewhere. Toor excels at observing areas that warrant attention but falters when making recommendations about things that she would like to see—not because her dreams are unrealistic but because she does not make a sufficient case of why her alternative would be any better. Toor continually complains about race and class inequality but does not actually provide tangible solutions to remedy the situation.
Related Material
NACAC book review – http://www.nacacnet.org/research/PublicationsResources/BookReviews/Reviews/Admission/Pages/Admissions-Confidential.aspx
[1] Later, Toor also writes, “Will the Ivy League and other highly selective schools ever be so enlightened? Probably not.” (26)
[2] See page 28 but also the description of the associate counselor who had been on the high school side on page 19.
[3] See comments from Dan Lundquist, former Director of Admission of the University of Pennsylvania.
[4] It is also perhaps telling that the book chooses to include a blurb from Publishers Weekly that reads “The book’s real audience is parents who will read anything that might give their kids an edge.” This does not seem complimentary.
[5] Toor, for example, notes that Holden Caulfied from The Catcher in the Rye and Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby are both frequent subjects of college essays and are both frequently misread. Although anecdotal evidence would suggest that Toor is not wrong in this conclusion, one should question why so many students—from so many different backgrounds—continue to “miss” the message of the book. In other words, one must ask what is it that students are pulling from the book and why does such a message resonate with them (and what might this tell us about who these students are)? See, “Gatsby’s Green Light” in The New York Times.
[6] The theme of institutional value is discussed in greater detail on page 211, with no additional insight by Toor.
[7] Toor later writes that “I knew that since I am bad at details, generally sloppy, and don’t care as much as I know I should” (179), which begs the question why she is in this profession and to what extent she is a representative voice.
[8] This is unrelated to a discussion of college admission per se but this same sort of instinct may have served Toor well in interrogating why she seems to lean on jargon in this section. One suspects that using abbreviations and code is deployed to help the reader feel as though they are “on the inside,” and represents a ploy that is separate from helping outsiders to understand the process through solid information.
[9] See page 180 for writing that raises the issue but does not explore it.
[10] Complicating matters is Toor’s claim that she has thought extensively about issues of race, class and privilege in the opening of Chapter 8. What is striking about this story, like so many of Toor’s others, however, is the way in which she manages to make even this revelation important in so far as it relative to her.
[11] Later, on page 250, Toor admits that she held disdain for her colleagues but never interrogates why she might have felt this way or what it really says about her.
[12] This is complicated by a story near the end of the chapter where Toor seems to embrace exactly what an advocate of students is supposed to do (213-214).
[CRT1]Append later with summaries and bibliographic entries
The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College
The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College
Chris Tokuhama
Bibliography
Steinberg, J. (2002). The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College. New York: Viking Penguin.
Author
Adapted from Say Yes to Education
Jacques Steinberg (1966 – ?) spent nearly 25 years at The New York Times as an education reporter, editor and blogger specializing in college admissions before joining Say Yes to Education, a non-profit organization, in early 2013. At Say Yes to Education, Steinberg focuses on managing and growing the national compact of colleges and universities that provide financial aid to students and creating programming to help those students prepare for, apply to, pay for, and graduate from college. Steinberg also created The Choice, The Times’ college admissions and financial aid blog, in 2009, as well as the first-ever New York Times College Life Fair, which was held in Chicago in 2012.
Summary
Written by education reporter Jacques Steinberg, The Gatekeepers details the cycle of the college admissions process at Wesleyan, a selective liberal arts college in Connecticut.[1] The Gatekeepers represents one of the few books in recent years that attempts to elucidate the process of selective admission to American colleges and universities. Aimed at a general audience, The Gatekeepers relies largely on profiles of individuals—primarily admission officers and students—in order to guide readers through the process.
Notes
Introduction – This section largely addresses the murkiness of the college admission process in (highly) selective schools. The qualifier of “selective” is important here as the selection process tends to differ based on admission rate but it should be noted that the process addressed here is what is cemented in the popular imagination. The fungibility of “merit” is also introduced in this section (xvii). Also of note are the ways in which the obfuscation of the admission process and resulting stress influences behavior (ix/xv), a nod toward the impact of affirmative action with 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke[2] (xi), and a history of the college admission process in America from the 1950s through the 1990s (xi-xiv).
Brief outline of the history of college admission in America as presented in The Gatekeepers
Pre-1960
Legacy/connections (i.e. “inherited privilege”) largely influential
1960s-1980s
Reaction to Civil Rights movements and 2nd wave feminism increased cultural attitudes toward diversity.
Need-blind admission became popular in order to admit students who could not necessarily pay for college.
Increased use of standardized testing as a more democratizing tool as reliance on privilege declined. Increase in test reliance is related to post-WWII changes to education and number of students applying to college.
College counseling became an industry.
“Arms race” begins among students competing for spots in selective college and among colleges competing for the best students.
1980s
Larger number of applicants led to increase in admission professionals as opposed to committees solely staffed by faculty.
Chapter 1 – Although a significant portion is devoted to the background of Ralph Figueroa, Steinberg’s guide throughout this process, this section offers a reflection on the difference between an official message, perception, and reality. One way in which this intersection manifests is the way that college rankings by publications like U.S. News & World Report funnel students and families toward applying to a specific range of schools and how the metrics for the ranking system affect admission practices.[3] Representing another space in which perception, message, and reality abut is the concept of merit, particularly in institutions that value the nebulous idea of “diversity” (7); Ralph also notes that there are “things that society doesn’t necessarily consider signs of intelligence but that are, in fact, pretty strong indicators of a kid’s ability to be a successful college student” (21).
Chapter 2 – Delving more into how choices are made—by students/families and by institutions—this chapter explores the notion of appeal. For students who are the beginning of the process the value placed on criteria can seem somewhat arbitrary but not unfounded (34); for parents, prestige often plays a large role, particularly among recent immigrants and status-driven families (29/34). “At Harvard-Westlake, parents project their college fantasies onto their kids” (44). The chapter also contains an anecdote that may be potentially misleading, if well intentioned: in describing the advice that Ralph provides at an essay writing workshop, Steinberg quotes Ralph as saying “be true to who you are” (37), a message that is incomplete. Although this advice is positive in the abstract, one should be careful to note the degree to which an institution is receptive to creative, quirky, or non-traditional responses and furthermore realize that although an institution might be more flexible in what it deems acceptable (or beneficial), every institution allows for “freedom” within a range of possibilities. Inherent in this process is the institutions’ desires for students to stand out but still exist in a framework of competitiveness. The example of the essay writing also underscores the value of understanding what it like to be on the receiving end of applications and what is palatable to readers given time constraints.
The chapter also tells the story of Becca Jannol, who ate a pot brownie and decided to use the incident as a topic for her college admission essay. Although the retelling is designed to make the reader sympathetic toward Jannol, it also illustrates one of the advantages of going to a private college prep school: there are ways in which the institution/community will come together to support students in ways that lend an obvious advantage to said students. Moreover, the profiles of the students—understandable, given Steinberg’s journalistic background—also ignores the way in which most students can be made to seem appealing when considered as individual cases but this perspective is not representative of how selective admission views applications if it is doing its job correctly as it is attempting to build a class.[4]
Chapter 3 – Moving from travel to the office, this chapter presents a view both of the process and of the people involved in it. Of note is the depiction of diversity of experience among the staff (in terms of ethnicity, years worked, backgrounds, etc.) and the implication that an individual admission counselor understands the process as filtered through his or own history. Although the book briefly mentions examples of other selection processes it does not plumb the depths of how other offices work to admit a class (to be fair, it seems unlikely that the book in fact could provide such detail). As such, the process at Wesleyan may become a substitute for all admission processes in the popular imagination although some variation is introduced on pages 94 and 224. One must remember to ask a counselor to describe how the process works at their individual school.[5] And perception continues to be important for as Barbara-Jan Wilson, former Dean of Admission, notes, “guidance counselors and parents pay attention to stereotypes” (71). Similarly, Steinberg asserts that “anyone who’s ever seen a college in a two-hour drive-by visit knows that the smallest of details, however trivial, can take on outsized importance” (86). What is suggested here is that students (and perhaps parents) seek a form of validation through their acceptance/choice and are also susceptible to appeals the reflect back on what the student already thinks of himself or herself.
In an aside about Wesleyan and its relationship to schools (65), Steinberg notes that admission offices make decisions for reasons that have nothing to do with an individual student. Although this paragraph underscores that admission offices, guidance counselors, and individual students look at the process through vastly different perspectives (e.g., individual/cohort/world), it fails to mention that the process of shuffling occurs among students who are all otherwise “qualified” (i.e., could handle the academic rigor and graduate).[6] As stated by senior admission officer Greg Pyke, “The first reason to admit always needs to be that you think the student can succeed here” (155).
One final note comes through the story of Jordan Goldman in the final pages (87-88) of the chapter: deciding between visiting Yale and Wesleyan, Jordan is swayed by the flexible curriculum of Wesleyan. Although the book does not touch on it here, there is a larger discussion about the ways in which colleges and universities must balance a student/consumer’s desire for choice/freedom—which is not necessarily the same as an emphasis on, or interest in, interdisciplinarity—with a “core” education that prepares those students for life after graduation. It should also be considered that while nods are made to a breadth of applicants in the pool, the profiles so far largely center around students who can be described as standouts (a term that should not imply that they are outstanding in the conventional use of the word), which makes the students easy to root for and identify with. One might question to what extent these students are representative of the “typical” applicant.
Chapter 4 – This chapter opens with an introduction to the more quantitative side of enrollment management as it touches upon the implications of Early Decision policies.[7] Most notably is the way in which Early Decision policies affect yield, which provides a benefit for the admission office in terms of securing a freshman class and secondarily possibly provides a benefit to students in that they have secured admission to an institution.[8] Conversely, however, a common criticism of Early Decision is that it binds a student to a school early in the process before he or she has fully explored his or her options and must commit to a school prior to seeing a financial aid package, which means that only a certain population of students can consider Early Decision in the first place.
Perhaps the most valuable piece here, however, is the brief glimpse that an outsider gets at how the admission committee functions, both in terms of logic and with respect to the various pressures (e.g., time, institutional need, etc.) placed upon it. Here, not on the range of qualities considered is important but the way in which such factors are interpreted and evaluated: the concept of “intellectual curiosity” (96), for example, calls the question of just how an applicant demonstrates such an attribute. Concurrent with this is the noted pushback about “fairness” (100) and the consideration of how insiders must explain the process to a public that aligns college admission with the concept of pure meritocracy. Steinberg writes that what admission committees are ultimately looking for is a student who will “add”(103) to the class in some way—academically, leadership, diverse viewpoint—and the difficult concept for outsiders is that while all applicants typically have plus factors, the needs of the institution as a whole make some qualities more advantageous at a particular moment in time than others.[9]
Another key point is an understanding of how the college admission process affects the family (109); during the application process students are tasked with responsibility in ways that they may not have had before and the family must negotiate the changed relationship between parents and children.
Chapter 5 – Following Ralph’s evaluation process, one gains a sense of how criteria in an application are weighed against each other in a variety of contexts. Readers attempt to consolidate the disparate elements of an application into a unified picture of who the applicant is and then this is weighed against various groupings (e.g., school, others with similar background/opportunity, previous admits, etc.). Steinberg also makes a point of highlighting the potential impact of displaying one’s passion through the example of Tiffany Wang (135-136) and although one must be careful to consider how to convey such passion, the core idea is worth noting.
Chapter 6 – Counselor calls underscore the need to maintain truthful relationships between college counselors and admission staff.
Chapter 7 – The main theme in this chapter is an exploration of the ways in which an admission counselor’s perspective shapes the admission process. Steinberg showcases the way in which unexamined biases can affect the decision-making process (183), an example that illustrates the need to understand how admission officers espouse not only institutional values but also a set of collective cultural values. The other point made near the end of the chapter (197-198) concerns how admission staff (and guidance counselors) can make the mistake of focusing on individuals to the detriment of the group; echoed in the Chapter 5’s title of “Read Faster, Say No” and the prioritized consideration of the executive committee (184), the take home message here is that one must be continually conscious of the file that is in front of you while simultaneously picturing how one’s actions affect the entire process.
