... and for Yale: Why Bright College Years Never Fade Away

by J. Kirk Casselman

Overview

In 1964, when author J. Kirk Casselman applied to Yale College, more than five thousand other secondary school students also applied for admission to one of the 1,300 places in the Yale Class of 1968. Of those applicants, 1,569 were offered admission, for an acceptance ratio of approximately 30 percent. Today, thirty thousand students apply for admission for the same number of places, for an acceptance ratio of just 7 percent.

The drastic change in the college application process results in today’s students regularly applying to colleges based solely on name and reputation, without knowledge of a school’s profile and character. In the case of Yale, at least, Casselman hopes to correct that lack of knowledge.

In … and for Yale, Casselman provides a subjective—and perhaps even impressionistic—view of his association with Yale, its institutions and traditions, and the effects they have had on his life. In this memoir, he recalls his undergraduate years at Yale and his more than forty years of involvement with the university as an alumnus recruiting, interviewing, and counseling prospective and current students.

This memoir reflects Casselman’s passion and lifelong involvement with Yale and helps applicants and future students to understand the nature of the admission process, the college experience, the institution, and the influence it has on its graduates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475993400
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	07/19/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	164
File size:	2 MB

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... and for Yale

Why Bright College Years Never Fade Away

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By J. Kirk Casselman

iUniverse

Copyright © 2013 J. Kirk Casselman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-9339-4

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CHAPTER 1

Admission to Yale

Every year, 30,000 students apply for admission to the 1,300 places in an undergraduate class of Yale College. By what alchemy does the Admissions Office at Yale decide which students will fill those 1,300 places?

The answer lies in part in a self-selection process on the part of applicants. The Admissions Office has stated that less than 1 percent of the applicants (about 200 in number) are shoo-ins, another 15 percent (or 5,000 applicants) are highly competitive for admission. That leaves 25,000 applicants, the majority of whom (say 13,000 or 45 percent of applicants) are perfectly well qualified and the balance, or approximately 12,000 applicants are not qualified and should not have applied. Accordingly, 60 percent of applicants (18,000 in number) are qualified and it is an art to choose those who would be accepted–the art of constructing a balanced class of individuals who would reflect diverse backgrounds and skills and who would be able to learn from each other. In making those choices, Yale can only offer admission to about 2,000 (or about 7 percent) of the 30,000 applicants.

I applied to Yale in a different era. In 1964, only 5,500 students applied to Yale, and there was a self-selection process, with the result that only 10 percent of the applicants were not qualified. 1,600 of these applicants (or a whopping 30 percent) were offered admission.

In addition to Yale, I applied to Stanford and the University of Michigan. By then, my older brother had been at Stanford for a year, and I knew that I did not want to be following in his footsteps once again. So, I effectively applied to two colleges. The computer and the Common Application form has made application to ten or fifteen colleges the norm, applications made often on the basis of name recognition only, not a thorough understanding of the fit between a college and its applicants.

In the summer after my junior year in high school, I took a driving trip with my parents to visit colleges in New England. My interviews on that trip revealed to me the caricatures of the various colleges I visited. I came away from my interview at Harvard with the impression that Harvard was academically snooty. I came away from my interview at Princeton with the impression that Princeton was socially snooty. Another informed Yale writer would refer to the former as "the eggheads to the north" and the latter as "the fashion plates to the south". See Chapter 8.

After my interview at Yale, I was convinced it was where I wanted to go. R. Inslee ("Inky") Clark, Jr., then Associate Director of Admissions at Yale, convinced me that the residential college system was exactly what I was looking for. I knew, even at age 18, that I did not want a college where fraternities ruled the social roost. I entered the admissions process for Yale full of enthusiasm.

I was later to discover that alumni play a role in the admissions process. Historically, 80 percent of the students applying to Yale receive a one-on-one interview lasting about an hour with an alum, who then writes a one-page report to the admissions office. After graduation, I became one of these alums. Inevitably, the subject of how to pay for a Yale education comes up in these interviews.

