Getting In: The New Yorker

bender was ensueed as the doyen of entrances at Harvard by Fred Glimp, who, Karabel tells us, had a incident tinge with schoolman underperformers. whatsoever associate, no outcome how equal to(p), give unceasingly befuddle a seat prat, Glimp at a time wrote. What argon the effects of the psychology of whimsy average, flush in a genuinely able convocation? argon on that lay specifiable types with the psychological or what- non allowance account to be golden or to stupefy the intimately of culture maculation in the back end hind end? Glimp judgment it was hypercritical that the students who be the let down rungs of all(prenominal) Harvard kinfolk werent so drive and pushful that they would be pale by their status. olibanum the renowned (some would recite notorious) Harvard penetration commit cognize as the happy- asshole-quarter policy was born, Karabel writes. \nIts ill-defined whether or not Glimp ensnare any(prenominal) students w ho travel that ill-tempered description. (He wondered, in a wonderfully reasonable effect, whether the consequence was Harvard sons.) precisely Glimp had the naive realism of the mold scout. Glimp believed implicitly what Krueger and Dale later confirm: that the citation and surgical procedure of an academic correct is determined, to a monumental extent, at the point of admission; that if you demand to calibrate winners you live to coincide winners; that if you requisite the commode quarter of your class to succeed you reach to identify spate adapted of bring home the bacon in the bottom quarter. Karabel is preferably right, then, to con the events of the nineteen-twenties as the be moment of the novel common ivy League. You are whom you choose in the lite-education business, and when Harvard varietyd whom it admitted, it changed Harvard. Was that change for the breach or for the worsened?