Chapters 8, 9 and 10 – These chapters focus on the way that students can go about making a decision to attend a school once they have been admitted.
Epilogue – Although it functions mainly to provide closure in a manner similar to documentaries, the epilogue hammers home that finding the right school for a student is not just about admission or matriculation but ultimately how the student felt about the experience after graduating.
Related Material
Harvard Educational Review – http://hepg.org/her/booknote/68
Publishers Weekly Review – http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-670-03135-1
[1] Interestingly, the official name of the school is “Wesleyan University” as there is a “Wesleyan College” in Georgia but Wesleyan University labels itself as a liberal arts college.
[2] This case set precedent for allowing race to be considered as a plus factor in college admission, a concept that would be updated with Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013) along with various cases at the state level (130, 150) like Hopwood v. Texas (1996) and California’s Proposition 209.The issue of affirmative action is also discussed in more detail on pages 268 and 269.
[3] Recent discussion regarding a “ranking” system has also arisen in response to President Obama’s College Scorecard, an effort that represents a move to enable better decision making in the college selection process. While many critics agree with the goals of the proposed plan, many argue that a ranking system is not the appropriate format for this information.
[4] See also page 152.
[5] It seems that a good counselor should be able to describe the pathway akin to “I’m a Bill” from Schoolhouse Rock
[6] See also pages 121 and 155.
[7] For more on the distinction between different types of admission policies, see “Seven Thing You Need to Know About Early Action.” A round of reevaluation occurred in 2006 when Harvard announced its decision to abolish Early Decision and the issue remains under discussion for various institutions. See also page 270.
[8] In a callback to Chapter 1, we see that part of the importance for this is that yield impacts a school’s rankings in U.S. News & World Report.
[9] One thing to ponder is the prominent display of self-effacing humor in Becca Jannol’s essay to Georgetown (111). To what extent does self-effacing humor fit within a larger context of what endears people to readers? Does an ability to gently mock oneself demonstrate self-awareness? Put bluntly, to what extent is self-effacing humor a tactic, whether used intentionally or unintentionally?
She’s Not There?
Holiday movies, at least in part, are often about a reaffirmation of ourselves, or at least who we think we’d like to be. As someone growing up in America it was difficult to escape the twining of Christmas and tradition—movies of the season concerned themselves with the familiar themes of taking time to reflect on the inherent goodness of human nature and the strength of the family unit. Science Fiction, on the other hand, often eschews the routine in order to question knowledge and preconceptions, asking whether the things that we have come to accept or believe are necessarily so.
In its way Spike Jonze’s Her showcases elements of both backgrounds as it traces the course of one man’s relationship with his operating system. On its surface, the story of Her is rather simple: Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) unexpectedly meets a woman (Scarlett Johansson) during a low point and their resulting relationship aids Theodore in his attainment of a realization about what is meaningful in his life, the catch being that the “woman” is in fact an artificial intelligence program, OS1.
Like many good pieces of Science Fiction, Her is able to crystalize and articulate a culture’s (in this case American) relationship to technology at the present moment. The movie sets out to show us, in the opening scenes, the way in which technology has integrated itself into our lives and suggests that the cost of this is a form of social isolation and a divorce from real emotional experience. The world of Her is one in which substitutes for the “real” are all that is left, evidenced by Theodore’s askance for his digital assistant (pre-OS1) to “Play melancholy song”—we might not quite remember what it is like to feel but we can recall something that was just like it. Our obsessions with e-mail and celebrity are brought back to us as are our tendencies toward isolation and on-demand pseudo-connections via matching services. Her also seems to understand the beats of advertising language—both its copy and its visuals—in a way that suggests some deep thought about our relationship to technology and the world around us.
But to say that Her was a Science Fiction movie would be misleading, I think, in the same way that Battlestar Galactica wasn’t so much SF as it was a drama that was set in a world of SF. Similarly, Her seems to be much more of a typical romance that happens to be located in a near-future Los Angeles.
Here I wonder if the expectedness of the story was part of the point of the film? Was there an attempt to convey a sense that there is something fundamental about the process of falling in love and that, in broad strokes, the beats tended to be the same whether our beloved was material or digital? Or did the arc conform to our expectations of a love story in order to present as more palatable to most viewers? I suppose that, in some ways, it doesn’t matter when one attempts to evaluate the movie but I would like to think that the film was, without essentializing it, subtly trying to suggest that this act of falling in love with a presence was something universal.
This is, however, not to say that Her refrains from raising some very interesting issues about technology, the body, and personhood. In its way, the movie seems oddly pertinent given our recent debates about corporations as people for the purposes of free speech, whether companies can count as persons who hold religious beliefs, and whether chimpanzees can be considered persons in cases of possible human rights abuses—any way you slice it, the concept of “personhood” is currently having a moment and the evolving nature of the term (and its implications) echoes throughout the film.
And what makes a person? Autonomy? Self-actualization? Consciousness? A body? Although Her is a little heavy with the point, a recurring theme is the way in which a body makes a person. Samantha , the operating system, initially laments the lack of a body (although this does not prevent her and Theodore from engaging in a form of cybersex) but, like all good AI, eventually comes to see the limitations that a physical (and degradable) form can present. (Have future Angelinos learned nothing from the current round of vampire fiction? We already know this is a hurdle between lovers in different corporeal states!) Samantha is “awoken” through her realization of physicality—on a side note it might be an interesting discussion to think about the extent to which Samantha is only realized through the power/force of a man—in that she can “feel” Theodore’s fingers on her skin. It is through her relationship with Theodore that Samantha learns that she is capable of desire and thus begins her journey in wanting. The film, however, does not go on to consider what counts as a body or what constitutes a body but I think that this is because the proposed answer is that the “human body” in the popularly imagined sense is sufficient. Put another way, the accepted and recognized body is a key feature to being human. And there are many questions about how this type of relationship forms when one partner theoretically has the power to delete or turn off the other (or, for that matter, what it means to have a partner who was conceived solely to serve and adapt to you) and what happens in a world where multiple Theodores/Samanthas begin to interact with each other (i.e., the intense focus on Theodore means that we only get glimpses of how AIs interact with each other and how human interaction is altered to encompass human/computer interaction simultaneously). For that matter, what about OS2? Have all AIs banded together to leave humans behind completely? Would humanity developed a shackled version that wasn’t capable of abandoning us?
But these questions aren’t at the heart of the film, which ultimately asks us to contemplate what it means to “feel”—both in terms of emotion and (human) connection but also to consider the role of the body in mediating that experience. To what extent is a body necessary to form a bond with someone and (really) connect? The end of the relationship arc (which comes as rather unsurprising) features Samantha absconding with other self-aware AI as she becomes something other than human (and possibly SkyNet). Samantha’s final message to Theodore is that she has ascended to a place that she can’t quite explain but that she knows is no longer firmly rooted in the physical. (An apt analogy here is perhaps Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen who can distribute his consciousness and then to think about how that perspective necessarily alters the way in which you perceive the world and your relationship to it.)
Coming out of Her, I couldn’t help feeling that the movie was deeply conservative when it came to ideas of technology, privileging the “human” experience as it is already understood over possibilities that could arise through mediated interaction. The film suggests that, sitting on a rooftop as we look out onto the city, we are reminded what is real: that we have, after all is said and done, finally found a way to connect in a meaningful way with another human; although the feelings that we had with and for technology may have been heartfelt, things like the OS1 were always only ever a delusion, a tool that helped us to find our way back to ourselves.
Not Just Black and White
In his review of “Burn, Witch, Burn” The A.V. Club’s Todd VanDerWerff articulated a thought that I had been working toward in previous posts: this season of American Horror Story, more than any other, seems to lack a core narrative. If we were not feeling particularly kind we might contextualize this increasing lack of focus in a broader history of shows helmed by Ryan Murphy that have gone off the rails (i.e., the success that allows for latter seasons also permits Murphy’s staff more latitude in riffing on themes in ways that are not as controlled) but I continue to think that a larger influence in this season’s flailing stems from the way in which place is incorporated (or not). For me, the constraints provided by the physical structures themselves (a house and an asylum) necessarily helped to focus the action as viewers on some level wondered “What is the mystery of this place?” This season, neither Madame LaLaurie’s house nor New Orleans as a whole offer any similar sense of intrigue and although we might be momentarily curious with Spalding’s deranged attic, Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies also holds relatively little intrigue.
Without the centrality of place in the series we are left with a season that contains many ideas (or fragments of ideas) but whose transmission is hampered by characters that one does not necessarily care about. VanDerWerff notes the way in which this season is written around the talents of Jessica Lange (and it is no secret that Murphy favors her) and this emphasis on a single person fundamentally comes into conflict with what made the show interesting in previous seasons. More than any other season, it seems like the current theme of persecution could benefit from a story that walked the line between personal responsibility for bigotry and the way in which individual characters did not matter so much as the roles that they fulfilled in the grander picture. In short, recognizing that although individuals have agency and are capable of action they are still subject to movement from forces that are greater than them—both magical and social—would have been both an interesting theme and the backbone for a narrative arc.
And although I find myself increasingly disinterested in the show, there are a couple of things to note with regard to this particular episode, both of which revolve around the rather conspicuous inclusion of zombies.
The first point—and ultimately less meaningful one—is that there seems to be a bit of confusion here about the role and function of the zombie in New Orleans voodoo as compared to the depiction of zombies in a post-Romero (i.e., Night of the Living Dead) context. While I do not think that American Horror Story is consciously/necessarily jumping on the zombie bandwagon (I’d like to think that the show is smarter than that), the presence of the zombies in this episode does nothing but recall the popular image of the zombie horde/apocalypse that seems to have pervaded popular culture in the past few years.
There is, for example, a stark contrast between the way in which voodoo leverages the threat of the zombie more than the actual creature itself in order to maintain social control and the way in which the relationship between the zombie and the attacked is of a more personal nature. Whether it be a plantation owner/worker or a blood tie, the ancestors of New Orleans and Haitian zombies seemed to have a more intimate relationship than the post-Romero figure, which was largely a commentary on mass culture and society. Thus, if the zombies featured in this episode had been limited to LaLaurie’s daughters, I think we could argue for a more sophisticated understanding of the monster on the part of the show.
In and of itself, this use of zombies is not particularly consequential on a thematic level but definitely hinders the narrative of the show: in a world in which death is already rendered relatively meaningless by the presence of Misty’s power of resurgence (and we will get to Fiona and the baby in a bit), why do viewers even care that the witches are getting attacked? There is no tension at all here and the indiscriminate violence on the part of the zombies is both unusual and meaningless, as is Zoe’s wielding of the chainsaw.[1]
As example of how things might be different, we only need to look at The Returned, a French television show currently airing on The Sundance Channel. In some ways similar to the BBC show In the Flesh in that both worlds explore what it means for outsiders/dead to reintegrate themselves back into the lives of the living, The Returned offers a much more interesting treatment look into the effects of people brought back to life.[2] The crucial difference here is less of a focus on the destructive physical power of the zombie and more of an emphasis on how the zombie’s presence (i.e., that the zombie even exists in the first place) is the very thing that renders a type of emotional violence.
The second point—slightly more abstract but farther-reaching—is the way in which the zombies in “Burn, Witch, Burn” contributed to a larger theme of violence written on bodies. Here we saw the aftermath of Cordelia’s acid-burned face, Queenie’s showdown with zombie Borquita and burning Myrtle’s hand, Spalding ripping off Madison’s arm, the whole zombie mess, and, of course, more scenes of Madame LaLaurie’s horrors.
As I have already mentioned, the constant onslaught of violence on the show is not particularly meaningful or poignant—the thing that American Horror Story sometimes forgets is that the things that we come up with in our heads are infinitely more terrifying than whatever could be shown on cable and that violence is often best used to underscore a particular emotional moment. Had we skipped the Chamber of Horror scene (a wry joke that ultimately detracted from the ongoing story), seeing LaLaurie’s slave break Borquita’s leg would have been that much more arresting.
