The Runner (11 page)

often-celebrated search for lacrosse-playing cellists with 4.0 grade point averages and perfect SAT scores from disadvantaged neighborhoods also disguises a bushel of discriminatory policies that aim to cap the number of Jews and Asians and other minority groups who take education too seriously, in favor of the kinds of students that the admissions department and college alumni like better—namely, their own children.

Hogue gave the Princeton admissions office exactly what they wanted, reflecting their

own self-serving mythology back to them in a mirror that he had crafted for that purpose. When they looked in the mirror, the face they would see was not his but their own—men and women of upstanding character and noble purpose. The fact that no similar student had ever applied to Princeton before might have cast some doubt on the true aim of the preferences they

administered. Thanks to James Hogue, applying for admission to the Princeton Class of 1992

under the name Alexi Indris-Santana, the righteousness of their intentions could now be made plain.

“You will find that Part I of the Application for Admission is incomplete,” Santana

wrote. “I have not attended an organized school since my mother and I moved from Topanga,

California to Europe in 1978,” he explained. “I have been living independently here in the

Mohave Desert since 1985, while my mother currently resides in Switzerland.” Cleverly

blending elite geography (Topanga, Switzerland), with his life in the Mohave Desert, Santana’s story appealed to the admissions officers’ yen for adventure while reassuring them that he came from a familiar, elevated cultural background that would help him fit in with his privileged classmates. By stressing the fact that he was living independently, apart from his mother, he also made himself eligible for increased levels of financial aid while removing the necessity to forge a set of documents from a second fictional character—his mother.

“Even though my formal education is lacking I do not consider myself disadvantaged for

that reason,” he wrote. Pronouncing himself to be “self-educated,” he forswore any claim to inferior status, in language that might have been taken directly from Ben Franklin’s diaries.

Having sent clear signals that he should be given preference as a Hispanic student, he filled out the racial preference question on the application, “How would you describe yourself (check

one),” with the coy notation, “I prefer not to respond.” By checking the report of Hogue’s SAT

scores from the College Board (730 verbal, 680 math), Princeton could verify that the applicant was both “Mexican American” and a U.S. citizen.

The facts of his life were plain enough. Born on January 7, 1969, his father, Oscar Carlos

Santana, was a self-employed potter; his mother, born Susan Vindriska, was a sculptress with an undergraduate degree from the Universidad Nacional Autó-noma de México and a graduate

degree from the Pacific School of Art. His permanent home address was the “state line” on the Utah and Arizona border; he could be reached at post office box 1968 in St. George, Utah. He had worked as a mosaic-tile maker, a cattle herder on the Lazy T ranch, a race-horse exerciser for a man named Bud Payton, and as a construction worker. He was interested in studying

architecture, art, humanistic studies, visual arts, and science in human affairs, with a particular interest in Western water policy as it related to farming and ranching.

But it was the details of Santana’s life as a self-educated ranch hand in the Mohave

Desert that made the Princeton admissions officers swoon. “As a person who spends several

months tending to a one-man herding station,” Santana wrote, “I look forward to excitement.”

He told Princeton about a “grueling, but wacky” cross-country relay race called the “Levi’s Ride and Tie,” run by teams consisting of a horse and two people. While one member of the team sets off running, the other rides the horse ahead to a predetermined spot where the runner finds it and then rides ahead to the next hitching place, where his partner mounts the horse. Santana had learned about the race from his friend Renee Vera, who would drop by his herding station on her spirited Arabian mare, Goodnuf.

What Santana offered Princeton was a storybook universe that embodied all the requisite

multicultural virtues at the same time as it hearkened back to the mythic vistas of the unspoiled West. There was something in his story for everyone in the Princeton admissions office, from the most impassioned supporter of racial diversity to the most dewy-eyed fan of Thomas Kinkade

paintings and John Ford movies. “Each morning we raced the sun to the top of the arduous trail out of Purgatory Canyon,” Santana wrote. The reward for winning was “to witness those

spectacular few moments when the light first struck the Vermillion Cliffs. Even when the sun prevailed,” he continued, “we were filled with the pride of getting to the top, then with the dread of descending the hazardously steep and rocky path.”

If his metaphoric description of the glorious ascent to the summit and the dangers of the

path below might be read by an enthusiastic literary critic as a nod to the thrills and dangers of the applicant’s desire to better his class standing by applying to Princeton, the rest of the essay evoked his experience as a distance runner to explain what it was like to run a race. “Exhaustion creeps in slowly enough to dull a competitor’s wits in a race this long,” he wrote, “making it impossible to keep tabs on the other teams amid the constant relaying back and forth.”

The occasional backstage cough and the suppressed laughter that runs throughout the

essays are proof that the applicant, unlike so many others that year and since, was enjoying himself. Asked to “discuss more fully any academic or intellectual interest that is especially significant to you,” he chose a book by a Nobel laureate physicist who taught at Princeton.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
! made him want to learn more about physics, he wrote, noting that “Feynman loosely scatters references to science among the many anecdotes about

safecracking, bongo playing and general fakery that he wants to be most known for.” For an

exceptionally suspicious mind, the choice of subject might have raised a wee bit of suspicion that Richard Feynman’s disposition might be shared by the applicant himself. Having had his fun, the applicant attempted to squelch any such suspicions with a straight-faced description of how he had gone on to read Feynman’s highly technical multivolume work
Lectures on Physics
in search of a deeper explanation of how the universe actually works.

“Soon I began to catch on that the trick is to sum up a complex situation in a few

well-chosen words, just as his famous Feynman diagrams simplify subatomic encounters in a

few squiggles and lines,” the author explained. He playfully added, “I was able to approach the subject without worrying over every little detail precisely because someone as brilliant as Richard Feynman, B.S. MIT, PhD Princeton, distinguished professor of knowledge at Cal Tech

could have ‘stuff’ as his favorite word.”

