UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

Honoring Great Teachers

WHEN HARRY ELAM'S BOOK on playwright August Wilson is published next spring, the acknowledgements will include an unusual group. There, among thank-yous to his editors and family and colleagues, the drama professor expects to recognize the members of a seminar—including several undergraduates—whose discussions prompted him to alter a chapter.

The group examined Wilson’s 1988 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. “I thought the representation of women was not as full as it could have been,” Elam says. “We looked and charted and thought about. The perceptions the students brought to the text changed my opinions: saying Wilson didn’t create strong women characters was too simplistic.”

In that moment, undergraduate students gave back to Elam some of what he has given them over the years, as a teacher in Sophomore College (Stanford’s two-week intensive program just before the start of fall quarter) and as the inaugural director of the Introduction to the Humanities program, from 1997 to 2000. Elam “always asks for our feedback,” says senior Misty Espinoza, who has taken two courses with Elam and served as a course assistant. “He says, ‘I’m not a student—this isn’t something I know. What do you guys think?’”

Now, the University is recognizing Elam and other faculty members who have been especially dedicated to teaching young students through a new designation announced in January—University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Eight professors were appointed fellows in January, and administrators expect to name as many as 40 over the next five years. The new program furthers the goals of Stanford’s $1 billion Campaign for Undergraduate Education, which seeks in part to endow the recent curriculum innovations that comprise Stanford Introductory Studies.

For professors, the honor is mostly just that. It comes with a modest stipend, but several of those chosen say they take pleasure simply in the accolade. “What it says is the University appreciates the work you have done, most particularly the work in terms of undergraduates,” Elam says.

That work might include teaching an introductory seminar, involving undergraduates in research or serving as an adviser. Or all of the above, in the case of University fellow Pat Jones, a professor of biological sciences and vice provost for faculty development. Jones says there are three keys to engaging undergraduates: present subject matter that will interest them, communicate your excitement about the field and convey why the material is important. Of her seminar on infection and immunity, she says: “One of my goals is to challenge them to think and to be synthetic in their learning—not just to memorize material and spit it back, but to combine material they use in one context and apply it to another context.”

The University fellows program allows administrators to recognize faculty from schools that grant only graduate degrees, but who have nonetheless made contributions to undergraduate education. One of the initial appointees, John Boothroyd, is a professor of microbiology and immunology in the Medical School who teaches a freshman seminar on modern plagues and who mentors undergraduate researchers in his lab.

In addition to Boothroyd, Elam and Jones, the new University fellows include Thomas Byers, an associate teaching professor of management science and engineering who introduces students to entrepreneurship through the Mayfield fellows program; Terry Karl, ’70, MA ’76, PhD ’82, a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies who involves students in Latin American scholarship; David Kennedy, ’63, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor who teaches Introduction to the Humanities courses; Douglas Osheroff, a Nobel laureate who teaches introductory physics courses and a seminar on photography; and Eric Roberts, a computer science teaching professor who has created an internationally recognized undergraduate program in computer science.

ECONOMY

Out of the Dot-Coms, Into the Classroom

CHARLIE SHUFELDT is the quintessential dot-com guy. He left Stanford as a sophomore in 1999 to co-found a start-up that would provide online trail maps for hikers—a sort of MapQuest for the outdoor set. As CEO of Trailworks.com, Shufeldt raised venture capital, oversaw the expansion of the company from three to 40 employees and moved the firm’s operations from Atlanta to Portland, Ore.

But in March 2000, the NASDAQ began its tailspin and Trailworks got caught in the downturn. “The landscape changed,” Shufeldt remembers. “It was impossible to get anyone to commit more money.” As the executives began to look for someone to buy the company, the market continued to deteriorate. On several occasions, acquisition talks fell apart in the late stages. In July 2000, Shufeldt had to lay off all but four of his staff.

Shufeldt says he had always intended to return to Stanford. The downturn helped him figure out when. “By August 2000,” he says, “I knew that the days of 20-year-old CEOs were over and a Stanford education was worth a lot more than any additional time I could spend working.” He took advantage of Stanford’s liberal stop-out policy (“we accept [undergraduates in good standing] back whether [they’ve been gone] one week, one month, one decade or longer,” says Dean of Students Marc Wais) and re-enrolled immediately.