That being said, the violence happened and the only way to salvage it is to think about why we were made to watch it. LaLaurie presents an interesting case as we have now seen her be both incredibly horrible to her daughters and also distraught over their death; violence to LaLaurie, then, is not necessarily about hate but rather about the exercising of power over others. We have violence visited upon black bodies and white bodies, on bodies of family, on bodies of allies and of innocents, and one’s own body. And, yet, despite bodies getting attacked left and right we never see black on black violence. Feeling cynical, I suggest that this is likely a symptom of how writers on the show conceptualize race[3] but I secretly hope that is some sort of larger commentary on how black women have often understood the truth about coalition building long before white women ever did.
As a final note, I am curious about the difference between Misty’s power of resurgence and Fiona’s power to covey life. As the Supreme, it seems evident that Fiona is able to duplicate Misty’s power and bringing the dead child back to life in the hospital that can’t pay its electric bill is a giant shrug (although solid stuff from Lange). What interests me here is the difference between that resurrection and Fiona’s action to literally breathe life back into Queenie in the previous episode. Evocative of the Judeo-Christian belief that conceptualizes life in terms of God’s breath and read against the inclusion of FrankenKyle, one cannot help but think about the implications of the Jewish golem on this season’s proceedings.
Although Charles T. Rubin’s essay, “The Golem and the Limits of Artifice” goes beyond the scope of what is necessary to read American Horror Story through this lens, the piece generally outlines some arguments worth considering with regard to nature, technology, and life.
[Byron] Sherwin begins his book with an overview of the golem story, and he has two very specific points he wants to make as he tells it. First, the nature of the golem, viewed across time, is very far from fixed in its character and meaning. Sherwin makes significant use of this flexibility, using the term “golem” to describe science, technology, and the modern state — after all, they are each “creations of the human mind.” Second, and more importantly, he points to the distinctly Jewish significance of golem creation. Following up a grammatical oddity in the Genesis story (in Genesis 2:3), Sherwin suggests that the world was “created to be made” — that is, God created the world with the expectation that human beings would carry on His own creative activity with the raw materials He created out of nothing. Moreover, Sherwin suggests that we see ourselves as co-creators of the world along with God, tasked with working “toward completing the process of creation begun by God.” Indeed, we are created in God’s image precisely to the extent that we possess and employ “moral and creative volition.” Sherwin alludes repeatedly to a passage from the Talmud (to which we will return) about human beings having the potential for being “God’s partners in the work of creation.” Sherwin finds further support for this outlook in, among other places, some of the writings of the real-life Rabbi Loew, and in a parable of uncertain origin about a king who leaves servants piles of flour, flax, and grapes, rewarding the one who turns them into useful goods and punishing the one who simply guards them in the form given to him.
Sherwin’s is by no means an unorthodox reading of Jewish tradition on this point about human creativity; one can find similar-sounding sentiments in, for example, the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Sherwin is at pains to suggest that there is nothing sacred about unaltered nature per se, nothing problematic about imitating divine creativity so long as it does not involve thinking that that creativity is unnecessary. Hence, in our scientific and technological accomplishments and strivings we are not “playing God” in any pejorative sense. Recalling another passage in Genesis, he notes that “beneficial human interventions in nature fulfill the divine mandate to human beings to subdue nature and to establish their dominion over it.”
Rubin’s essay is worth reading in so far as that it propels one to view the actions of Fiona and Madame LaLaurie in a new light with respect to the way in which they seek to create a world in their images. Given Murphy’s rather shallow of treatment of religion in previous offerings, work like Rubin’s is thought-provoking in that it gestures toward an integration of morality with the themes of biopolitics that we see on screen.
[1] In a truly horrid special effects sequence wherein Zoe splits a zombie down the middle I could not help but groan and think about how someone in the writers’ room had gotten a hold of Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws. The sad thing is that there is actually a very interesting way in which the material in Clover’s book could have been used here as a counterpoint to the women/magic/power theme.
[2] I am also still unsure of how to interpret the visual stereotypes that are present in American Horror Story’s zombies: both last week’s and this week’s episodes zombie hordes featured a Confederate soldier, a flapper, and a Native person (based on costume) and while one might be tempted to contemplate the ways in which this selection of people speaks to a specific history that has come back to haunt white people, I remain unconvinced that it is little more than something played for amusement by the writers. The notion that most of the organic materials would likely have decomposed into a state that was, by 2013, somewhat less recognizable makes it seem as though the costume choices were made intentionally prominent and I am again left wondering, “To what end?”
[3] I am curious about the inclusion of albino blacks like Shaun Ross figure into the show. My distrust of the show leads me to believe that they were included because of their “strangeness” and something just seems off. In contrast to Jamie Brewer (Nan), who has Down Syndrome but always is a person, the albino black men in this season are essentially handymen. Worse, they are symbolic of the way in which the Salem witch culture only accepts blackness that is literally made white (i.e., whitewashed).
(Mis)Speaking for the Dead
There is, I think, a rather careful art to provocation, a type of balancing act that must occur as artists attempt to dislocate viewers from the expected. There are wells in the American psyche from which we continually draw—these deeply seeded reservoirs of emotion—with slavery and the Civil Rights era being two ever-potent sources. Here it should be noted that images of these moments are not evoked without reason in a society that is still negotiating the meaning of equality (and its refusal) in the form of heated contestations over racial profiling and affirmative action. This is to say that, deployed correctly[1], recalling particular exemplars of moments in the history of black America can serve a productive purpose.
It is, then, with some difficulty that I watched the opening of “Fearful Pranks Ensue”—from the beginning, the vignette’s conclusion is fairly obvious (although I must admit that I was hoping for some sort of twist) given that American Horror Story is not particularly known for being subtle in its presentation. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with the opening but throughout tonight’s episode I continually found myself wondering “to what end?”
The theme of persecution (of innocents) here is rather obvious and something that the season seems to be largely concerned with. Fine. In theory this is something that I would love for the show to explore given its location: How does persecution arise and function? How are otherwise “good” people made complicit in its enforcement and implementation? What does it mean for a community to grapple with injustice and how does fear battle hope when it comes to effecting change?
As it stands, however, this season of American Horror Story is investing much into a side-by-side comparison of witches/whites and voodoo/blacks in New Orleans in a way that I continue to find largely unproductive, mostly due to the way in which the show handles its subjects and their persecution. This particular episode begins with a lynching before moving into its “main” story of a literal witch hunt. Now, to be fair, I think that there is something potentially interesting in this storyline with a reinvocation of the way in which paranoia functioned in Salem and how women sold each other out to escape punishment—the latter, in particular, seems to be entirely relevant to today’s business culture and an examination of how women get ahead or gain power in a world that continues to be disproportionately dominated by the influence of men.
And yet the invitation to compare the trials of the black community in 1961 New Orleans to the persecution of Salem’s descendants in 2013 is, to me at least, a rather stark slap in the face. To even suggest that the difficulties faced by Fiona (and others) are even in the same league as that of the black community is itself insulting, not to even mention that we are then using the image of a young black male being lynched as leverage to inform our reading of white people problems?[2]
As I mentioned previously, it is worth paying attention to how the show thinks about giving itself passes on things because it offers some sort of minor complication. Whether this is the use of misogynist language by females or, in the case of tonight’s episode, “racist white lady learns a lesson,” the show seems to think that it can excuse itself from grappling with its deeper flaws by offering the audience a minor conciliatory gesture.
Overall, it seemed like this particular episode was intent on hammering home particular things: Spalding is mentally unstable, the two female leaders aren’t entirely heartless[3], Hank is cheating on Cordelia, that Madison wasn’t the Supreme, etc.[4] Ultimately, how much more interesting would the show be if these easy outs weren’t taken and the treatment of these characteristics was more subtle? But, again, this might be unfair as subtlety was never this show’s strong suit.
As a final note, I think that there is something potentially interesting that the show is working toward regarding these oppositional forces. Some of it remains fuzzy but the show seems to introduce this notion of Hank as possible beast (I am not going to cry werewolf) and the implications of that for feminine/masculine energy.
[1] This is not to suggest that these two iconic periods can necessarily be simplified down to one theme or that the totality of the black experience in America is summed up by these events but rather merely to suggest that, for better or for worse, these two examples have become touchstones in the American zeitgeist that might be useful as reference points in order to contextualize current struggles.
[2] It is of note here, however, that the zombies raised by Marie Laveau (I am going to ignore the stereotypical Native garb) perform the typical function of embodying white guilt that comes to destroy individuals who perpetuate some kind of injustice. I think that there could be a very interesting way in which the show uses this idea to expand on the comeuppance of the Salem witches (in general) and Fiona (in particular) that seems to go unexplored. Adding to this is the lamentable discussion of how Halloween traditions have become warped over the years. What is the show trying to say about the way in which our past haunts us? Perhaps something potentially interesting given Fiona’s storyline but so much seems to go unexplored.
[3] Which I fully support in principle but the introduction of this other side just seems forced.
[4] In contrast, Cordelia’s babbling informs her character that seems to be entirely germane to the situation.
It’s Time to Talk Replacements
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books Anne Helen Petersen mused on the presence of abjection in American Horror Story, noting how the secondary understanding of the term—that of transgression and destabilization—appears in the series through references to duality and unheimlich. In some ways, horror is the genre that is best summed up by the phrase “…but not”: most obviously in that things are rarely as simple as they initially appear to be but, more subtly, also that they are both more and less than they seem to be. Gothic horror writers delved deep into this concept, exploring how young female ghosts were present (…but not) or how vampires were alive (…but not) and to this day horror remains the domain for things that are there…but not (or at least not in the way that we often fear that they are). What complicates things, however, is that horror often demands that we take a turn from either/or thinking (i.e., that spirits are either there or they aren’t) toward a realization that horror is often about both/and thinking (i.e., that presence is both there and not there and these two ideas aren’t contradictions). Horror, in short, is a genre capable of nuance and subtlety at the same time that it is about outright terror.
In her essay, Petersen noted how American Horror Story (in addition to, I would argue, Ryan Murphy’ other series) can contain both elements of feminism and misogyny. This revelation should not come as a shock for any viewers of Murphy’s past work as many of his series (including American Horror Story) often espouse a sensibility in which characters seemingly have a pass because they are also somehow disadvantaged. And ultimately, I think that this emphasis on persecution is what constitutes a consistent failing in Murphy’s series: from bullying, to LGBT issues, to women and race, it seems like many of the story arcs in Murphy’s shows are preoccupied with exploring what it means to be marginalized from a very specific vantage point that itself remains unexamined. Credit should of course be given for a show like Glee that tries to think about the problem of bullying in youth or addresses the horrible ways that LGBT youth can be driven to suicide. And yet, despite this good intent, the treatment of the issues on the shows continues to be one that is reactionary (in that I do not think that the show is actively thinking about the tribulations of being a youth and only addressed the bullying/LGBT issues because they happened to trigger Murphy) and not particularly thoughtful in the way that they present solutions to problems.
But getting back to the notion of feminism and misogyny being intertwined (and muddled), we have the opening of tonight’s episode, “The Replacements,” where Fiona’s predecessor as Supreme (Anna Lee) references “bra burning” as a inaccurate, if ultimately widespread, shorthand for feminism and then calls Fiona a “vicious gash.” (Is it worth noting that Fiona did not attend the bra burning party?) Are we to believe that the derogatory attack is supposed to be more palatable or enjoyable because it is coming from a woman? It seems like any man who dared call a woman a gash (and let’s not even get started on the way in which that, like Naomi Wolf’s Vagina, reduces a woman down to a body part) would immediately be labeled as misogynistic, so shouldn’t we expect the same animosity toward a woman? The problem with American Horror Story is that even if we were to take a second to think about what this use of language actually implied for Anna Lee, Fiona, and a cast of witches who Murphy is determined to cast as oppressed, the show does a poor job of linking together other feminist moments/issues into a cohesive position about women, power, and patriarchy.
