Overall, I was a good, but not a great, student. I was in the top half, but not the top third, of my class. I told myself not to worry too much, as Lawrenceville was an academic high school. I graduated with one AP credit, which again was nothing to be ashamed of, but not great, either.
An example of a better student was Pete Howard, who was in the math sequence I described above. Students like him drove students like me nuts. Besides being the starting single-wing quarterback on the varsity football team and a varsity lacrosse player, Pete somehow found the time to rack up seven AP credits. I didn't know that the school offered that many AP courses. One more and he could have started at Yale University as a junior. (According to the alumni directory, he now practices clinical psychology in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
Pete took the best and most complete class notes I've ever seen. To make matters worse, his handwriting was highly legible, unusual for a boy. That's right, a blocking back with gorgeous handwriting. I, on the other hand, was a rotten note-taker. I could only manage to get onto paper about one-fourth of what the master said, and afterwards I could barely read my own writing.
Then there's the sticky question of standardized tests. Sometimes I think they are meaningless and should be tossed out as good for nothing. Other times I think that they do measure something useful, and are okay if kept in a proper perspective. I guess there's plenty of evidence on both sides. Confessing your SAT scores is like confessing your salary, your medical history, or the size of your wee-wee, but here goes: there was a 300-point gap between my worst score, which was in English, and my best, which was in math. I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. You could drive a GMC truck through that hole. Native English speakers aren't supposed to have a gap that wide. In mathematical terms, that's three whole standard deviations. I knew I was deviant, but I didn't know how deviant until I took the SAT. I've since learned that there are psychological terms (such as "scatter" and "islands of ability") associated with this phenomenon. They're usually related to early childhood developmental issues, but that's a different essay.
I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the home of the Educational Testing Service, the company that produces the SAT and many other standardized tests. So I have my own perspective on these issues. ETS is a business like any other. Some companies sell soda pop, some sell lawn mowers, and others sell standardized tests. The business model at ETS depends on the notion that everybody has to take their test. It should be obvious that they are not going to do or say anything that will discourage the notion and hurt their bottom line.
| Lesson: Take all testing with a grain of salt. Don't believe the advertising and hype any more than you would believe the ads for baldness remedies or surefire investment deals. |
My so-so grades worked in my favor when I made the trip as a Fifth Former to Swarthmore College in suburban Philadelphia. My parents had gone there and wanted me to apply, but I wanted nothing to do with any college that had anything to do with my parents.
In any case, the admissions department made you fill out a form and check a box for A (90 to 100), B (80 to 89), or C (70 to 79). My average was a respectable but not brilliant 78. When the interviewer saw the C, he advised me not to bother applying, which I was more than happy not to do.
Lawrenceville accepted about ten or twenty postgraduate students each year. The PG year was attractive to students who hadn't gotten into the college of their choice on their first try. It provided them with an extra, finishing year to fatten up their resumes. The venerable, ivy-covered colleges had "standards" and felt that they couldn't accept any old stupid son of an alumnus. So the back door into Daddy's college was to continue taking extra work until you met its minimum requirements.
On reading our twenty-fifth reunion questionnaire, I was dismayed to see that many athletes who were mediocre students nevertheless ended up attending top colleges. Meanwhile, some of the better students who happened to be non-athletes went to lesser schools.
| Lesson: It's a jock world. |
Around Christmas of my senior year, I learned that I would be accepted at my first choice, Brown University. It had a good, solid, if somewhat boring, reputation. It was coed, if you want to say that a ratio of five male students at Brown for every two women at Pembroke, the coordinated women's college, is "coed." I had applied for the Bachelor of Science program in Chemistry, and apparently my grades and scores in math and science had impressed whoever read my application. That is, they accepted me on my strengths and ignored the rest of my record. Bless their hearts.
| Lesson: Some people will give you a break, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. |
I guess that my acceptance at Brown was the high point of my academic career. By the end of my Fourth Form year, I had under my belt an academic prize and a perfect score on a standardized test. My life has been mostly downhill from there, with the occasional rise. Think of a scenic, but frostbitten, cross-country ski trail that winds from the top of a modest hill to the warmth, safety, and hot chocolate, with marshmallows, of the base lodge below.
