the Sam Jackson College Experience

One of my classes this semester, The Intellectual in Politics (HUMS 331 / PLSC 328), has a final research project which revolves around the use of the Yale University Archives and the Manuscripts and Archives division. An institution hundreds of years old has a great deal of interesting documents pertaining to its own history, but Yale also has thousand upon thousands of other collections of papers from noted intellectuals over time. All told, Yale has more than 12 miles of papers entrusted to it by various persons.

Our final project for this class will be to create an online exhibit around five different documents, so I will definitely share it when I’m done.Everywhere you look, there are amazing things to find – you can request the personal notes and documents of people from important people hundreds of years since left to the history books, or zoom in to chronicle the personal diaries and thoughts of noted government figures and other intellectuals. It’s really just like a time machine, except with more paperwork to fill out.

At the moment, I am in Sterling Library reading through some of the records associated with the presidency of Kingman Brewster, my personal favorite Yale president. While there is too much to type altogether, I am going to share one piece that I really like that I just read. It makes me sad to think that in 1965, it was a *problem* that students were not motivated by money. How different were the problems facing educators in 1965? Read on to find out:

This is text of a speech of President Kingman Brewster, Jr. before the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1965

“If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

Boredom is not a newcomer in the halls of academe. But there is a mounting impatience and if we admit it, a new and unpleasant aroma of scorn among some student groups –impatience with education, scorn for educators.

Of course faculties are, and always should be heavily populated by people who are dedicated to the proposition that the search for truth is an end in itself. I am not one of those who buy the notion that the only worthy end of thought is action. Thought and learning, like experience and beauty can be ends in themselves. Not the least part of our job is to awaken a capacity for this enjoyment in the oncoming generations so that theirs may be delight in living as well as doing.

But the tragedy of the highly motivated impatient young activist is that he runs the serious risk of disqualifying himself from true usefulness by being too impatient to arm himself with the intellectual equipment required for the solution of the problems of war and poverty and indignity. You and I have seen too many among our students of high promise squander their talent for a lifetime of constructive work at a high level for the cheaper and transient satisfaction of throwing himself on some immediate barricade in the name of “involvement.” Posturing in the name of a good cause is too often the substitute for thorough thought or the patient doggedness it takes to build something.

Because we assume our own faith in education perhaps we have not preached it well enough. We have left it to the economists and the politicians to translate teh value of education into earning power and let it go at that. A generation whose brightest minds are unsatisfied with the dollar as the measure of success cannot be expected to find relevance in such appeals.

One of the new responsibilities for our old generation of educators is to remind the most highly motivated among the oncoming generation that there is no shortcut to the intellectual capacity which is now required to be useful in this ever shrinking ever complicating world. The chance to make a constructive difference in the lives of others, not the full dinner pail, is the highest reward of a higher education. If impatient anti-intellectualism of the radical left is not to seduce many of our best brains away from true usefulness; we and our faculties have to resassert again and again that emotional oversimplification of the world’s problems is not the paper to their solution.

But let me return to my text. What of the ends? If they don’t justify the means, what does?

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Yalies who thought that gender issues were a relic of the past should have had a rude awakening last year, after the mess surrounding some highly public misogynistic frat behavior known as the ‘we love yale sluts’ incident [YDN]. However, after the anger at the Zeta Psi pledges and hatred towards the Women’s Center had subsided, things seem to have gone back to normal – issues of sexism and the question of gender in general subsided once again into the background, consigned to the shadows again.

At the same time, the class of 2012 now seemingly holds a record for the greatest gender gap in Yale admissions history, or something close to it– 2,281 more women than men applied to Yale for the class of 2012, but men were 68% more likely to be offered a spot. The adjusted admissions rate: 9.8% for men, 7.5% for women.

It’s in this climate that a great new blog popped up, called Graphic Feminism. The authors talk about feminism as it applies to higher education and Yale, but also are putting up some really well done posters around campus on a weekly basis highlighting certain issues that seem to go unmentioned, unquestioned, and undiscussed. There was a really powerful one called ‘Your Comments Here‘ which reprints in full form many of the comments from that YDN article — and it is shocking, horrible, and deeply informative all at the same time.

Definitely worth checking out — just some pictures you can look at quickly, won’t take much of your time! I’m having a meeting this weekend with some other Yale bloggers to talk about the future of blogging at Yale. More updates to come soon.

你们好 (Hello all)! I know I have been seriously remiss in my posting, but am here to check in. Sophomore year has been very busy, moreso than I had expected. Although my usual calculus tells me that blogging comes before homework, having Chinese every day means that things have shifted to the back burner a little bit. I’m still at Yale, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, so I thought at the very least I should take a moment here on Thanksgiving break to update everyone on the kinds of things that have been keeping me away from the “write post” button.