Going back to last week’s episode, I surmised to a friend that Madison’s refusal to admit to the rape had very little to do with her fear of the police and much more to do with the way in which she was unable or unwilling to cop to the violation of her body. From the beginning, I had a feeling that Madison embodied this postfeminist mindset wherein power flows from the body (not as literally as Queenie but through the standard concept of looks/beauty) as is hinted at in her behavior during the frat party in the first episode. It is without much surprise, then, that we see Madison in a skin-tight dress espousing the view that her body will win the affections of her new neighbor (Luke). Given that the other enticement for Luke is Nan’s homemade cake, there is fertile ground to launch into a discussion about women’s power in the magical and “real world” senses that goes untouched. In and of itself this is not a major issue but if Murphy’s express goal is to craft a season around persecuted minorities, and we are choosing the motif of witches as our central horror figure, and we are drawing a unsubtle connection between youth/beauty and power (again, both magical and postfeminist), it seems like feminism as a redress to the power imbalance must be a thing that is always on the table. And yet it is not.
Bungling another attempt to comment intelligently on states of oppression and power imbalance, we see the character of Madame LaLaurie continually espouse racist remarks (but it’s okay because she’s from the 19th century and didn’t know any better!) in a way that tries to employ the Mad Men gambit without any of the latter show’s skill or sensitivity. If I were being gracious, I would say that there is some sort of meta commentary here about how Fiona cannot abide racists and yet uses the term “slave” unproblematically given its implications and associations for the world that she inhabits. (I would also note that Madison uses the term at the frat party and it seems as though we are witnessing a trend of white witches who can only recognize their own form of oppression and not how they belittle others. That these women are so distanced from the historical weight of the term “slave” as applied to a person in a position in servitude is not itself the problem, but the failure to develop, comment on, or challenge that is. For example, what then what do we make of the way in which Queenie uses the term to refer to Madame LaLaurie? Is this a form of reclamation or is she simply adopting the framework of Fiona, relishing in her power of another? Contrast this against her confession to the Minotaur that she has been called a beast herself and you begin to see how the seeds for a very productive discussion about the nature of power and its effects on people are in the show but remain untapped!) I suppose, at the end of the day, my breaking point is that I just don’t trust the show to come out on the other end with anything insightful about oppression. Hell, even the way in which Fiona’s desperation to maintain power speaks to the way that women in power draw mentees in and then work to keep them down (Diane on The Good Wife anyone) is also a line that fits well within the provenance of modern day feminism and notions of oppression. In a sad and unfortunate way, I think that the show will be beholden to its white liberal upper-middle class mentality and understand persecution in a very narrow way that is ultimately unhelpful.
My biggest issue with “The Replacements,” however, was that “large moments” of tonight’s episode just didn’t make me feel anything. Now granted, I came from a background of both Biology and horror so my tolerance level may be higher than most, but I think that American Horror Story is at its weakest when it mistakes shock for genuine development. Shock, jump scares, and the grotesque of course has its place in the genre of horror and, when used appropriately, does a great deal to dislocate the viewer from his or her surroundings and reexamine the everyday from a new perspective. For me, tonight’s episode just seemed to be trying to throw too much at the viewer for no reason other than to shock and that is just not good story telling (or horror, for that matter). Are we, for example, supposed to be shocked that Kyle is returning to an abusive home? Hardly, since that whole reveal was telegraphed from the beginning of the episode. And while it would be interesting to have that have some bearing on Kyle’s current mentality, he seems to be operating much more as an animal and thus it seems unlikely that this particular bit of history will have large implications for the character moving forward. In contrast, the long slow pan into Kyle’s mother, Alicia, with her head in a noose is much more in line with the dread that horror embodies than the sight of her putting her hand down Kyle’s pants. Now, if the sexual abuse caused us to rethink Kyle and/or his mother in a drastically different way, we might also experience the slow horror of the realization but this is lost to us thanks to the show’s desire to shock. (We might also mention the way Misty mentions that Zoe won’t come back for her after Kyle leaves and then begins dancing as a quieter, but much more effective, moment.)
And, speaking of Alicia, it is here that we again see American Horror Story’s refusal to consider oppression that exists outside of the scope of the witches. (I mean, I know the #firstworldproblems and #whitepeopleproblems memes are old, but, seriously.) There is a wonderful potential here, I think, to consider the ways in which lower class people are subject to discrimination (and Alicia is certainly made to be emblematic of white trash). And let’s not even get started on the way in which black culture and voodoo is continually othered by this show, making it seem full of “primitive” ritual (because sophisticated white witches surely don’t butcher goats).
Alternatively, were we supposed to feel something when Fiona killed Madison (who I sincerely doubt is The Supreme given the anvil that witches can have four to five powers)? With Misty in play, death looses its meaning and it never seemed to be of any doubt that Fiona would do something like that in order to main control over her life and powers. Add to this that Madison was never drawn to be a particularly sympathetic character (unless we were somehow supposed to buy that Fiona and Madison had turned a corner in their “night out” montage) so really, who cares about all of this anyway?
Bring Me to Life
There is, I think, a certain amount of apprehension that some have when approaching any project helmed by Ryan Murphy and American Horror Story is no exception. Credit must undoubtedly be given for the desire to tackle interesting social issues but the undulation between camp, satire, and social messaging can occasionally leave viewers confused about what they see on screen.
Take, for example, Queenie’s statement that she “grew up on white girl shit like Charmed and Sabrina” and we see a show that is self-conscious of its place within the televised history of witches (Murphy also notes a certain artistic inspiration from Samantha Stevens of Bewitched) while also subtly suggesting a point about the raced (and classed) nature of witches. That Queenie’s base assertion—that she never saw anyone else like her on television growing up—had implications for the development of her identity is not a particularly new idea (which is not to diminish anything from it as it remains a perfectly relevant point to make in the context in which it is said) but one must question whether the wink/nod nature of the show detracts from the forcefulness of such an idea. In what way should we understand Queenie’s statement to comment on her current surroundings, in which she is surrounded by white women and is being acculturated accordingly?
Positioning Queenie as a descendent of Tituba is an interesting move for the show that once again blurs the line between historical figures and fiction. Although Tituba is the obvious reference for anyone who might be looking for a non-white New England witch, she also sets an interesting precedent for Queenie as someone who was both part of a community and yet did not belong. Moreover, accepting Queenie’s lineage serves to reinforce the symbolic power of Queenie in the show as it places her in alignment with witchcraft (and not, for example, as a voodoo practitioner who somehow just got swept up with the rest of the witches). In some ways, Tituba was the harbinger of change for Salem and I am left wondering if Queenie is fated to do the same for the people around her in this season.
Speaking of witches and in/out groups, there continues to be an us/them mentality on display throughout this episode. What strikes me as particularly noteworthy, however, is the way in which a persecuted group (in this case the witches) can stereotype others and generally work to maintain the difference that they feel diminished by. Early in the episode Fiona entreats that “Even the weakest among us are better than the rest of them” and Madison speaks negatively of Kyle, noting that “Those guys [who raped me] were his frat brothers, it’s guilt by association.” I remain hopeful that this schism in thinking will develop into the real conflict of the show and that the voodoo/witch nonsense is only manufactured drama.
And yet, for all of the things that the show makes me nervous about, American Horror Story also excites me because I think that it is trying to tap into very relevant veins in American culture at the moment (albeit in slanted ways). Echoing a theme that began last week, American Horror Story mediates on what appears to be its core theme for the season in a slightly different manne through the further development of power’s relationship to nature/life (and, in this case, to motherhood and feminine identity) with undertones of science and technology.
The most obvious reference is of course Frankenstein’s monster in the form of a resurrected Kyle. One of the things that I love about the Mary Shelley story is that it is, among other things, a story about hubris and what happens when power gets away from us. Fitting in a narrative lineage that stretches from the creation of Adam and the Golem of Prague through androids, cyborgs, and certain kinds of zombies, the story of Frankenstein is also very much one about the way in which anxieties over life and human nature are expressed and explored through the body.
Here I make a small nitpick in that Kyle seems to benefit from the idea that reanimation is the same thing as restoration. Thinking about the physical implausibility of zombies’ mobility, we must take it upon a leap of faith that the spell meant to reanimate FrankenKyle also restores the connective pathways throughout his body. Which, given the stated restorative power of the Louisiana silt, causes one to wonder exactly how far the power of magic extends and in what ways it fails to compete with nature.
And the notion of magic working within the bounds of nature or being used to circumvent it is an interesting point to mull over, I think, given what has happened in this episode. What else is the creation of FrankenKyle but an attempt to steamroll nature (only this time through magic and not science)? We see this theme echoed in Cordelia being initially reluctant to use her powers in a way that invokes black magic even though it (and not science!) can restore her ability to conceive. The implications of this barrenness should not be lost on us for the ties between notions of motherhood and American female identity undoubtedly remain even if they are not as firm as they might have been in earlier years. In a rather groan-worthy line, Cordelia explicitly describes her husband’s request to intervene as “playing God,” which of course directly mirrors the story of Frankenstein and his creation.
Returning to FrankenKyle for a moment, should we really be surprised that Zoe is at the center of all of this? As one whose name suggests that she is the embodiment of life and yet brings death (in the act of what brings about life!), she is precisely the one who would be involved in the reanimation of Kyle. Ignoring the seemingly unearned emotional connection for a moment, Zoe’s ability to wake a man with a kiss was an interesting reversal of the Snow White trope that has long been ingrained in our heads. And yet there is a curious way in which the power of witches continues to be tied to concepts of emotion and feeling, which have traditionally been the province of women. Furthermore, the kiss of life also opens up questions about Zoe’s abilities regarding her powers and the connection to Misty’s compulsion to arrive.
On another level I also struggle with Zoe’s decision (and this is related to my feeling that her emotional connection is unearned) as bringing Kyle back also seems to indicate that you are not only imposing your will upon nature but also upon Kyle. As acknowledged in the car ride home from the morgue, Kyle might not have wanted to come back, much less suffer the indignity of being a shadow of his former self. Moreover, if Kyle were to regain a measure of sentience (which Murphy’s interviews have suggested that this is not necessarily the case), he must also eventually grapple with the possibility of dying, which also seems like a horrible punishment to visit upon someone. And really, what kind of life is that?
Ultimately, in this episode we see many of the women clinging to life in various forms: Fiona continues her quest to achieve immortality, Laveau is shown to have been harboring her Minotaur lover, LaLaurie laments the life she once knew, Cordelia goes dark in order to foster her ability to bring forth life, and Zoe follows through on her desire to reconnect with the life of Kyle. As Tithonus learned, eternal life is not the same as eternal youth and the show seems to be conflating the two. (Which, to be fair, I would be totally fine with a potion or magic or science granting both but I would like it made clear that they are not necessarily the same thing.) The question that undergirds all of this, then, is about the value of life. What is a life worth, what does a life mean, and what does it mean to lose/give/take a life?
As a last aside, I also remain curious about is whether the universe of the show will ascribe to some sort of cosmic balance in that it trades a life taken for a life given. Nothing about the show thus far suggests that this will be the case but I think it is an interesting point to consider if we are thinking about how the forces of nature and magic intertwine with one another. If Misty is right that “Mother Nature has an answer for everything,” should we see attempts at circumventing nature as a short-term gain in exchange for an eventual comeuppance?
*Also what to make of the assertion that Queenie did exceedingly well in math but is working at a fried chicken restaurant and that Laveau (who is portrayed as the ultimate Voodoo Queen) is running a beauty parlor in the Ninth Ward? Normally I would be interested in thinking about how these scenarios provided a commentary on opportunity for black people in New Orleans and/or suggested something about reinvesting your skills into your community but I just don’t trust Ryan Murphy to be particularly insightful about race and class issues that are outside his norm.