Shufeldt is not alone. Although the University does not track the number of undergraduates who return after leaves of absence, nearly everyone, it seems, knows someone who is coming back to finish a degree after being bruised by the dot-com crash. The softened economy also has influenced many people to seek refuge in graduate school, and several of Stanford’s programs, particularly in law, business and computer science, have seen double-digit increases in applications.

The Law School is accustomed to seeing more applications during recessions. This year, the number went up 10.2 percent, from 4,275 to 4,712. “This is a big jump,” says associate dean for admissions and financial aid Faye Deal. “I suspect it is directly attributable to the economy.” But Stanford’s increase is less than that of other law schools. Deal says colleagues at East Coast schools and at California public universities have seen applications rise 30 to 40 percent. She thinks some applicants may be reluctant to pay private-school tuition during tough economic times, and others—particularly those in the heavily populated Northeast corridor—prefer to stay closer to home. “This still doesn’t beat the early ’90s,” Deal says. “We had 6,000 applications then.”

During the height of the most recent economic boom, applications to the Business School’s MBA program decreased. This year, MBA applications went up 10 percent—back to a normal pre-boom level. It might seem as if some people were making too much money to bother with a graduate degree. But assistant dean and director of MBA admissions Derrick Bolton, MA/MBA ’98, doesn’t see it that way. “We are pleased with the quality of the applications,” he says. “We think these are people who would have been applying whether the NASDAQ was at 5,000 or 3,000.”

In electrical engineering, administrators have received about 100 more applications for master’s and doctoral programs than last year—an increase of approximately 7 percent, according to director of student services and admissions Kimberley Ashley. But nowhere is the growth in graduate-school applications more dramatic than in computer science. Last year, there were 574 applications for the PhD program. This year, the department was flooded with 876—a 52.6 percent increase. And, says Jennifer Widom, an associate professor who chairs the department’s PhD admissions committee, the applications are high quality. “There was some speculation that all the extra ones would be at the bottom of the pile, but that wasn’t the case.”

For Widom, there’s an additional upside: due to the economic shift, she is less worried that students she has mentored for several years will leave school before finishing their degrees. During the boom years of 1998 to 2000, almost every professor working in a lucrative field (such as databases, Widom’s area of research) lost one or two graduate students to industry. “For me personally, that’s the good news, that my PhD students aren’t going to disappear,” she says.

For their part, students hope that adding a degree to their résumé will bolster their chances with employers—or at least that the job market will improve by the time they get out of school. Things have already worked out for Charlie Shufeldt. After he graduates in June, he’ll join Bank of America’s private equity placement group—and assist start-ups trying to raise venture capital.

Cardinal Numbers

Attendees at Stanford’s 2002 Viennese Ball in San Jose: 1,200

Attendees who were University faculty or administrators: 13

Distance, in miles, Jeff Ryan, ’79, traveled to attend: 6,149

Rental price of a basic black tuxedo and shoes at Selix in Palo Alto: $90

Rental price of the same tuxedo package for the first ball in 1978: $27

First year James Mendoza, ’93, MA ’94, attended the ball: 1991

Years he’s missed since: 0

Sources: Viennese Ball Steering Committee; Selix Formal Wear

VISITORS

Anita Hill Tells of the Aftermath

THE LIGHTS CAME UP as a driving drumbeat and soaring chorus began to rock Memorial Auditorium. Making their entrance from the back of the house, two elegantly attired black women strode past row after row of standing, clapping, stomping well-wishers wearing badges that, 10 years later, still said it all: “I believe Anita.”

Thus began “An Evening with Anita Hill,” a two-hour conversation on March 22 with the former University of Oklahoma law professor whose 1992 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee raised profound questions about the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hill’s televised remarks also riveted national attention on an issue that until then was largely confined to whispered conversations: sexual harassment in the workplace.