It always surprises applicants, and their parents, to find that there is a national standard or formula for calculating the contribution expected of parents toward the price of a college education and, where that calculation showed a shortfall for the year, Yale makes up the difference from its endowment in the form of loans, scholarships and term time jobs, such as bussing dishes or working in a library. If there is a good fit between Yale and student, there is a way to make it work financially. This is the essence of need blind admissions where a student is evaluated for admission on the basis of academic performance and leadership potential without regard to ability to pay.

Periodically, the Admissions Office has conducted training seminars for interviewers in which they would review entire admissions portfolios derived from actual applications. This was very useful since I never had an opportunity to review my own admissions portfolio, including letters of recommendation from my teachers. To permit such review, of course, would have a chilling effect on the candor of teachers writing letters of recommendation.

It was amazing to watch the mind of the admissions officer work. They could tell from the language used in a letter of recommendation whether the author knew the student well or not. They looked for consistency in commentary among all letter writers and discounted letters that were inconsistent with the others.

The admissions officers also drew conclusions from data in the portfolio. For example, one student took the SATs three times, each time scoring nothing but perfect 800s. "What is this kid trying to prove?" was the comment from the admissions officer. The student was rejected. Yale does not want all valedictorians or all perfect test scorers. They want a mix of people.

Furthermore, Admissions Office staff advised us that, if we found a student who really wanted to go to Yale, the student should tell the Admissions Office in some way, shape or form. This advice reflects the deal making aspect of college admissions. Finding the right fit between applicant and University is important and applicants need to take some initiative to demonstrate the fit as they see it.

Once admitted, a student finds himself in what has been called a beehive of activity. A former Dean of Yale College spent a number of years at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. When asked to describe the difference between a Yale education and a Stanford education, he replied that it is a matter of intensity. Yale is a more intense learning environment. It is a healthy intensity, but it is more intense.

I have described this difference in intensity with the following scenario. If you're seen at Stanford to be working hard, you are shunned, thought of as a nerd. If you are seen at Yale to be working hard, somebody comes over and says, "Hey, what are you doing?" This is a caricature, and perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but more or less true.

With all this as background, I might well ask the question, "How in the world, then, did I get to go to Yale?"

CHAPTER 2

Preparation

Dink Stover, freshman, chose his seat in the afternoon express that would soon be rushing him to New Haven and his first glimpse of Yale University. He leisurely divested himself of his trim overcoat, folding it in exact creases and laying it gingerly across the back of his seat; stowed his traveling-bag; smoothed his hair with a masked movement of his gloved hand; pulled down a buckskin vest, opening the lower button; removed his gloves and folded them in his breast pocket, while with the same gesture a careful forefinger, unperceived, assured itself that his lilac silk necktie was in contact with the high collar whose points, painfully but in perfect style, attacked his chin. Then, settling, not flopping, down, he completed his preparations for the journey by raising the sharp crease of the trousers one inch over each knee–a legendary precaution which in youth is believed to prevent vulgar bagging. Each movement was executed without haste or embarrassment, but leisurely, with the deliberate savoir-faire of the complete man of the world he had become at the terrific age of eighteen.

Behind was the known and the accomplished; ahead the coming of man's estate and man's freedom. He was his own master at last, free to go and to come, free to venture and to experience, free to know that strange, guarded mystery–life–and free, knowing it, to choose from among its many ways.

-Stover at Yale, 1912

In June of 1964, I was graduated from a large mid-western suburban public high school as valedictorian. I had taken judicious advantage of an evolving advanced placement grading system that awarded five points for an "A" in an AP class, making it possible to earn an average greater than 4.0 on a scale of 1 to 4. Not uncommon in the world but it made me feel special, nonetheless. I even had a letter from President Johnson congratulating me on my accomplishment. Even if I were one of thousands of such recipients, it made me feel special. Furthermore, I had been President of the Student Council, past Class President, semifinalist in the Michigan Mathematics Prize Competition.

I was also a sprinter on the track team–a journeyman sprinter, to be sure, but I was the best we had.