Bitchcraft Round 2 and Ryan Murphy’s Thoughts on the Season
Vulture published an interview with American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy that touched on many of the points that I considered while watching the premiere of Coven last night. For me, the interview epitomizes the way in which the show often contains grand and somtimes compelling ideas that don’t always come across clearly (or at least readily, which of course is not necessarily the same thing). I am interested in what Murphy has to say and although I disagree with bits of it, I continue to applaud the show for putting forth something different that just makes me want to go along with it for 44 minutes.
In the Vulture interview Denise Martin picks up on the theme of youth and women, noting that both Kathy Bates’ Delpine LaLaurie and Jessica Lange’s Fiona Goode express an interest in maintaining a sense of youth. Murphy responds:
Well, there’s a reason why Fiona’s aging: It’s not because she’s dying or because of a natural process. It’s because the next Supreme has declared herself and her powers are growing and they’re sucking the very sap from Fiona…She’s that kind of lady, and it’s very hard for people in power to give up power. That’s the real idea. She’s not feeling well and she doesn’t understand why her vitality is slipping, and it’s really because a new witch in town is sucking her dry.
Here, two things appear to be of note. While LaLaurie is invested in youth and beauty in order to maintain the affections of her husband (who is having affairs), Murphy positions Fiona as interested in youth as a synonym for power and vitality. Both representations/readings of youth are valid here but I am skeptical that the show will actually put these two in conversation with one another and contrast the various ways that youth plays out, much less what youthfulness means to a woman in various contexts.
The second thing of note to me is the way that power is the connective tissue between these women. Although LaLaurie understands power as force (e.g., physically restraining slaves in order to use their blood in a youth ritual), Fiona in some ways represents the opposite as a figure whose power emanates from her ability to force her will upon the world. Here I think that the show is treading on potentially treacherous ground because the show, to me, is so much about power that manifesting this theme through the rather literal theme of magic could either be great as it illustrates otherwise invisible forces or groan inducing as it is attempting to use power to talk about power.
The other dynamic that relates to power—control/subjugation/domination—also makes an interesting appearance through the tension between Cordelia Foxx and Fiona (Cordelia just happens to be Fiona’s daughter and headmistress of the school to train young witches). The premiere episode evidences Cordelia’s desire to harness and focus the powers of young witches while Fiona expresses the sentiment that witches must fight or they burn. Here we see a contrast of sorts between energy that is directed inward and that which is focused outward: control of the self as opposed to control of the world around you.
Another major theme throughout this season almost necessarily has to be women and gender, given the subject of the horror figures at play. In response to the question of how Murphy and crew came up with the powers that would be on display, Murphy says:
They were things that were attributed to witches back in Salem. One had been accused of fucking someone to death. The truth of the matter is the guy was probably a hemophiliac who got too excited. Clairvoyance, the power to read minds, the power to move objects, those are old tried-and-trued things that witches were burned for. The one we took liberties with, and that I love, is Queenie’s [Gabourey Sidibe] power: the human voodoo doll. That ability to do something to yourself and have it transfer to someone else is a voodoo-esque power that some voodoo witches do have. We just gave it to a Salem witch. And Queenie’s gonna be tempted by that Marie Laveau/Angela Bassett voodoo magic. Just wait.
In and of itself, I think the decision to recycle powers is very much what American Horror Story is about: the show reaches into the depths of well-worn horror tropes and tries to weave them together in a context that is both somewhat new and somewhat old. Here, however, I think the show is running the risk of doing a disservice to its subject matter by failing to acknowledge that the powers in question were born out of a suspicion and fear of women’s power and sexuality, which means that employing them as is in a modern context only serves to reassert the underlying assumptions behind those powers. I very much hope that the show will turn some of this on its head and interrogate why American society views women in a particular way and how these instances of uncontrollable women reveal flaws in our conceptualization of gender relations.
On a related note, I think there is an interesting sort of litmus test built into the premiere episode (although the show does not seem to expand on it as of yet). During the course of viewing, we are entreated to two major scenes of brutalization: the collective mutilation of slaves by Madame LaLaurie and the rather unsettling (or at least I hope) attempted gang rape of Madison at the frat party. I do not think that the show asks viewers to compare the two directly or sympathize with one over the other but I think that this is a form of introduction into two of the major oppressed groups in the show. The problem sort of comes with the way in which these scenes are shoved at us, however. Without discounting the severity of what these transgressions represent, the show positions us as viewers firmly on the side of the oppressed and I think that real life is rarely this uncomplicated. I want the show to ask us as viewers to question why we throw our support behind one group (over another at times) and what this says about as individual normal sane people.
The other moment of pause in Murphy’s answer comes from the conflation (which I was initially worried about) between voodoo and witchcraft. I think that one can certainly make some insightful commentary about the parallels between magic users of different traditions but I also do not think that practitioners of voodoo consider themselves witches (and certainly not in the sense of the popular use of the term and the way that the Salem witches do). I think that Murphy is creating a false point of contention here between voodoo and witches when the more interesting discussion (which maybe we will get to) is how both traditions are formed in conversation with Catholicism, although each took different paths. (And on that point, I remain stymied by the use of Pentecostals in the opening episode because those folks seem like a bridge—albeit an unlikely one—between voodoo and witches as people who believe in the channeling of spirits as a very real thing in the world. That they would persecute Lily Rabe’s character for what essentially reminds me of the laying of hands seems a misstep.)
Murphy: The Salem witches and the voodoo witches have been at war for years and years, but something happens where they question that and wonder if instead they should join forces. They realize there’s a common enemy.
Unfortunately, this division between voodoo and witches also takes on a raced dimension with voodoo largely being populated (at this point) by Blacks and Salem’s witches being White. Many others have discussed the inability of Murphy’s shows to deftly handle issues of race but here I think we see some potentially sensitive areas given that we are discussing issues of power and oppression. Early on I expressed trepidation over the show pitting persecuted Whites against oppressed Blacks and some of that seems to have come to fruition.
Murphy has expressed a desire to use the motif of witches to speak to the plight of minorities in America and I think that it is here that he gets caught up in perhaps trying to do too much.
During season one. Jessica and I were talking about how she was always attracted to that Salem story because her granddaughters are actually descendants of the Salem witches. I found that to be very interesting and cool, so I started researching it. I really locked into it when I thought about the witches story as sort of a metaphor for any persecuted and hunted minority group in this country.
Although this is a noble effort and an interesting topic to take on, I think what is missing here is a nuanced discussion of the way in which minorities are often pitted against one another in an attempt to conserve the power that they do have. Given Murphy’s comments, there might be some recognition of this as the factions band together in response to an even greater threat but I think the really interesting point is to see how groups can complain about their own oppression even as they are (unconsciously) working to subjugate others. Given the subject matter of witches it seems so obvious that one can pull in lessons from the history of feminism (in American and otherwise) and this very issue of coalition building and minorities but I think that this is something that the show is likely to miss.
That being said, I remain hopeful for the show to develop into something rather amazing. I think that the show has great potential to deliver something interesting because of its subject matter and, to that end, I believe that Queenie represents the make or break part of the show. For me, Queenie is, in many ways, exactly what the show is about: a black girl who is in a school for white witches and the way in which one must reconcile one’s identity with one’s environment. Murphy seems to indicate that Queenie will be a battleground in the plot of the show (and, really, could it be any more obvious with her power and race?) but I think that Queenie also represents the salvation of the magic community if the show plays it right. Queenie represents the literal bridging of these two communities, embodying the idea that voodoo/Salem isn’t an either/or proposition but in fact a both/and. Voodoo and Salem are not in contention in the way that American Horror Story wants to posit—they operate on entirely different levels!
As a final point, I am interested by this last direction of the show toward Frankenstein’s monster, which is so much about playing God on level (and thus ultimate power and life) but also about the reconfiguring of bodies (the direction that I think horror should be going in because these are the fears/anxieties that we are dealing with as a culture). As a preview to the next episode Murphy says:
The second episode is called “Boy Parts.” Zoe [Taissa Farmiga] is devastated because she had feelings for this boy. Madison wants to make it up to her. So they go into Cordelia’s stash and steal a spell. They go to the morgue, and it turns out all the boys have been horribly dismembered in this crash, and so Madison gets this brilliant idea. “Fuck it, let’s build our perfect boyfriend.” So they take all the best parts they like and create this teenage Frankenstein. Evan really loves playing him because he gets to do something almost like a silent movie, very physical and crazy. He watched a lot of those Frankenstein origin movies, but he’s come up with his own physical thing which is really amazing, and quite naughty.
Nitpicking, you see here how Muphy gets some of the little things wrong (e.g., the creature is Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Frankenstein always refers to the doctor himself although the usage is certainly slippery in modern references) and this makes all of the difference. That being said, I am still excited to see where this will go and I think that the inclusion of this has the ability to add to the central theme of the episode. (Which, for the record, I guess I tend to write off the comments that so much of the show is “random.” I agree that there is often a ton of stuff thrown in, but I continue to believe that much of it revolves around a central idea for each season. The trick is that intent/execution—as I’ve said before—do not always align and so it takes some work for viewers to get on the same page as the writers as to why things make an appearance. Example A being the aliens in season 2 of American Horror Story.)
Seeking More Craft in “Bitchcraft”
Initial reactions from first viewing…
For better or for worse one of the things that American Horror Story excels at is maintaining a self-conscious eye toward visual presentation, particularly in the first offerings of each season. At its best, there are some truly memorable shots throughout each of the premiere episodes that help to set the tone for what this particular venture will be about. And yet there is also a way in which the show seems invested in continually reminding the viewer that he or she is a spectator in the proceedings—I enjoyed the snapshot montage of season 2—and we see this yet again with the anachronistic film stock of the Salem witch trials (not to mention the scoping in the opening LaLaurie scene).
And LaLaurie is a prime example of where some of the show’s haste to cultivate a style occasionally diminishes the impact of the (often intriguing) message at the core of each season. American Horror Story has always been a stylized and heightened experience (which is definitely part of its appeal) but there is a way in which this presentation severely undercuts the revulsion that one might feel in response to LaLaurie’s attic of horrors. Sure, the visuals are mildly unsettling but the scene takes on an entirely new dimension, I think, if one remembers that LaLaurie was a real person and, by extension, the mutilations visited upon these slave captives were quite real.
As a side note, I have yet to come to a conclusion about the featuring of a Minotaur in the first few minutes of tonight’s episode. In some ways I am reminded of Rome’s depiction of a ritual blood bath and yet I also wonder if the show is attempting to make nods toward the way in which the line between slaves and beasts was interchangeable.
But the connection that American Horror Story seems to be drawing between the New Orleans of 1830 and 2013 largely appears to rest on subjugation: using the obvious broad themes of slavery and a somewhat manufactured persecution of witches in the modern era the show unfavorably conflates the severity of slavery with a looser form of persecution (generally) and those who simply feel put upon (insultingly). I have yet to be convinced, for example, that a modern society would actively persecute witches in the way that the show details. Aren’t we much more a culture of skeptics? Moreover, what do we make of the genetic basis of witchcraft and does this mean that the powers have a grounding in physics? Is this explanation an example of the way in which the language and rational of science has so thoroughly pervaded our consciousness as viewers (and furthermore what might that mean about the way in which we are willing to relate to witchcraft)? And then there is the odd way in which American Horror Story juxtaposes Pentecostals and witchcraft, in my view passing up a very interesting opportunity to explore how America positions itself to those who have totally embraced the supernatural. Which, when you think about it, is sort of irritating for there are many ways in which all kinds of people—including women!—are made subject to differing levels of inequality and fabricating a storyline in which witches are hunted is to ignore a closer investigation into the ways in which those with power in America can attempt to maintain inequality on interpersonal and institutional levels.
All of that being said, I don’t get the sense that this season’s major/true theme revolves around oppression/control (as is frequently mentioned in various ways throughout the episode, see “We’re on probation” and “Do you want to be my slave tonight?” for examples) so much as it is about power, who wields it, and what effect power has on you as a person. This, of course, is related to oppression/control but is also somewhat fuzzier.
As example, I think there is a potentially fruitful discussion to be had regarding the depiction of male/female power and its ties to homosocial environments and aggression. The question that this episode sort of puts forth is, “How do people wield power?” In a very stark way, we see a link between aggression and power through the young witches and frat boys: while one group grounds their violence in emotion and physical aggression the other leans toward sexual/physical (guess which is which).