LaDoris Cordell, Stanford’s vice provost and special counselor to the president for campus relations, interviewed Hill about the Senate hearings and the professional and personal fallout. Cordell, JD ’74, a former superior court judge, also took an Oprah-like stroll through Hill’s upbringing in rural Oklahoma as the youngest of 13 children, and glanced at various perceptions of Hill’s place in America’s black community. Their down-home discussion launched a two-day conference, “Sexual Harassment: A Decade Later,” that brought almost 100 participants from across the country.

Asked about charges that she had been manipulated, either by white liberals or African-American backers, Hill said, “What people can’t really understand is that we women can come forward on our own.” She added that she agreed to testify because “I felt the integrity of the Supreme Court was at stake.”

In the aftermath of the hearings, Hill said, some Oklahoma state legislators tried to get her fired and others proposed abolishing the law school “to remove the taint of Anita Hill.” When supporters raised $250,000 toward an endowed professorship in her name, the school at first would not accept it. “And there are very few universities that would turn down that kind of money,” she said to growing laughter.

Tracing several decades of case law on sexual harassment, Hill stated that the Supreme Court is “really just beginning to get a handle on it and figure out how to end it.” New appointees in the next few years, she suggested, will “determine where we go.”

Asked why she moved to Brandeis University, where she teaches law, social policy and women’s studies, Hill said she appreciated a campus that is committed to social justice. “One of the things the hearings reminded me was that laws are important, but it’s not until people really embrace the law that change can occur.”

STUDENT LIFE

A Chance to Teach

THE SEEDS OF Orlando Lara’s teaching career were planted last March when he traveled to the Arizona-Mexico border as part of an alternative spring break trip. For Elizabeth Aab, the pivotal moment was when two planes slammed into the World Trade Center on September 11 while she was eating breakfast a few miles away at her childhood home in midtown Manhattan.

Under a new ASSU program called Student Initiated Courses, Lara, ’03, and Aab, ’02, were able to share their knowledge and curiosity with fellow undergraduates—as their instructors. The program, introduced last year, allows students who obtain faculty sponsorship to teach one- to two-unit academic courses. Last quarter, the program offered five courses, ranging from a five-student seminar on Ayn Rand, to Understanding 9/11: Its Causes, Context and Consequences, which attracted 70 students.

Undergraduate instructors aren’t new to Stanford. Beginning in the 1960s, students often taught seminars as part of Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues. But the program was eliminated during budget cuts in the early 1990s, and nearly a decade passed before the ASSU launched Student Initiated Courses.

“This is about students helping to shape the intellectual climate of Stanford,” says Shannon Ashford, ’02, one of the program’s co-directors. Typically, the student instructors have already studied their subject areas extensively, she says. The ASSU provides them with training on how to teach, as well as funds for class expenses like photocopies and speaker honoraria.

Lara, who recently taught Documenting the Undocumented: “Illegal” Migrations across the U.S.-Mexico Border, is grateful to the program for providing the “mechanism to put something like this together, the encouragement that other students are doing the same thing. It gave me an idea of the possibility that I could do this,” he says.

And Aab, one of nine students co-leading the course on September 11, lauds the opportunity to learn by teaching: “This has been the best experience academically I’ve had at Stanford, hands down.”

PUBLIC POLICY

Making Gray Matter

THERE'S A LOT OF TALK in the media and on Capitol Hill about the growing ranks of America’s elderly, but shopworn stereotypes about senior citizens could hinder effective policy-making. Knowing there are many shades of gray in the over-65 population, Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender assembled a forum of 13 experts to identify the key social and political challenges of an aging society.

Following a yearlong series of sessions at Stanford and based on their own decades of research, the scholars drew up a consensus report, “Aging in the 21st Century,” earlier this year. They paint some surprising silver linings among the storm clouds.