I used to love running on the curve in track spikes—the grip on the ground, the sudden burst of energy, the graceful feel of leaning into the curve and the final bounding to a stop after the finish line, arms swinging rhythmically to maintain balance during the slowdown. I'll never forget anchoring the mile relay team at the Eastern Michigan Relays. It was a regional meet, with all the color and pageantry of flags and banners, run on an indoor eighth-mile track, which meant that races were run on a continuous curve. I took the baton a few paces behind my competitor, but I ran the best race I can remember, overtook my competitor and beat him. As a team, we didn't win anything, not even ranking in the regional meet, but I was on top of the world.

And I was dating the most desirable girl in the high school.

She was Secretary of my Student Council and in my AP classes. I had first laid eyes on her in the ninth grade, when I, as an interloper, attended a dance at the other junior high school that fed into our common high school. There she was across the gym, shadowed by a spotlight in a very high ceiling which bathed her in voluptuous half-light and shadow, a kind of smoky haze. The same image appeared on the cover of the Vassar Night Owls record album a couple of years later when she sang with that group.

A number of benefits accrued to me as result of dating this girl, who shall be known as "my girlfriend" for purposes of this book, not the least of which was that she arranged for me to be taken into the a cappella choir of the high school. Me, with a stone ear and wooden voice and little musical training (I had had one year of accordion lessons before I was 10 years old) singing in a choir!! It was tantamount to a political appointment to the choir.

Being in the choir was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

Music has always been important to me, despite my disabilities. My love affair with music started in my extreme youth, listening to late-night radio. Country-western music, liberated in Memphis and other southern cities from competition for the airwaves, would lull me to sleep through the medium of a plastic Motorola combined record player and radio. My first record purchase, a 78-RPM disk for sale at the local Woolworth's dime store, was Chuck Berry's Maybelline. My second purchase, now a more modern 45-RPM disk, was Hound Dog by Elvis Presley. From there, my collection has grown steadily.

It was in choir that I discovered that there are as many endorphins, nature's pleasure drug, released in the brain from singing as are released from any other activity in which we as human beings indulge. The sheer physicality of singing has as great appeal as yoga or stretching. This sense of well being that accompanies the act of singing is palpable.

And we seem to remember melodies and lyrics more readily than we do poetry or narrative. Music goes to the very soul. Years later, in a white steepled church across the street from a New England country inn, with three inches of snow falling gently, I would remember long passages of the baritone part of Handel's Messiah. In the years between these events, however, I would be haunted by a cappella singing at Yale.

My girlfriend played the guitar in a group of girls who sang at high school events, including our English class. She would sing, looking straight at me:

I will love you 'til the day I die
I will love you and I'll tell you why
Cause your heart is pure and your dreams are mine
Cause I love you

I fell heir to that guitar when she upgraded it and I still have it—47 years later.

We spent the summer, my girlfriend and I, doing what kids in the Midwest do in summer, dabbling at summer jobs, working on my car, worrying about proper wardrobe for college, sewing name tags into the proper wardrobe, going to drive-in movies (and all that that entails) and going to the lake. She had been accepted at Vassar, historically the sister school of Yale. No fool I, I wasn't going to an all-male college without my high school girlfriend. We were playing out our futures strictly as planned.

As the summer drew to a close, I got my first exposure to the "Yale community": All of the parents (read "mothers") of local high school students matriculating at Yale got together and conspired for all of us, a dozen or so other members of the Yale Class of 1968, to ride a Greyhound bus together to New Haven.

Well, this turned out to be a false community or, at best, a short-lived community, one that had no real affinity amongst its members. However, the bus trip did provide an opportunity for my girlfriend and me to test our newfound independence and our devotion to each other. The bus made a penultimate stop in New York City, where my girlfriend had arranged a rendezvous, convincing her father to divert their trip to Poughkeepsie in order to surprise me during the layover at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

And surprised I was! The bus trip had been uneventful, boring at best, and shot through with anxiety over the unknown future. Furthermore, it was probably the longest period of time my girlfriend and I had been apart in many months. Seeking a little privacy, we found a public telephone booth (remember telephone booths?) just big enough to accommodate me with my girlfriend on my lap, with our feet sticking out holding the folding door open, where we proceeded to make up for lost time.