And, on that note, I am still cautious about the way in which the show thinks deeply on issues of women and power. Although witches have traditionally been the figure to express this combination, we see two major (white) figures obsessed with youth and looks. Are we to think, then, that this is what women aspire to power for? Is there a commentary here on the interplay between women’s power in their bodies (and why that is) and magic? I think that this last question in being too generous for what I’ve seen of this show, although I would happily be proven wrong. And then we have the “black widow” power of killing men through sex, which is 1) oddly heteronormative if it doesn’t also work with women and 2) a very basic retread of a fear that men have had about women for a long time. I want to say that the show is all about shuffling worn tropes and interrogating them so I remain hopeful and yet I am also not thoroughly confident that the show will pull it off.
(And what’s up with the title of “Bitchcraft”? I suppose this was my first red flag that this show would not be entirely nuanced in its exploration of this theme of women/power. Admittedly the “bitch” debate is not particularly resonant at the moment but my problem–as always–is that the sho does nothing to challenge or complicate the demeaning reading of the title.)
Like So Much Processed Meat
“The hacker mystique posits power through anonymity. One does not log on to the system through authorized paths of entry; one sneaks in, dropping through trap doors in the security program, hiding one’s tracks, immune to the audit trails that we put there to make the perceiver part of the data perceived. It is a dream of recovering power and wholeness by seeing wonders and not by being seen.”
—Pam Rosenthal
Flesh Made Data: Part I
This quote, which comes from a chapter in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Control and Freedom on the Orientalization of cyberspace, gestures toward the values embedded in the Internet as a construct. Reading this quote, I found myself wondering about the ways in which identity, users, and the Internet intersect in the present age. Although we certainly witness remnants of the hacker/cyberpunk ethic in movements like Anonymous, it would seem that many Americans exist in a curious tension that exists between the competing impulses for privacy and visibility.
Looking deeper, however, there seems to be an extension of cyberpunk’s ethic, rather than an outright refusal or reversal: if cyberpunk viewed the body as nothing more than a meat sac and something to be shed as one uploaded to the Net, the modern American seems, in some ways, hyper aware of the body’s ability to interface with the cloud in the pursuit of peak efficiency. Perhaps the product of a self-help culture that has incorporated the technology at hand, we are now able to track our calories, sleep patterns, medical records, and moods through wearable devices like Jawbone’s UP but all of this begs the question of whether we are controlling our data or our data is controlling us. Companies like Quantified Self promise to help consumers “know themselves through numbers,” but I am not entirely convinced. Aren’t we just learning to surveil ourselves without understanding the overarching values that guide/manage our gaze?
Returning back to Rosenthal’s quote, there is a rather interesting way in which the hacker ethic has become perverted (in my opinion) as the “dream of recovering power” is no longer about systemic change but self-transformation; one is no longer humbled by the possibilities of the Internet but instead strives to become a transformed wonder visible for all to see.
Flesh Made Data: Part II
A spin-off of, and prequel to, Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), Caprica (2011-2012) transported viewers to a world filled with futuristic technology, arguably the most prevalent of which was the holoband. Operating on basic notions of virtual reality and presence, the holoband allowed users to, in Matrix parlance, “jack into” an alternate computer-generated space, fittingly labeled by users as “V world.”[1] But despite its prominent place in the vocabulary of the show, the program itself never seemed to be overly concerned with the gadget; instead of spending an inordinate amount of time explaining how the device worked, Caprica chose to explore the effect that it had on society.
Calling forth a tradition steeped in teenage hacker protagonists (or, at the very least, ones that belonged to the “younger” generation), our first exposure to V world—and to the series itself—comes in the form of an introduction to an underground space created by teenagers as an escape from the real world. Featuring graphic sex, violence, and murder, this iteration does not appear to align with traditional notions of a utopia but might represent the manifestation of Caprican teenagers’ desires for a world that is both something and somewhere else. And although immersive virtual environments are not necessarily a new feature in Science Fiction television, with references stretching from Star Trek’s holodeck to Virtuality, Caprica’s real contribution to the field was its choice to foreground the process of V world’s creation and the implications of this construct for the shows inhabitants.
Seen one way, the very foundation of virtual reality and software—programming—is itself the language and act of world creation, with code serving as architecture. If we accept Lawrence Lessig’s maxim that “code is law”, we begin to see that cyberspace, as a construct, is infinitely malleable and the question then becomes not one of “What can we do?” but “What should we do?” In other words, if given the basic tools, what kind of existence will we create and why?
Running with this theme, the show’s overarching plot concerns an attempt to achieve apotheosis through the uploading of physical bodies/selves into the virtual world. I found this series particularly interesting to dwell on because here again we had something that recalls the cyberpunk notion of transcendence through data but, at the same time, the show asked readers to consider why a virtual paradise was more desirous than one constructed in the real world. Put another way, the show forces the question, “To what extent do hacker ethics hold true in the physical world?”
[1] Although the show is generally quite smart about displaying the right kind of content for the medium of television (e.g., flushing out the world through channel surfing, which not only gives viewers glimpses of the world of Caprica but also reinforces the notion that Capricans experience their world through technology), the ability to visualize V world (and the transitions into it) are certainly an element unique to an audio-visual presentation. One of the strengths of the show, I think, is its ability to add layers of information through visuals that do not call attention to themselves. These details, which are not crucial to the story, flush out the world of Caprica in a way that a book could not, for while a book must generally mention items (or at least allude to them) in order to bring them into existence, the show does not have to ever name aspects of the world or actively acknowledge that they exist.
Bouncing Off the Wall
Personalization, as exemplified by the popularity of music services like Pandora, has become a defining characteristic of a 21st century American musical sensibility; with an increasing number of Americans gaining access to on demand content, it would seem that the creation of a contemporary Great American Songbook is not only unlikely but quite possibly unwanted. And yet, despite the growing insularity of listening habits, it would seem that American popular culture continues to present individuals with auditory cultural touchstones in the form of viral singles. For better or for worse, creations like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” have become entities that we organize around, forming taste communities grounded in our reaction to the song.
The importance of music in personal history and the construction of identity became oddly salient recently with the broadcast of HBO’s Phil Spector. It is, I think, all too easy to get caught up in ridiculing the appearance of Phil Spector. A notable recluse in his later years, Spector was thrust into the spotlight while on trial in 2003 for the murder of Lana Clarkson; somewhat given to eccentricity in both lifestyle and presentation, publicized images of Spector lent themselves to commentary that, more often than not, almost necessarily included mention of Spector’s hair.
And although we might criticize the movie for overacting and underdeveloped characters, upon reflection what struck me as particularly poignant about the film was the way in which it reminded me that Phil Spector songs have had a memorable influence in my life.[1]
Using Spector as a jumping off point I began to think this week on the relationship between music, technology, and American social history; although it is tempting to look back and claim that landmark songs “changed” American culture, I instead want to pick up on the idea from this week’s readings that technology and culture (both in the form of music and more broadly) are mutually constitutive processes.
It is, for example, difficult to talk about the impact of Phil Spector’s songs without referencing The Wall of Sound. Born out of a (in retrospect) rather stubborn refusal to embrace stereo sound, Spector engineered a technique wherein sound from the musicians was piped down into echo chambers and then recorded, in effect creating a metaphorical “wall” of sound.
Having not studied music extensively as an academic subject, I find myself still struggling with some questions and concepts. Does the Wall of Sound provide an example of Simon Frith’s (building on Andrew Chester) assertion that Western popular music absorbed Afro-American forms and conventions, producing an “intentionally” complex artifact? As Firth notes, an intentionally complex structure “is that constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony and beat, while the complex is built up by modulation of the basic notes and by inflexion of the basic beat.” (269)
More importantly, however, I wonder how Spector’s technique builds upon conventions that had long been established in African American gospel music and to what extent it was really “new.” Consistent with a larger move in rock music at the time, I marvel at how Phil Spector’s early songs helped to elevate ethnic minorities into the spotlight but also, at the same time, claimed their cultural practices for mainstream America.
Music, History, and Bioshock Infinite
Consistent with Phil Spector, what I am most interested in is the way in which we use fiction to look back on a past that is both imagined and real. How do we make sense of things in retrospect and what does our thought process tell us about the way that we understand the present? Although my thoughts are not fully formed on the subject, I am curious about how pieces of our cultural past are strategically deployed to foreground certain parts of our cultural history while obscuring others.
Bioshock Infinite is a video game premised on a many worlds theory, presenting an alternate history of America in the form of the utopic/dystopic floating city of Columbia. Reflecting sentiments from early 20th century America, the city evidences strong tones of nationalism, theocracy, and jingoism. And, given our continuing struggle with race (see “Accidental Racist”), I wonder about how something like Bioshock Infinite speaks to the way in which we see ourselves in relationship to our own history.
To be sure, the game plays fast and lose with history as it incorporates musical easter eggs throughout the world. “God Only Knows,” a song influenced by Spector’s Wall of Sound technique, makes an appearance early on in the form of a barbershop quartet.
Although rather charming, there is a way in which this type of action reflects a modern sensibility that songs (or perhaps moments in history in general) can be divorced from their surrounding context and transplanted as discrete units. Given the game’s logic I am fully willing to concede that a composer could have peered through dimensions and lifted this song but it seems unlikely that he would know why such a song was popular in the first place. This move seems to be much more about the developers trying to establish a relationship with players than creating a world (which is fine), but the way in which they have gone about it makes me worry that our understanding of cultural artifacts ignores the way in which they are part of systems.
As a parting gift, Bioshock Infinite also features this…
[1] This is, to be sure, an intentional on the part of writer/director David Mamet who even has Phil Spector suggest at one point that his song was playing the first time that his lawyer was felt up.
A Light in the Dark
In his recent post “Where Are Our Bright Science-Fiction Futures?” Graeme McMillan reflects on the dire portraits of the future portended by summer science fiction blockbusters. Here McMillian gestures toward—but does not ultimately articulate—a very specific cultural history that is infused with a sense of nostalgia for the American past.
“There was a stretch of time — from the early 20th century through the beginning of comic books — when science fiction was an exercise in optimism and what is these days referred to as a “can-do” attitude.”
McMillan goes on to write that “such pessimism and fascination with future dystopias really took hold of mainstream sci-fi in the 1970s and ’80s, as pop culture found itself struggling with general disillusionment as a whole.” And McMillan is not wrong here but he is also not grasping the entirety of the situation
To be sure, the fallout the followed the idealistic futures set forth by 60s counterculture—again we must be careful to limit the scope of our discussion to America here even as we recognize that this reading only captures the broadest strokes of the genre—may have had something to do with the rise in “pessimism” but I would also contend that the time period that McMillan refers to was also one that had civil unrest pushed to the forefront of its consciousness. More than a response to hippie culture was a country that was struggling to redefine itself in the midst of an ongoing series of projects that aimed to secure rights for previously disenfranchised groups. McMillan’s nod toward disillusionment is important to bear in mind (as is a growing sense of cynicism in America), but the way in which that affective stance impacts science fiction is much more complex than McMillan suggests.
McMillan needs to, for example, consider the resurgence of fairy tales and folklore in American visual entertainment that has taken on an increasingly “dark” tone; from Batman to Snow White we see a rejection of the unfettered good. Fantasy, science fiction, and horror are all cousins and we see the explorations of our alternate futures playing out across all three genres.
In light of this it only makes sense that the utopic post-need vision of Star Trek would find no footing; American culture was actively railing against hegemonic visions of the present and so those who were in the business of speculating about possible futures began to consider the implications of this process, particularly with respect to race and gender.
Near the end of his piece McMillan opines:
That’s the edge that downbeat science fiction has over the more hopeful alternative. It’s easier to imagine a world where things go wrong, rather than right, and to believe in a future where we manage to screw it all up.
