Ivy League hack job, plus Mencken

There is presently a mini-scandal afoot in the elite Ivy League involving a Princeton dean who inexplicably hacked into Yale’s admissions Web site where Yale had posted a list of students it had accepted.

No big deal, you might reasonably think. But knowing in advance whether a student had been accepted by a rival college could give Princeton an edge in the all-important race for “yield” – the percentage of admitted students who actually attend, according to Newsweek magazine. “If X had been accepted at Yale, her first choice, then you can safely turn her down,” reporter Julie Scelfo explained.

Since Princeton had already chosen its next class by the time that associate dean Stephen LeMenager logged on to the Yale site, his motive seems obscure. Yale has called in the FBI to determine if a crime was committed. Embarrassed Princeton big-wigs have apologized for the affair, and LeMenager has been suspended.

Ah, the tony Ivies. As Scelfo puts it, “If there is any competition more cutthroat than that of high-school seniors to get into the top Ivy League universities, it is the competition among the universities themselves for the gold-plated applicants with brilliant resumes, perfect boards and [famous relatives].”

It has seemed ever thus at these storied bastions of higher learning, producers of the nation’s movers and shakers practically from the time the republic was but a gleam in the eyes of the founding fathers.

The higher education recruiting flap brings to mind a classic newspaper column written by the late, great newspaperman H.L. Mencken – he of the wondrously acid pen – for the Baltimore Sun in 1927. (Oh, I can hear you muttering now, “For God’s sake, stop him, someone, before he quotes H.L. Mencken again.” And, given my track record in genuflecting to the literary giant, I can’t say I blame you.)

Nonetheless, I plunge ahead. The essay is included in “A Second Mencken Chrestomathy,” published in 1994 by Vintage Books.

Mencken observes that bright boys get little out of college, and “half-wits get even less, but what they get is obviously more valuable to them. Though they emerge with their heads quite empty of anything rationally describable as knowledge, they have at least gained something in prestige: the hinds back at home, still chained to the plow, admire and envy them…”

If he had a son and he seemed middling dull, Mencken wrote, he’d send him to Harvard. Harvard “not only inculcates the sublime principles of Americanism as well as any other; it also inoculates all its customers with a superior air, and that superior air, in a democratic country, is a possession of the utmost value, socially and economically. The great masses of men never question it: they accept it at once, as they accept a loud voice. These masses of men are uneasy in their theoretical equality: their quest is ever for superiors to defer to and venerate.

“Such superiors are provided for them by Harvard. Its graduates have a haughty manner. Moreover, they are entitled to it, for Harvard is plainly the first among American universities, and not only historically. I believe that a bright boy, sent to its halls, is damaged less than he would be damaged anywhere else, and that a dull boy enjoys immensely greater benefits.

“Its very professors show a swagger; there is about them nothing of the hang-dog look that characterizes their colleagues nearly everywhere else. The tradition of the place is independent and contumacious. It was the first American university to throw out the theologians. It encourages odd fish. It cares nothing for public opinion. But all the while it insists upon plausible table manners, and has no truck with orators.

“A Yale man, however he may snort and roar, can never get rid of the scarlet fact that, while he was being fattened for the investment securities business, he was herded into chapel every morning. It rides him through life like a Freudian suppression; he recalls it in the forlorn blackness of the night as a YMCA secretary recalls a wicked glass of beer, or the smooth, demoralizing, horrible whiteness of a charwoman’s neck. A Princeton man remembers the Fundamentalists at commencement – flies in amber, spectres at memory’s feast.”

In the lesser colleges there are rules against everything from smoking, to courses in Americanization, to praying bands, Mencken noted. But the Harvard man, looking back, “sees only a pink glow. His college has not turned out a wowser in 150 years. His accent and necktie are correct. His classmates continue to be worth knowing. No wonder he regards the Republic as his oyster.”

No wonder, indeed.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.