For example, the report challenges the notion of growing old as an unremitting slide toward frailty and dementia. Today’s elderly are in better health than their counterparts in the early ’60s, and “the reduction in disability rates continued at a steeper rate from 1994 through 1999,” the report says. Moreover, 60 percent of people over 80 live independently, and studies show that practical problem-solving abilities remain as sharp in the elderly as in the middle-aged. While cognitive impairment strikes those over 65 more than any other segment, the scholars assert that that age group also includes “the wisest and richest people in our society.” And a majority “are at least as satisfied with their lives as are younger people.” In sum, the experts agree, “older people are living added years in better physical and mental health and with more freedom from pain than ever before.”

Yet there is no such thing as an “average old person,” and the hardships of aging afflict some groups disproportionately. The report notes that women are mostly responsible for an estimated annual 120 million hours of unpaid care of the elderly—work worth $45 to $94 billion if credited by Social Security. Women frequently use all their resources to cover their husbands’ last medical expenses, then, as widows, have their Social Security benefits cut by a third and sink into poverty. Married African-American women suffer a “triple jeopardy”: they are more likely than whites to provide unpaid care for family, earn less during their working lives and lose their spouses at a younger age.

Policy-makers must take such disparities into account, says psychology professor Laura Carstensen, former director of the institute. “If people are talking about the wrong questions, you can be sure they won’t get the right answers.” To that end, the report has gone to every member of Congress as well as state and local officials and professionals.

LECTURE HALL

Inaugurating Korean Studies at Stanford

ALTHOUGH NO ONE knows for sure how many people died during North Korea’s recent famine, conservative estimates put the number at about 500,000, or 2 percent of the nation’s 20 million citizens.

“The worst may be over, but many problems remain and the prospects for the North Korean economy are not that bright,” sociology professor Gi-Wook Shin told the 23 students enrolled in State and Society in Korea. “Still, it’s amazing that [people] were able to survive at all.”

Shin’s observation is filled with empathy. As a specialist in 20th-century Korean history and politics, he has studied the roots of rapid postwar industrialization and democratization in South Korea and the prospects for reunification. But he also speaks as one whose minister father—like thousands of his generation—was separated from his parents in the North by the Korean War and never saw them again. “Whenever he delivered a sermon on Mother’s Day,” Shin recently wrote in UCLA’s alumni magazine, “he could not escape a sense of guilt for not fulfilling the Confucian responsibility of filial piety toward his mother.”

Recruited from UCLA last summer, Shin was appointed director of Korean studies at the Asia Pacific Research Center and a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies, and is in charge of building a Korean studies program at Stanford. Instead of following the lead of the 20 or so other Korean programs and centers in the United States, which draw primarily on the humanities, Shin intends to put undergraduates and graduate students to work on research projects that will examine social science policy issues. This summer he plans to find corporate, government and media internships in Seoul for several students; and in September, he will take 15 students to Seoul National University for a weeklong seminar sponsored by Stanford’s overseas studies program. His overall goal: “to give students a broad perspective of issues on the peninsula.”

But for now, Shin is concentrating on his new course. It’s the first Korean studies course at Stanford to be taught by a tenured faculty member, and he wants to lay groundwork for students’ future study. Rather than a survey or general history class, it is intended to focus on major sociological and theoretical issues in social change and development.

In the middle of a discussion about the failing North Korean economy, Shin asks, “Are the causes structural or situational?” He presses the class to think in practical terms about the country’s isolation from world markets, its lack of capital and even the overuse of chemical fertilizers. Shin also wants his students to consider the daily lives of the estimated 2 million South Korean immigrants living in the United States. “What is the role of Korean churches in Los Angeles?” he asks, pointing out that there is one for every 500 Koreans in that metropolitan area.

The diversity of the class adds to Shin’s challenges. Half the undergraduates were educated in foreign-language high schools in South Korea and are more fluent in Korean than English; the other half are from the so-called “1.5” generation, a designation for those who were born in Korea but came to the United States as youngsters and speak only minimal “kitchen Korean.” And then there’s a wide range of graduate students—a handful of Caucasians, including one on a U.S. State Department fellowship, and a number of students from Japan, China and Singapore. Shin accommodates the varying levels of English proficiency in the class by sticking close to a written English-language outline, which is projected on the wall as he speaks.