Our class was the first in the school's century-and-a-half-long history that didn't send its largest group to Princeton. For various reasons, more guys in our class ended up at Harvard than any other school. Its image was softer than that of Princeton. Like Brown, Harvard had a coordinated women's college (Radcliffe), but Princeton didn't. Harvard was near a big city, with nightlife and cultural activities, but Princeton was in the sticks. Harvard was good-old-boy, to be sure, but not as self-consciously so as Princeton. And, of course, Harvard had a great academic reputation. Nineteen guys ended up at Harvard, out of a class of 170 or so, with smaller groups going to the other Ivies, including Princeton, Yale, and Brown. A few went to Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT or other selective institutions. Others went to smaller private men's colleges in New England like Tufts, Amherst, or Williams. Many who had achieved the so-called "Gentleman's C" went to the venerable southern universities like North Carolina, Virginia, and Duke.
My recollection is that everyone in our graduating class went to college the following fall except for one who joined the service. (This was during the Vietnam War.) Jared Wickware has spent his career as an artist and draftsman in the Navy.
The winds of social change had begun to blow in the mid-1960s, and no institution, not even Lawrenceville, was fully protected from all of the back breezes. Being born to be more mild than wild, our way of rebelling against tradition was to try to leverage whatever smarts we may have had, instead of relying solely on the wealth-legacy system to carry us along. Many of us chose not to attend our daddy's alma mater, as had long been the custom.
Relative to previous classes, ours was more interested in pursuing our own academic and professional opportunities than in simply replicating the financial and social successes of our parents. We gravitated, therefore, toward colleges that offered us what we believed were the best opportunities for personal advancement. This may not sound revolutionary by the standards of bomb-chucking anarchists, but, by Lawrenceville's standards, it was more than evolutionary.
I think of Lawrenceville as either the southernmost of the northern prep schools, or the northernmost of the southern preps. It's situated just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in the marshy wasteland of central New Jersey. Like Afghanistan, the Garden State is a kind of politically corrupt demilitarized zone surrounded and dominated by large, powerful city-states. It's perhaps best known to the outside world as the birthplace of such cultural abominations as the toxic waste dump, the strip mall, and Bruce Springsteen. Small wonder that it harbored the World Trade Center bombers of 1993 and the anthrax terrorists of 2001.
Despite its tradition of sending large numbers of students to Princeton and other venerable colleges, Lawrenceville was hardly the most Ivy of the preps. For hard-core Ivy, try the New England blue-blood schools like Andover, Choate, or St Paul's. Compared with our counterparts at these schools, we had a reputation as competent but unexceptional students who got by on the strength of our connections in the mid-Atlantic and border-state upper bourgeoisie.
We also knew that there were many public schools whose academic standards were higher than ours. For examples, we couldn't compete in math and science with the Bronx High School of Science, nor in the humanities with Boston Latin.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of." I hope that this is not the case. Lawrenceville in my day was sexist, homophobic, classist, and racist. You might argue that the world as a whole was also less than perfect when it came to these issues. The "everybody-does-it" argument. I would love to be able to say that the world is a kinder, more inclusive place today than it was forty years ago when I entered Lawrenceville. But I can't. I guess my preppy friends will have the last laugh, as money, power, and birthright make the world go around as much today as they ever did. In the interim, Britain, the old empire, has become something of a democracy, and America, the new empire, has become a monarchy.
I didn't fit in at Lawrenceville, and I wouldn't wish that feeling on a dog. On the other hand, you might say that not fitting in early in life prepared me well for not fitting in later. There are many Third World jails, some of them inside the mother country, and I can say that Lawrenceville has prepared me well for all of them.
While it's undeniable that Lawrenceville's credits, such as they are, continue to give forever, it's equally true that its debits continue to take forever. They have asked me for money nearly every year since I graduated. I have yet to give a single dollar. In other words, if it were up to me, not even Mr Heyniger would receive a salary.
I have no money to give, but if I did, I wouldn't give it to them. I'd give it to the local soup kitchen or homeless shelter or to street people who have nothing. Not to institutions, no matter how excellent, that already have money.
| Lesson: Those who ask for money the most often need it the least. |
I've never been back to Lawrenceville. Let me amend that slightly. On one occasion, a couple of months after we graduated, a mutual friend took Dennis and me for a car ride on the banked, grassy dipsy-doodles that border the athletic fields. The same fields where I had once chatted with Dennis.
| Lesson: It's never too late to have a happy childhood. |
| Lesson: Don't be afraid to take a joy ride on your past. |
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