I collected information about most of the events that I went to the week before vacation and am going to share them here, so take a peek at a few – normally things are booked more heavily, but these last few weeks (and unfortunately, the next few) are dense indeed with papers and studying for finals.

11/15 – Student Environmental Program-organized tour of the Yale Power Plant

This was a really cool chance to go tour the Yale Power Plant, the large heating, chilling and electrical production hub of main campus. Learning about the specifics of Yale’s cogeneration tech was very interesting, and though the industrial machinery was fascinating, it was the environmental impact of the University that was most interesting to me. President Levin is really keen on expanding the sciences at Yale, and while I’m a big supporter, I didn’t realize what it meant to install a new cooling plant with 20,000 tons of chilling just for the labs on Science Hill… let alone the new space on West Campus. Fellow Exonian Libbie Cohn (who needs a better web presence for me to link to!) joined me on the tour and agreed that gas turbines are really cool.

11/15 – Fox International Fellows + Trumbull College film screenings

This was pretty fun – I helped organize a series of movie screenings in the theatre of my residential college. We have a nice space in the basement which is usually used for theatrical productions, but I spoke to our master and reclaimed it for a film series or two. This evening I teamed up with another group, the Fox Fellows, to show a cool international movie and then host a discussion about it. More below:

A series of screenings comprised of contemporary cinema from each country that form the Fox Program (England, Ireland, Turkey, India, Japan, China, South Africa, Brasil, Mexico, France, Germany, Russia and Israel). Chosen and discussed by the respective native fellows with the main purpose of portraying aspects of contemporary life in their countries.

WHICH FILM? “Head-On” (Gegen Die Wand) by Fatih Akin (2004)

Synopsis by Laurissa Muhlich – Fox International Fellow – Germany. “20 year old Sibel tried to commit suicide although she just yearns for a free and self determined way of life. She arranges a fictitious marriage with Cahit, a Turkish immigrant to Germany who is twenty years elder than her in order to escape from the traditional lifestyle of her Turkish parents’ house. Once she indeed falls in love with her husband, her fortune takes an exceptional turnaround…

11/17 – Genius in a Bottle: Perfume as a Copyrightable Creative Work?

This was  a very interesting lecture that I came across from my visits to the ISP events at the Law School (Information Society Project, some of whose events are not listed here) – essentially asking what it meant for something to be able to be copyrighted and what a creative work actually means, through the interesting lens of perfume legal debate. Definitely worth looking into more if you are interested in the movie/book Perfume, perfume itself, or especially the intricate legal details of creative authorship and intellecutal property law.

Copyright protects expressive works of intellectual endeavor: literature, music, films, perfume… Perfume?? “Yes,” said the Netherlands Supreme Court in a recent decision; “Yes” and “No” have said various French courts grappling with the same question over the past twenty-five years. This presentation considers whether copyright should be extended to such products of human ingenuity, and the role of human perception in determinations of copyright eligibility. We will experiment with a number of fragrances, and all who attend should leave in an “odour of sanctity” (or at least that of Chanel).

11/17 – Panel on Socio-economic Status and Class: “Dialogue on Class: At Yale and Beyond,”

This was a great discussion which gave me huge respect for Jeff Brenzel, who is now very much cooler than I had first imagined. Though I still am angry for some of the ways he is keen to reject the internet and its utility in running the Yale Admissions Office, his talk about what the declining stock of affirmative action means, and how some want to focus on class instead, was really great. Very relevant to this blog, too — I wish I had a copy! I wish I could sit down and talk more about it with him, in fact, though when the admissions officer of a school like Yale has time to sit still and think at all during admissions season is a great mystery to me indeed.

Joseph Gordon, Acting Dean of Yale College, will be the moderator, and he will be joined by panelists Jon Butler, Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of History, American Studies, and Religious Studies; Jennifer Klein, Professor of History; Jeff Brenzel, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid in Yale College; and Marichal Gentry, Dean of Student Affairs in Yale College.

11/19 – Master’s Tea, Trumbull College:

Yale has many, many, many master’s tea, and this day I was coming back to class ready just to skip all five (yes, five) that were going on this afternoon, but decided instead to stop by the one literally right across from my entryway at our college master’s home. Orzala Ashraf Nemat gave a really fascinating talk about her life growing up as a refugee trying to make sure she could get her education and then trying her best to serve Afghanistan, especially the women of Afghanistan, through the Taliban years into today. Check out her bio at the Yale World Fellows program site – the YWF progarm is another blog post in and of itself, just amazing.

A Master’s Tea with Orzala Ashraf Nemat, Trumbull World Fellow Founder & Chair of the leading NGO Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan.

So, that is a little bit of what keeps me busy! Readers, please write in and let me know if there are more things about Yale that you would like me to write about and I’ll try to bring that to the forefront as I try to make time to blog more going forward.