I have no other recollection of that bus trip to Yale. Surprising how selective memory can be.

CHAPTER 3

Arriving for the First Time

He passed on through the portals of Phelps (Gate), hearing above his head for the first time the echoes of his own footsteps against the resounding vault.

He was on the campus, the Brick Row at his left; in the distance the crowded line of the fence, the fence where he later should sit in joyful conclave.

"And this is it–this is Yale," he said reverently, with a little tightening of the breath.

-Stover at Yale, 1912

The Residential College System

The bus pulled into New Haven and stopped at Phelps Gate, the elaborately carved entryway into the Old Campus. Disembarking from the bus, I could for the first time "hear above my head the echoes of my own footsteps against the resounding vault," a sound I was to hear many times before my time at Yale was over.

The sound took on different meanings at different times. I have to say that the echoing footsteps first evoked an image of a cold and inhumane institutional environment, such as one might find at the entrance to a prison. However, that impression gave way to a more comforting feeling when I realized that passing through the Phelps Gate provided a buffer between the hubbub of the City and the relative serenity of the Old Campus, with its welcoming, twinkling lights at night. Later, it signaled my arrival home, for the Old Campus was home and the echoing footsteps meant I would soon reach my room, my refuge from the rigors of the day. If it were raining or snowing, Phelps Gate provided relief from the weather, if only momentarily.

The Old Campus is a series of buildings of mixed architectural style, built over a period of years but now forming a continuous façade enclosing a green space the size of an entire city block. All freshmen live in dorms on the Old Campus, but "dorms" is the wrong word to describe the suites of rooms that cluster on each of four or five levels or landings accessible via a single entryway door.

This design enhances the creation of community in subtle but distinct ways. A student opening the entryway door is confronted by a set of stairs leading up to a landing. Three or four suites of rooms radiate off the landing, housing four students per suite. So, typically, twelve or more students are housed in a way that they cross paths continually. Multiply those numbers by three or four or five, depending on the number of floors in the entryway, and you have a good sized community of people passing each other many times during the day.

A suite of rooms consists of a large living room or common room and two small bedrooms off the living room. This gives the four students occupying the suite enough room to spread out, but usually not enough room to escape horseplay for study. Students during their serious study time can be found in any one of a number of nooks and crannies in the buildings on campus. The dorm rooms, therefore, become the place to hang out with friends and socialize. This use of space follows naturally if you subscribe to the precept that environment shapes behavior.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ... and for Yale by J. Kirk Casselman. Copyright © 2013 J. Kirk Casselman. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................     vii     

Introduction....................     xi     

Chapter 1 – Admission to Yale....................     1     

Chapter 2 – Preparation....................     5     

Chapter 3 – Arriving for the First Time....................     15     

Chapter 4 – Academics....................     29     

Chapter 5 – Athletics....................     37     

Chapter 6 – Music and Other Activities....................     43     

Chapter 7 – Fraternities....................     47     

Chapter 8 – Senior Societies....................     51     

Chapter 9 – Junior Year – On the Way Down....................     59     

Chapter 10 – Junior Year – The Utter Nadir....................     61     

Chapter 11 – Junior Year – Headed Back Up....................     65     

Chapter 12 – Summer in France....................     71     

Chapter 13 – Senior Year....................     75     

Chapter 14 – Law School....................     81     

Chapter 15 – Alumni Schools Committee....................     85     

Chapter 16 – The Yale Club of San Francisco....................     93     

Chapter 17 – The Association of Yale Alumni....................     97     

Chapter 18 – Community Service Summer Fellowship....................     103     

Chapter 19 – Yale Day of Service....................     109     

Chapter 20 – Bulldogs Across America....................     111     

Chapter 21 – Yale Career Network....................     117     

Chapter 22 – Music Program for Graduates....................     121     

Chapter 23 – YaleGALE....................     123     

Chapter 24 – Reunions....................     127     

Chapter 25 – Reunion at the White House....................     135     

Chapter 26 – In Summation....................     143     

Epilogue....................     147