In a session on Korean-United States relations, he brings up contemporary examples of insults to Koreans in U.S. media. Case in point: the joke Jay Leno told on the Tonight Show during the winter Olympics about a Korean speed skater who “must have kicked a dog in frustration, then eaten it” after losing a gold medal. Noting that Leno’s remarks ignited a storm of protest in South Korea, Shin said, “That kind of remark only hurts Koreans’ national pride and leads to anger and frustration—and it is why there are reasons for some anti-American sentiment today.”

The presence of 37,000 American troops in South Korea also feeds resentment, Shin tells the class. “There is a lot of criticism from those who believe that Korea does not have real sovereignty, especially when the Korean government has to pay one-third of the forces’ operational expenses but cannot take custody of American GIs during criminal investigations.” But, asked one student, are there generational differences in how Koreans perceive the U.S. presence? “Of course,” Shin says. “Younger people are far more critical of the American presence, and those who experienced the Korean War are far more grateful.”

HEALTH RESEARCH

A Dream Drug for HIV?

IT COULD BE AN IDEAL DRUG to fight HIV—a drug that does exactly what doctors want it to do with minimal side effects.

“We know that it works in vitro,” says genetics professor Leonore Herzenberg. “But we don’t know how HIV patients will react.”

The drug, Gd-Tex, was developed by Sunnyvale-based Pharmacyclics and is currently being tested in humans as a treatment for cancers of the lung, brain, breast and pancreas. Gd-Tex targets tumor cells, disrupting the mechanisms that protect them from a type of stress. The cells then die more readily during radiation treatment.

Because HIV-infected cells are similarly weakened, Herzenberg and her partner in life and lab, emeritus professor of genetics Leonard Herzenberg, had a “hunch” that Gd-Tex might kill those cells, too. To test that hypothesis, the couple turned to Omar Perez, a first-year graduate student who was rotating through their lab.

Perez treated HIV-infected blood samples with Gd-Tex for two years, encouraged by his adviser, associate professor Garry Nolan, PhD ’89, who also had been a student in the Herzenbergs’ lab. Perez discovered that a key type of T cell that coordinates the body’s immune response—and is devastated by HIV—was committing a kind of “cell suicide” in reaction to the drug. In February, the researchers published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science stating that Gd-Tex “could prove quite useful for removing HIV-producing cells.”

The Herzenbergs, who have been researching HIV since 1989, are cautiously optimistic about Gd-Tex. In the lab, low doses of Gd-Tex kill HIV-infected T cells, leaving healthy white blood cells untouched. Although current drugs for HIV stop the virus from replicating, they don’t kill the infected cells. With Gd-Tex, the Herzenbergs say, it is conceivable that those cells could be eliminated.

But the researchers won’t know how effective Gd-Tex is, or whether its rapid destruction of HIV-infected T cells will release harmful toxins into the body, until it can be tested in patients. Those clinical trials could start as early as June at Stanford’s Positive Care Clinic.

Will Gd-Tex be a dream drug? Leonard Herzenberg uses a bridge player’s analogy to describe his view: “I feel encouraged, but I also have lived long enough to know that there are a lot of steps between bidding and making a slam.”

Inquiring Minds

SLOW DINO: Could the king of dinosaurs have been a slowpoke? Using biomechanical computer modeling, Stanford postdoctoral fellow John Hutchinson and his research partner have demonstrated that Tyrannosaurus rex could probably run only 10 to 25 miles per hour—less than previous estimates. The researchers calculate that a zippy, 45-mph T. rex would have required as much as 86 percent of its body weight in leg muscle—a biological impossibility. To further illustrate that size limits speed, they created a computer model of a 13,228-pound, dinosaur-size chicken. Could it run? “A giant chicken could not even walk,” says Hutchinson. “Big things really don’t move fast.”

KNOW NUKES: According to researchers at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies, the disturbing stories about lost and stolen nuclear material aren’t as bad as they sound: they’re worse. The scholars have compiled a new database that organizes and evaluates public information from several sources worldwide. But researcher Lyudmila Zaitseva estimates that the actual amount of missing weapons-grade material may be 10 times higher than official reports. “That’s the most frightening thing."