Regular Decision notice for the Yale Class of 2012 comes out this Monday, March 31st. This post is addressed to both the regular decision and early action members of Yale 2012, and is posted on the admitted students website as well as my own blog.

This is my first for the Yale admitted students web site, so if you are reading this there–congratulations on your admission! My name is Sam Jackson and I am a member of the Yale class of 2011. I’m from Newton, MA (right outside Boston) and I’m in Trumbull college here at Yale. Some of you may already know me from ‘real life’ or might have been reading my blog already–others know me only as some random member of Yale 2011. This post is addressed to all of Yale 2012 but also applies to anyone who is wondering whether my credibility is impacted by my new role as an ‘Undergraduate Recruitment Coordinator’ on the Yale payroll with the admissions office. I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and explain some of my motivations in blogging.

I’ve spent the last two and a half years blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends, reaching (among others) an audience of admissions officers and professionals as well as higher education marketers. I’ve used that access to call for more honest and authentic marketing efforts and for greater transparency and access in general. I also blogged about my college admissions process since it began, and today continue to blog about life here at Yale. As all of you readers are no doubt intimately aware, applying to college sucks.

I wish it didn’t have to be like that. My efforts to convince people to change their ways haven’t exactly had an instant payoff. Right now I’m organizing a way to offer large sums of money for a scholarship to the student who can think up some of the best solutions (more on this later!) but that won’t affect what you have already had to suffer through… and I can only offer my condolences for the painful, stressful process. It’s not quite over yet, but the worst is behind you. Choosing can be maddening, but it’s better than having no choices at all… and if you’re reading this at admits.yale.edu, it means one of your choices is Yale. So, could definitely be worse.

I am blogging exactly as I always have been, only now I get paid for what I was already doing. Truthfully, I would pay Yale if it meant that I could easily reach all of you admitted students! (Coincidentally, so would a lot of other, less reputable people–Yale and other schools wouldn’t sell your information, but huge amounts of money are spent to buy up your contact information once you reach college-admissions age. When you took the PSAT or SAT, and then wondered how you subsequently got huge volumes of mail, it’s because the College Board sold your personal information if you consented to the ’student search service.’ Of course, the problems of the College Board are another story, one I chronicle often: e.g., a year ago I detailed 51 ways your SAT could be mis-scored, none of which the College Board would want you to know about, because things like that might reduce public confidence in the security of their testing procedures.)

I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to blogging credibility. If it were about the money, after all, my main interest wouldn’t be Yale–I get an order of magnitude more money from direct advertising than I do by being paid $12.80 an hour to blog for Yale. My bread and butter has always been leveraging my cynicism and negativity towards marketing efforts and institutions which I feel are not effectively serving students–especially prospective students.

I have a few posts on my blog explaining why I matriculated to Yale, why I wanted to go, a few cheerleading Yale, etc. But I also have quite a few more calling Yale out for all the things it does wrong, and things that could be improved. In fact, the way I actually came to this position–blogging for you now–was through a post I made last July attacking the admissions office for its position on official admissions blogs– that is, blogs where the admissions officers themselves are blogging, but which can (and generally should) also incorporate student voices. This admitted students website has student blogs, but they are not publicly accessible (i.e., publicized). If you are interested in more of my writing on the subject, it’s what I’ve been writing about for years on my blog and the topic of my presentation at the 2007 College Board Forum in New York–I’ll stop ranting for now.
So… expect to see lots of posts on why Yale is failing to recruit more low-income students, problems about its admissions practices, and other problems along with all the nice things I have to say. I have lots and lots of great things to say and write about Yale–I love it here. Maybe you’re already in love with Yale, too; maybe you’re not sure yet. Either way, you have a lot to look forward to next yearm whether it’s at Yale or anywhere else.

(Whatever your level of excitement, congratulations on your admission to Yale– I am excited to find out more about everyone joining us next year!)

How can we untangle good intentions from invasive tendencies when it comes to college admissions? This is a question that can be asked on many fronts, but has added relevance this year with the addition of a question on the common application about disciplinary and criminal records.

The Boston Globe ran a piece two weeks ago about this tricky issue.

“I want to help the colleges, but I want to make sure we help our students in any way we can . . . Our first allegiance is to the students,” said Jim Montague, director of guidance counseling at Boston Latin School, which leaves disciplinary questions blank on the application but will answer them if college officials inquire directly. [...]

Colleges primarily want openness, said Kevin Kelly, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which like BU pushes students, but not high schools, to answer the questions if they are left unanswered. “I wish everybody would share everything,” Kelly said.

I’m not sure what it means that colleges “want openness.” Is this meant to imply that it’s some kind of trust game, and suggest that in addition to hopes and dreams we students load up our college applications with dirty secrets so that the admissions offices would take this to be an investment in our trust with the school, like some weird Skull and Bones initiation rite? Still, UMass at least is open to different methodologies from high schools.

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