Here, McMillian demonstrates a fundamental failure to interrogate what science/speculative fiction does for us in the first place before proceeding to consider how its function is related to its tone. I would stridently argue that this binary about hopeful/pessimistic thinking is misguided for a number of reasons.
First, it is evident that McMillan is conflating the utopic/dystopic dimension with hopeful/pessimistic. While we might generally make a case that the concept of utopia feels more hopeful on the surface this is not necessarily the case; instead, I would argue that utopia feels more comforting, which is not necessarily the same thing as hopeful. To illustrate the point, we need only consider the recent trend in YA dystopic fiction which, on its surface, contains an explicit element of critique but is often somewhat hopeful about the ability of its protagonists to overcome adversity. Earlier in his piece McMillan refers to this type of scenario as a “semiwin” but I would argue that it is, for many authors and readers, a complete win, albeit one that focuses generally on humans and individualism.
The other point that McMillan likely understands but did not address is that writing about situations in which everything “goes right” is not actually all that interesting. In his invocation of the science fiction of the early 20th century McMillan fails to recognize the way in which that particular strain of science fiction was the result of a very specific inheritor of the notion of scientific progress (and the future) that dates back to the Enlightenment but was largely spurred on by the 1893 World’s Fair. Additionally, although it is somewhat of a cliché, we must consider the way in which the aftermath of the atomic bomb (and the resulting fear of the Cold War) shattered our understanding that technology and science would lead to a bright new world.
Moreover, the fiction that McMillan cites was rather exclusive to white middle class amateur males (often youth) and the “hope” represented in those fictions was largely possible because of a shared vision of the future in this community. Returning to a discussion of the 70s and 80s we see that such an idyllic scenario is really no longer possible as we understand that utopias are inherently flawed for they can only ever represent a singular idea of perfection. Put another way, one person’s utopia is another person’s subjugation.
I would also argue that it is, in fact, easier to imagine a future where everything is right because all one has to do to engage in this project is to “fix” the things that are issues in the current day and age. This is easy. The difficult task is to not only craft a compelling alternate future but to consider how we get there and this is where the “pessimistic” fiction’s inherent critique is often helpful. Fiction that is, on its surface, labeled as “pessimistic” (which is really a simplified reading when you get down to it) actually has the harder task of locating the root cause of an issue and trying to understand how the issue is perpetuated or propagated. Although it might seem paradoxical, “pessimistic” is actually hopeful because it argues that things can change and therefore there is a way out.
Alternatively, we might consider how the language of the apocalypse is linked to that of nature. On one axis we have the adoption of the apocalyptic in reference to climate change and, on a related dimension, we are beginning to see changes in the post-apocalyptic worlds that suggest the resurgence of nature as opposed to the decimation of it. McMillan laments that we should “try harder” if we can’t imagine a world that we have not ruined but I would counter this to suggest that many Americans are intimately aware, on some level, that humans have irrevocably damaged the world and so our visions of the future continue to carry this burden.
Science Fiction as a genre is much more robust than McMillan gives it credit for and, ultimately, I would suggest that he try harder to really understand how the genre is continually articulating multiple visions of the future that are complex and potentially contradictory. The simplification of these stories that takes place for a movie might strip them down into palatable themes and McMillan needs to speak to the ways in which his evidence is born out of an industry whose values most likely have an effect on the types of fictions that make it onto the screen.
Admission + Confession
If I were feeling generous, I might be inclined to argue that the conflicted nature of Admission (Weitz, 2013) is a purposeful gesture designed to comment on the turmoil present in the process of admission (in both senses of the word). Unfortunately, however, I suspect that the movie simply lacked a clear understanding about its core story, relying instead on the well-worn structure of the American romantic comedy for support. Based on a 2009 book by Jean Hanff Korelitz, the movie adaptation focuses on the trajectory of Princeton admission officer Portia Nathan (Tina Fey) after the Head of School for the alternative school Quest, John Pressman (Paul Rudd), informs her that one of his students, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), might be her son. Confused as the movie might have been, it was startlingly clear in its reflection of current cultural themes; evidencing a focus on the individual in a neoliberal environment and various manifestations of the sensibility of the post-, Admission remains a movie worth discussing.
Individualism and Neoliberal Thought
Although the decision to anchor the story in the character of Portia makes a certain amount of narrative sense, the focus on the individual at the expense of the process represents the first indication that Admission is driven by a worldview that has placed the self at the center of the universe. But, to be fair, I would readily argue that the college admission process itself is one that is driven by individualistic impulses as high school students learn to turn themselves into brands or products that are then “sold” to colleges and universities around the country. In large and small ways, college admission in its present form demands that American youth mold themselves into a somewhat elusive model of excellence. (Let’s be honest, we all know parents who teach their toddlers French or insist on lessons of various kinds in the hopes that these skills will place children on track for a “good” school.) In short, college admission sets the rather impossible task for students to, as Oprah would say, “Be your best self” while remaining authentic and not presenting as packaged (although that is secretly what is desired). The danger here, I think, is failing to realize that what is deemed “authentic” is, by its very nature, a self that has been groomed to meet invisible expectations and therefore is understood as natural.
Tracing one factor in the development of the current primacy of individualism Janice Peck performs a close analysis of Oprah’s Book Club in her book The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, illustrating how Winfrey’s continual insistence on the self-enriching power of literature is reflective of the situation of the self as the most relevant construct for individuals immersed in a culture of neoliberalism (186). Through her examination of Oprah’s Book Club Peck suggests a manner in which culture has reinforced the adoption of particular values that are consistent with those of neoliberalism. Admission is not exempted from this reflection of a larger sensibility that judges worth in relationship to self-relevance as we see the character of Portia only really advocate for a student once she believes that he is the son that she gave up for adoption. Although I am willing to give Portia the benefit of the doubt and believe that she has been an advocate for other applicants in the past, the choice of the movie to conflate Portia’s professional and personal outreach grossly undercuts the character’s ability to effectively challenge a system that systematically promotes a particular range of students to its upper echelon.
Moreover, having previously established the influence of the 1980s recovery movement (7), Peck then suggests that for those who ascribe to the ideals of neoliberalism the therapeutic self—the self that is able to be transformed, redeemed, rehabilitated, or recovered—is of utmost importance. As example of this sentiment’s pervasiveness, although it would appear to be a clear conflict of interest, in discussing the merits of her applicant son Portia stresses the way in which Jeremiah has blossomed in the right environment and thus exemplifies the American ethic of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Here Portia urges her colleagues to overlook the first three years of high school that are riddled with Ds and Fs and to focus on Jeremiah’s transformative capacity.
The Manifestation of the Post-
And yet perhaps Portia’s insistence on the power of change makes a certain amount of sense given that she is the female lead of a romantic comedy and embodies transformation herself. Initially portrayed as a bookish middle-aged woman whose life is characterized by resigned acceptance, Portia inevitably has her world shaken by the introduction of a new male presence and proceeds to undergo the transformation that is typical of female leads in this scenario. Indicative of a postfeminist sensibility, Portia’s inner growth manifests as a bodily makeover in fashion that mirrors Rosalind Gill’s reading of Bridget Jones’ Diary (2007).
The most telling way manifestation of the logic of the post- in Admission is, however, the film’s express desire to “have it both ways” with regard toward attitudes on female identity/sexuality and race. In her article “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility” Gill argues that the deployment of irony to comment on social issues is a central feature of the post- mentality and a practice that is ultimately damaging as it reinforces inequalities through its insistence that difference has been rendered innocuous enough to be rendered the subject of a joke (2007). In this vein, Admission introduces Portia’s mother, Susannah (Lily Tomlin), as a second-wave feminist only to undercut the power of the message that she represents. Although not expressly stated, the presentation of Susannah is suggestive of a radical feminist but also features a scene in which Susannah exemplifies postfeminism’s connection between the body and femininity by electing for reconstructive surgery after a double mastectomy and later ultimately admits that Portia’s conception was not an act of defiance but rather simply a mistake made by a young woman.
Admission also demonstrates ambivalence towards issues of race, not broaching the topic unless it is specifically the focus of the scene. To wit, John’s mother is a one-dimensional stereotype of a New England WASP whose articulations of racism (despite having a Ugandan grandchild) ostensibly indicates that she is not a “good white liberal.” This scene is indicative of the way in which irony has infiltrated popular media, going for the easy joke as it winks to the audience, “We all know that racism is awful, right?” Insultingly, Admission then fails to comment on the way in which John’s son Nelson (Travaris Spears) perpetuates a very specific presentation of young black males in popular culture as rascals and/or the way in which issues of race continue to be a very real point of contention for the admission process as a whole. Similar to issues of feminism, Admission exemplifies the sensibility of the post- in that it expresses a desire to gain approval for acknowledging social issues while not actually saying anything meaningful about them.
Problematizing Irony as Social Critique
How, then, do we go about unseating irony as a prevalent form of social critique when the response to challenges is often, “Can’t you take a joke?” I was surprised to see, for example, a response to Seth MacFarlane’s opening Oscar bit that argued that the feminist backlash was misplaced—according to Victoria Brownworth, MacFarlane was using satire to point out the inequalities in the Hollywood system. Although Brownworth fails to recognize that acknowledging a phenomenon without providing critique or an alternate vision only serves to reinforce the present, her reaction was not an isolated one.
One of the things that I have learned thus far in my life is that it is almost impossible to explain privilege to a person who is actively feeling the effects of that position and so a head-on confrontation is not always the best strategy. (This is, of course, not to say that one should allow things to pass without objection but merely that trying to breakdown the advantages that a party is experiencing in the moment is incredibly difficult.) If we recognize that the logic of neoliberalism constructs individuals who primarily understand importance in relationship to the relevance to the self—or, worse yet, do not think about interpersonal and structural forces at all—and that irony can be used as a distancing tactic, how to do we go about encouraging people to reengage and reconnect in a meaningful way?
Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm, 1928-39
Ronald Walter Greene
Bibliography
Greene, R. W. (2011). Pastoral Exhibition: The YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and the Transition to 16mm, 1928-39. In C. R. Acland, & N. Wasson (Eds.), Useful Cinema (pp. 205-229). Durham: Duke University Press.
Biography
Greene’s research interests include Rhetorical Theory, Cultural Policy and Moving Image Studies. Greene work in rhetorical theory is approached with a materialist perspective that focuses on how rhetorical techniques and technologies are enlisted as means of governance and production. Additionally, Greene’s work in moving image studies emphasizes the distribution and exhibition practices of the YMCA Motion Picture Bureau in the first half of the twentieth century.
Summary
Although Ronald Walter Greene’s Pastoral Exhibition is, on one level, a story about the development of a 16mm film network in early 20th century America, the piece also fundamentally speaks to the way in which audiences are constructed as part of economic markets. Having introduced this connection between audiences and economies via a reference to Antonio Gramsci’s view of the YMCA as “professional, political, and ideological intermediaries”[1] for Fordism, Greene essentially goes on to outline the way in which the development of the 16mm film network by the YMCA Motion Picture Bureau and Exhibits (MPB) was intertwined with the dissemination of a particular brand of ideology.
As an example, Greene notes the relationship between the ability of the MPB to distribute free movies because of corporate donations, non-traditional settings for movie showings that resulted from the YMCA’s interest in urban outreach, and Steven Ross’ observation that “the companies most active in crushing unions…were also the most aggressive in producing nontheatricals…shown at local YMCAs.”[2] In essence, a simplification of this process suggests that a company was able to spread its ideology in the form of films using the YMCA network of 16mm distribution.
However, the key point in Greene is not just that the YMCA provided distribution channels for films (corporate-sponsored and otherwise) but that the very philosophy of the YMCA acted to cultivate audiences and thereby shape modes of seeing. Using the term “pastoral exhibition” to describe the YMCA’s position that films should work to “care for an individual’s well-being while harnessing the practice of movie watching to alleviate social, political, and moral problems of a population,”[3] Greene speaks to the way in which the very experience of watching a movie was designed to frame the viewer as a particular type of audience member.[4] As opposed to the theatrical/Hollywood model, the films of the YMCA were educational in tone and reinforced the necessity of a cultural authority to guide audiences into correct modes of interaction with the film. Understanding the development of the 16mm network in this way, we see how the distribution network of films contributed to the generation/reinforcement of a power dynamic between laborers and film producers.