Head of the Class

THEY’D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY: Four Stanford professors were elected to the National Academy of Engineer-ing. The new members are Ronald K. Hanson, PhD ’68, mechanical engineering; Martin E. Hellman, MS ’67, PhD ’69, electrical engineering emeritus; and Roland N. Horne, petroleum engineering. Norbert Peters, mechanical engineering, was elected as a foreign associate. Academy membership is one of engineering’s highest distinctions.

LAW SCHOOL

The Sound of a Different Gavel

CALLING FOR A “bigger bid,” Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan worked the crowd like a pro. In de rigueur black and pearls, she strode across the stage in Kresge Auditorium, auctioning off a two-night stay at San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis Hotel.

“$800?” Sullivan scoffed. “That’s only two hours of paid work for a [law firm] partner!” In the deluxe suite that was up for grabs, she pointed out, one could do things the City’s patron saint had never dreamed of.

The bidding for the fancy weekend closed at $900, and the teams of law professors who had to follow Sullivan’s lead as auctioneers had their work cut out for them. Step right up to “Bid for Justice,” an annual student-run event that this year saw the usually staid Crown Quadrangle festooned with purple, white and black balloons and lined with galaxies of twinkling lights and stars. Students, alumni and faculty turned out in their cocktail best on March 2 for the 10th anniversary and helped to raise $46,000 for the Stanford Public Interest Law Foundation (SPILF) by the time the final gavel sounded. The money will provide summer grants for students who want to work in public interest jobs and will also help to fund a dozen nonprofit legal organizations, including the Navajo Nation Bar Association in Window Rock, Ariz., and the Housing Discrimination Project of Holyoke, Mass.

“It’s a fabulous program to help PI [public interest] students,” says first-year law student Heidi Brooks. “We’re already paying $30,000 in tuition, so if we can get a SPILF summer stipend of $5,000, we can afford to do what we want: to work for a PI organization, which doesn’t pay at all.”

In the silent auction that preceded the Kresge gala, attendees bid on tennis games with professors, salsa lessons, theater tickets and designated drivers for a night. But the quality goods went on the block at 8 p.m. when tuxedoed emcee (and business law professor) Joe Bankman, a.k.a. the Billy Crystal of SPILF, introduced the worldwide “audience of billions,” who appeared via grainy video. (Uh, wasn’t that Professor Bob Weisberg, JD ’79, allegedly in French Polynesia, sipping an umbrella drink?)

Some auctioneers threatened dramatic readings of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act when bidding lagged, and Professor Deborah Rhode came dangerously close to singing “Edelweiss” when she wasn’t getting what she thought an autographed Dixie Chicks guitar should command. “This is serious feminist stuff,” said the gender-law expert, “not ‘Stand By Your Man’ music.”

Sullivan returned to the stage to auction off the final mystery item—the deanship, in the form of a lifesize cardboard replica of herself. “How’d you like to run a bunch of people who have life tenure?” she asked. It was going, going, gone at $700.

RESEARCH

Legendary Subjects

EVER HEAR THE ONE ever hear the one about Snapple’s support of the KKK? Or the one about the people unwittingly eating their own dog at a Chinese restaurant? Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business, says there’s a simple explanation for why we choose to pass urban legends on and on and on.

“They’re selected not because they’re true, but because they punch emotional buttons,” Heath, PhD ’91, says.

In a paper published in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Heath and two colleagues explore how these tales gain currency without PR reps or commercial jingles. Several heavily visited websites, including urbanlegends.com and snopes.com, even exist to debunk them.

Heath’s study homes in on urban legends that evoke disgust, since 25 percent incorporate some repulsive element (rats are a common motif). It’s unlikely that a big hairy rodent was ever the surprise at the bottom of someone’s Coke can, but the story has been bandied around for 30 years now. For one part of his study, Heath tweaked the legend and found that the yuckier the version—say, there was actual rat-to-mouth contact—the more likely it would get remembered and retold.

Traditional theories hold that urban legends proliferate in environments of heightened anxiety. The September 11 terrorist attacks unleashed a deluge of rumors, such as the one about a woman’s Afghan boyfriend who warned her not to fly on the 11th and to steer clear of shopping malls on Halloween. But Heath concludes that people are internally driven to pass these tales on as a way to share all sorts of emotions; it doesn’t take an atmosphere of extreme fear to make people retell legends, whether they can verify them or not.

“If we can understand that as a process, then we can understand why unscary information will propagate successfully,” he says. His research may, for example, help public health experts circulate information about good practices. But it seems particularly suited for fledgling entrepreneurs at the Business School, where Heath teaches a course on how to make ideas stick. Now, if they’d only learn to work a rat in
there . . .

—Marisa Milanese, ’93

ADMISSIONS

On Essay Help and Early Decision

A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR has just applied to Stanford. His credentials are similar to those of hundreds of other applicants, but his essay sets him apart. It is elegantly written, expresses profound themes of public service and citizenship, and oozes personality. It’s enough to make any admission officer swoon. Just one problem: the applicant didn’t write it. Not by himself anyway. A professional writer/editor, hired for the purpose, helped him shape the ideas, develop a structure and rework entire sections.

Essay assistance is a growing phenomenon as students look for new tools to help them get into the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Combined with concerns about early-decision programs—which allow students to commit to a “first-choice” school to improve their chances of acceptance (while enabling the school to lock in good applicants)—it has some administrators and policy-makers asking whether students with money and sophisticated support have an unfair advantage over those without.

Robin Mamlet, Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid, acknowledges that professionally packaged applications are a source of “increasing concern.” She and her staff sometimes notice particular styles or patterns that suggest students are using the same counselors or services to help them.

AdmissionsEssays.com, which bills itself as “the leading personal statement and essay assistance service on the Internet,” says it “organizes information you provide into a full and complete model essay.” The site cautions that students should never submit this model essay as part of an application package nor represent it as their own work. “We do not condone plagiarism.”

Whether using such a service provides an unfair advantage is unclear, but it raises suspicions that the essay may not represent the abilities of the student. And if admission officers can’t be sure of that, selecting deserving students becomes much harder.

One editor at another major essay-assistance company admits that the work makes her uncomfortable. “The way I have rationalized this is that wealthy people . . . can afford to pay a private editor on their own. I’m just providing a similar service for less,” says the Stanford graduate, who requests anonymity. She charges $20 to $30 per hour, and her clients often aren’t native English speakers. “Every once in a while, I feel like I’m helping someone get into a school they might not have and they’ll do something good with the chance,” she says.

Sohini Ramachandran, now a Stanford senior, worked on her application essay over the course of 10 days during her senior year in high school. She focused on how a conversation she had as a 9-year-old attending a math conference in Germany inspired her to study math and do research. Her parents, both college professors, read her essay and made a few suggestions, but Ramachandran says she hesitated to change much. “It’s such a personal thing,” she says. “I wanted to get my voice across. I worried that, if too many people looked at it and I incorporated their ideas, that wouldn’t happen.”

Some schools now attempt to gauge the amount of help a student received on the essay. Duke University’s application reads: “We recognize that all good writers seek feedback, advice or editing before sending off an essay. Whose advice did you seek for help with your essay? Was he or she helpful? What help did he or she provide?”

Stanford officials have talked about adding similar questions. At present, the application says, “In accordance with Stanford’s Honor Code, we trust that the essays will be your own work.” “My sense is that Stanford will need to come out with a statement of what is an appropriate level of help and what goes too far,” Mamlet says. But those involved in the discussions acknowledge that drawing the line between appropriate and inappropriate help is tricky. “We are getting into some very gray areas,” says David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature and chair of the Faculty Senate’s committee on undergraduate admission and financial aid.

Early-decision programs are another controversial practice. They have become popular because they let universities lock in high-achieving applicants while offering students better odds of acceptance. For example, applicants declare that Stanford is their first choice and submit applications by November 1 for an answer by mid-December. If accepted, they must withdraw any other applications and enroll at Stanford. For 2002-2003, Stanford accepted 556 early-decision applicants from a pool of 2,390, or 23.3 percent. Regular applicants—whose application deadline is December 15 and who receive answers in early April—face much harsher odds. For early- and regular-decision applicants combined, the acceptance rate was just 12.4 percent this year.