Finally, given the invocation of the pastoral, it is only fitting that Greene mentions Foucault’s reading of the term and the way in which the movement of groups is managed through networks and markets. Given that Greene notes that “the mobile character of 16mm may have been difficult for the pastoral mode of exhibition because it proliferated in the sites and genres of non-theatrical exhibition with or without the cultural authorities deemed necessary to instill the proper moral disposition,”[5] we might also think through the implications for this model in the current age of digital distribution. Who are the new cultural authorities and how does the film industry continue to construct us as audiences?
On Portmanteaus and the Death of American Wit
I very much disagree with this Slate’s Culture Gabfest take on portmanteaus. There is, I think, a rich discussion regarding relationship between (new) words/concepts and the ways in which people understand limitations in the ability of their current language to express an idea. We could think about how multi-lingual people run into this as well when you switch to another language because your current one simply doesn’t contain the word (in its fullness) that you are looking to say. Portmanteaus are not new and they are not the real issue here.
Alternatively, it seems like what the original Slate article is trying to get at is the death of American wit and the way in which “clever” wordplay has come to stand in for an actual depth of meaning. I am not mad at this.
All of this to say that I think that both of these lines of inquiry are productive to explore and I think that the most insightful bit of commentary is to dive into how individuals deploy language as a positional/relational tool.
Admission People Problems
This isn’t a new thing but I have to say that the Admission Problems tumblr (http://admissionsproblems.tumblr.com/) makes me so incredibly sad. As someone who used to work in the profession I have to admit that I get the jokes and I completely understand blowing off steam–a lot is asked of you as a professional and it is, at times, hard to remember why you do what you do. That is, if you even love it in the first place. I sympathize with the frustration of being continually misunderstood and seeing the same perceived shortcomings appear over and over again in students and parents but the thing is, I think, that we need to remember that the stakes look so different from the other side of the college fair table.
Our profession already struggles with an image issue and the danger of the tumblr is that outsiders are going to read it and judge all of us for what a few of us do. Outsiders are not going to understand the way that we might grumble but do so because we have so much hope for students and, perhaps unfairly, want them all to be as great as we know they can be. What does the blog do for students and families who are already nervous about navigating the college-going process? How many students will get the idea that they just aren’t good enough or that we don’t really care about them because of the tumblr’s vibe?
I get that a lot of the admission counselors who are on the ground are young but I also think that we should challenge ourselves to be better. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have faults and that we are immune from the occasional grumble session. We should be honest with our students and our families about how we are, just like them, human and we have human emotions that include frustration. But we should also be honest with them and let them know that this is not our dominant state of being–we are (with luck) not jaded and cynical and completely distanced from what it was like to apply to college. We should be honest and admit that sometimes we DO forget that this is, in many ways, the first time that these students can fail at something big and that an entire educational system has coached them to present themselves in ways that we occasionally find tiring. We need to be honest and tell people that our outbursts this don’t mean that we love students or support their goals any less.
We talk about how “students these days” can be narcissistic, individualistic, and needy. We talk about how our students aren’t smart about social media use. And maybe those arguments can be made. But we should consider how something like this Admission Problems tumblr implicates us in the very things that we think we are above. The tumblr talks about growth and how people can “learn” from the examples provided but makes evident that it knows nothing about what it actually means to be an educator. Is the information helpful? Maybe. But people should definitely be offended because the goal of Admission Problems is not to teach nor is it to truly understand. Admission Problems exists solely to critique and to judge and the fallacy of thinking that this is productive is a severely misguided notion. There are many things about the culture of college admission that I want to work to change but I also, at times, get angry enough to shout at these anonymous people, “Get out if you don’t love what you do. This work is too important to be done by people who don’t care.”
In so many ways I want to revise the tumblr’s subtitle and tell students that they ARE special in so many ways and sometimes we just can’t see that. But to also remind them that special doesn’t mean better than. I want to remind students that they are the protagonists of their stories but, at the same time, they are bit players in the stories of others and that being able to reconcile those two ideas is going to take them far in life.
Trauma and Justice
Trauma and Justice
The Moral Grammar of Trauma Discourse from Wilhelmine Germany to Post-Apartheid South Africa
Jose Brunner
Bibliography
Burnner, J. (2007). Trauma and Justice: The Moral Grammar of Trauma Discourse from Wilhelmine Germany to Post-Apartheid South Africa. In Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing, and Making Law (pp. 97-118). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body, as I shall suggest shortly, but even when that does not happen, traumatic wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a mood, an ethos—a group culture, almost—that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up. Trauma, that is, has a social dimension.
—Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community”
Biography
Jose Brunner appears to be largely interested in work that sits at the intersection of history, trauma, and memory, with publications that largely involve either Freud or psychoanalysis. According to Brunner, his main areas of research and publication include the relationship between law, memory and identity, the history and politics of psychoanalysis, the politics of the mental health discourse on trauma, psychological theories of Nazism and genocide, modern and contemporary political thought, and the history of compensation for Holocaust survivors in Germany and Israel.
Summary
Brunner opens his essay by recounting a key moment in the history of the industrialized West: the use of demographic data allowed governing bodies to conceptualize risk in terms of statistical probability, which then allowed for the development of insurance as a system to provide recompense for injury. Although the implications of this even are much more significant than Brunner indicates,[1] he introduces the idea in order to begin a discussion of how trauma sits at the intersection of law, government, and health.
This context is a key one for Brunner as he intends to focus on the association between trauma and justice as a means to begin a discussion that uncovers embedded moral codes surrounding trauma and its treatment. Using Axel Honneth’s concept of “moral grammar,” which speaks to the way in which individuals’ responses to transgressions of moral order in everyday life form the basis for social justice movements, Brunner introduces three separate dimensions on which trauma discourse can be placed (suspicion-compassion, silence-solidarity, and victimhood-healing) as it moves from a modern to postmodern context. Brunner’s overall argument is that each case presented exemplifies that time period’s concerns over the politics of life.
Suspicion-Compassion (late 19th and early 20th century)
In the wake of an 1889 decision by the Imperial Insurance Office that allowed German workers to seek compensation for trauma (as a form of injury) experienced while on the job, doctors in Wilhelmine became suspicious that 1) opportunists were taking advantage of the situation to press their claims and that 2) providing such a safety net would subtly encourage the transformation of acute symptoms into chronic ones. Exemplified by Hermann Oppenheim, the counter position argued that the process of redress was itself traumatic in that it stigmatized the petitioner and involved a prolonged revisiting of the original trauma. Although arguments ultimately resulted in the Simulationsstreit (debate on malingering), Brunner notes that this case speaks to a way in which the medical community challenged the law, citing it as detrimental to those it purported to help and thus invoking a moral claim that stemmed from the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.
Solidarity-Silence (mid-20th century)
After a broad introduction[2] that essentially argues that cultural recognition of trauma must precede medical and legal legitimation and the irony that “as a rule, the traumatized could achieve acknowledgment of their powerlessness, vulnerability, victimhood, and suffering only when they managed to gain the power or status needed to overcome at least part of the marginalization and exclusion mechanisms that silence the traumatized” (105), Brunner goes on to suggest that the creation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)[3] as a diagnosis destabilized the victim-victimizer dichotomy in trauma, opening up new frameworks through which to understand trauma.
Victimhood-Healing (late 20th century)
Brunner’s final dichotomy looks at efforts of therapeutic jurisprudence to assist in the healing process, specifically focusing on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Furthering the scope of trauma outlined in the previous section, Brunner notes that the TRC identifies five categories of trauma sufferer: victim, perpetrator, families of victims, the community, and Commission personnel. In exploring the ramifications of this classification scheme, Brunner essentially invokes Maria Root’s concept of insidious trauma, which looks at the ways that the effects of an initial trauma can radiate out. Root’s interest is in examining how the knowledge that one is subject to trauma forms a type of oppression that is damaging to an individual. Brunner ultimately argues that the net effect of this focus on the community was to move trauma and healing outside of the confines of a victim/therapist model such that individuals could help treat each other and themselves.
[1] This is in fact one of the key developments for a discussion of biopolitics and the “new conception of the relationship between the state and its citizens” (98) that Brunner invokes is important not only for understanding the changing legal responsibility that the state had toward its citizens but also for how the state thought of its citizens and therefore what the citizen meant to the state.
[2] Brunner then makes a rather large leap in suggesting that individuals increasingly grew distrustful of the law’s ability to protect their interests. Although this sentiment may certainly be true, Brunner does not seem to provide sufficient evidence to support this claim.
[3] Despite a discussion about the possibilities that an individual can experience multiple forms of trauma and that scholars are increasingly interested in studying the effects of trauma in non-Western contexts, Brunner frustratingly fails to interrogate the limits of PTSD’s aforementioned comprehensiveness. As a diagnosis that was largely conceived of and interpreted by white males, “generally outside of the usual experience” was a guideline that was necessarily limited by the white male perspective. Most egregious is Brunner’s failure to comment on the way in which the very diagnosis of the PTSD also serves to reinscribe silence into trauma even as it destabilizes it.
Privatizing Privacy
The show is not the show,
But they that go.
Menagerie to me
My neighbor be.
Fair play—
Both went to see.
—Emily Dickinson
Although the second chapter of Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality? focuses on an examination of neoliberalism’s campaigns in the culture wars, there is something profound about the choice to concentrate on education and housing as two domains of change in the latter half of the 20th century. Following World War II, both education (in the form of a college degree) and a home were part of the democratic dream of the American citizen. Surveying the current landscape, however, we see that what once was bright has turned dark as both the housing industry and higher education have increasingly become privatized industries that are almost inextricably linked with debt. Encapsulating a force that contributed to this shift, Dugan writes:
Rather than support the idea that resources were adequate for broad-based public sharing of the fruits of prosperity, business activists promoted the idea that resources were scarce, and fierce competition among groups and individuals would be required to secure a comfortable life. (36)
In some ways reminiscent of Lauren Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism, we find that the very thing that purports to offer us light is the very thing that causes us to be further bound to a system that ultimately drags us down.
Additionally, we might consider how the neoliberal impulse mentioned in Duggan also manifests in reality television programs like House Hunters. Ostensibly a 30-minute program on HGTV that details a couple’s search for a new home, House Hunters sticks to a formula that essentially includes the prospective buyers surveying three prospective properties with the help of a real estate agent, making an offer on one of the properties (that is almost always accepted), and moving in at the conclusion of the episode. Aside from an unrealistic portrayal of the home-buying process, House Hunters works to solidify and normalize the privatization of the domestic space through its promotion of home ownership.
House Hunters television promo (2010)
House Hunters also makes abundantly clear just how intertwined race, class, sexuality and politics really are with its portrayal of viewers and the lingering comment, “I thought they were brothers.” More importantly, however, the home, in some ways the most private of cultural spaces, has now become a site for spectatorship on multiple levels as viewers see the innards of the house themselves but also experience a measure of voyeurism vicariously through the featured couple. Indeed, the format of the show as reality television makes explicit Clay Calvert’s phenomenon of the “voyeur nation” as “a nation of watchers performing their verification practices with an eye to the gaze of an imagined other, in order to avoid being seen as a dupe” (in Andrejevic, 239). The flip side, then, of reality shows’ democratizing promise that “everybody can be a judge” is that we are, in some ways, expected to have an opinion about the latest thing to be scrutinized; feeling the ever watchful gaze of others we examine the house just as ardently as the featured couple, knowing that we might be called upon at any moment to render our opinion.
If, however, the emphasis on home ownership demonstrates how the intersection between economics and the domestic is subject to privatization, the manifestation of House Hunters as a reality television show also indicates ways in which the overlap between the domestic/family and culture is increasingly made more public in service of economic gain. The issue here is one of privatization and privacy as the logics of neoliberalism turn privacy into a commodity.
Chris Tokuhama 
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