Complaints about early-decision programs have increased in recent months. Last September, an article in the Atlantic Monthly criticized the way colleges and universities use early decision to manage their enrollments. And in December, Yale president Richard Levin, ’68, told the New York Times he would like to scrap the practice, saying “the only one who benefits is the admissions officers.”

But Mamlet is a strong supporter of early decision, arguing that it benefits students as well as colleges. Without it, she says, students would have to apply to more schools to cover themselves if their first choice fell through. As a result, they might be accepted at several schools, and admission officers would have to wait much longer to learn which students would accept their offers and which would go elsewhere. Competition would be keener in each school and wait lists would be longer.

Mamlet acknowledges that early-decision applicants are generally affluent and have good college counselors and college-educated parents familiar with the admission process. “The charge that early programs play to the privileged is a fair one, but the ultimate question is whether the existence of an early program diminishes the potential for diversity in the class,” she says. “Stanford has never been more diverse.”

The solution, Mamlet says, is to use the program judiciously. She says that placing a ceiling on early-decision admissions—Stanford’s is 33 percent of any entering class—provides sufficient balance and room for diversity.

One of the most disconcerting elements of both the early-decision debate and the growing reliance on professional essay writers, Mamlet says, is the sense that the admissions process is some sort of high-stakes game. “Applicants and their families are trying to ‘play’ the admission system rather than to reflect honestly and seriously about who they are, what they value, how it is they learn best, and therefore what kind of college will suit them best,” Mamlet told an audience during Parents Weekend this year. “And the public perceives that colleges are caught up in an unending and morally suspect ‘game.’ Because, this line of reasoning goes, each top institution now wants to be the top, we are no longer selecting applicants out of a genuine response to each student’s strength and individuality, but instead always with an eye to how best to position ourselves in the U.S. News rankings. I don’t think this is true, by the way, but I do think this is the way it is commonly understood.”

To overcome this, Mamlet says, she and her colleagues must thoroughly explain admission procedures and why they exist, recognize and speak more openly about the stressfulness of the process, and work with peer institutions to improve the process.

IN PRINT

The Truth About Falsehoods

BEFORE SHE DIGS UP the juiciest lies and deceptions, Evelin Sullivan tells readers of The Concise Book of Lying about the first fib she ever told—on the playground at age 3. And she has the scar above her right eye to prove it.

Sullivan has since reformed. “It probably sounds hokey, but I’m really committed to the truth,” she says. “I dislike lying, especially when people do it to me, because it really hurts.” Her ninth and newest book, published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a compelling and often witty romp through centuries of prevarication. Among its targets: the Bible, Greek mythology, trickster figures, hypocrites, George Costanza, Othello, the lies of the Vietnam War, psychoanalysts and lie detectors both medieval and modern.

Sullivan has been teaching technical writing at Stanford since 1985. She works with undergraduate and graduate foreign students in engineering who are finishing articles, book chapters and dissertations. And, it should be noted, not once in 17 years has she come across evidence of plagiarism.

Although she has filled four novels with nefarious characters distinguished by their twisted and tortured minds, Sullivan set out four years ago, somewhat like Diogenes, to get at the fundamental causes, characteristics and effects of telling untruths. Camping out in Stanford’s Green, psychology and law libraries, she began with the Bible as the source of Western civilization’s moral imperative for honesty, but she says she could have started anywhere. “There isn’t a culture alive that says to its people, ‘By the way, lying is a good idea,’” Sullivan says, “even though trickster figures are definitely admired for the panache they have and for how they bamboozle people.”

While Sullivan says she had “enormous fun” researching and compiling the book, she spells out the intent of her work in more sobering terms. Lying, she asserts, is “an evil thing for those being lied to, for those doing the lying and for that amorphous thing called society.” Fire and brimstone, indeed.