What Feynman did in his writing about physics, Hogue would do by inventing the

character of Alexi Indris-Santana, who could appeal to the prejudices of Ivy League admissions officers by translating the stops and starts of his own checkered academic career and his

postcollegiate life as a drifter into a fairy tale that Princeton might understand: even the most advanced science was a way of approximating and communicating a reality that was actually

quite different than what was being described. The most advanced minds, with the most

advanced degrees from the most advanced colleges, believed that intellectual life was a

sophisticated species of fraud. In conclusion, the applicant wrote, “The best that I can hope for from all of this is to emulate Feynman’s attitude that science turns out to be essentially a long history of learning how not to fool ourselves.” It was useful advice, which the Princeton

admissions office had no intention of taking. In Alexi Indris-Santana, the self-educated ranch hand, they heard the siren song of the kind of experience that would surely be an asset to the Princeton Class of 1992.

To see a Princeton admission application as a contest of wits between faceless admissions

officers and the cunning applicant is a common enough perception for seventeen- and

eighteen-year-olds who are self-possessed enough to see the admissions process plain. Cloaked in dull officialese, the application is a contest between the young student and a living, breathing entity that seeks to sniff out cravenness and fear. The rules of the game are openly rigged in favor of wealthy graduates of elite schools and other favored categories of applicant who profess officially approved beliefs to signal to the college that they belong. Applicants clever or cynical enough to cast their lives in an acceptable mold will glide through with ease. Those who sweat too hard will find themselves at lesser colleges. Elite private schools advertise their success at the art of polishing and buffing the life stories of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old high school juniors and seniors to the proper gloss and sheen, either through the efforts of in-house staff or outside consultants who can be hired by wealthy parents at a price of however many thousands of dollars a month—a pittance compared to the difference that a Harvard or a Princeton diploma might make over the course of a lifetime. The job of recasting the life stories of wealthy

teenagers is the kind of socially revealing occupation that Dickens or Balzac surely would have loved as a device in their fictions, as they would have also loved James Hogue, a young criminal with the brass to play against the lofty souls of the Princeton admissions office and win.

“At this point in the application, we as admissions officers have gained some insight into

the academic and extracurricular dimensions of your life,” Princeton announced, in a gentle and faintly patronizing tone of assurance that would turn out to be entirely misleading. “But the description is still incomplete.” In keeping with the tradition of the last fifty years, applicants were invited to reflect on an issue or experience that was significant to them, to be used as a Rorschach test by admissions officers eager to fill their quotas of hard-luck cases and perform whatever other acts of prestidigitation that the numbers game requires. Teenage applicants

accustomed to cocktail-party culture and to the admissions process at the country clubs and other social institutions to which their parents belonged understand the purpose of open-ended

invitations like the Personal Statement. The invitation to applicants to reveal themselves allows Princeton to choose the ones it actually wants and get rid of the others whose grades might be high enough and whose test scores might qualify them for admission but who “wouldn’t fit in” at Princeton.

“This may be the most difficult part of the application,” the application warned, before

feeding applicants more of the doublespeak that more provincial or trusting applicants might be lured into taking to heart. “We do not ask a specific question or present a topic for this essay because the subject you choose tells us almost as much about you as the way you discuss it. We encourage you to choose your own topic and write about it in a way consistent with both the topic and your personality.”

Hogue rose to the challenge with brio. “My advice to runaways, drop-outs, and gypsies in

general can be found on the attached pages,” he wrote. What followed was a personal statement that was as honest as anything that Hogue ever said or wrote, and that told the Princeton

admissions office everything they needed to know about their applicant. “Would you like to be a wayfarer open to all experiences, unleashed from your possessions?” An opening mélange of

beatnik clichés, which served to underline Hogue’s purported youth and his lack of formal

education, soon resolved itself into a heartfelt statement of purpose. “The person who strikes off is no hero, nor necessarily unconventional,” he wrote, “but to a greater degree than most people, he or she thinks and acts independently. Yet along with that ego-filled yea-saying,” he continued, in a Whitmanesque vein, “you probably feel timid or unsure that it could be you: too straight, too late, too many responsibilities, whatever.”

This was the voice of the James Hogue that his friends knew from late-night bull sessions

in high school and from working construction in Las Vegas, a combination of con man and

drifter, an adventurer who was in on the cosmic joke. A deadpan loner, a speaker of throwback hippie jive, a traveler of the open road.

“Obviously it does take something to kick around on the loose,” he wrote.

This trip is for people who want to be free and adventurous, yet realize it won’t come

easily or without knocks. Your state of mind must allow for new experiences, for tolerance and humor, must be willing to accept some discomfort, insecurity and risk. Everybody, after all, makes their own scene. If you view the world as a hostile place, it will be, any friendly paranoiac can confirm that . . . you say yes to life, all of it, as opposed to the narrow sliver we get so content with.

Having set out his credo in language that Whitman and Kerouac would have appreciated,

Hogue went on to describe the qualities that would allow a person to live the particular type of existence that he favored, one that would include privations as well as privilege:

You’ll lack luxuries, such as comfort and companionship, and at other times (or at the

same time) you’ll even miss out on necessities, such as food, sleep and shelter. You may be excited, bored, confused, desperate and amazed all in the same day. Or hour. It’s not for comfort hounds or poolside fainthearts, whose thin convictions won’t stand up to the problems that come along. The right state of mind allows you to take one thing at a time and deal with it. Approach this with the attitude, the knowledge and assurance that being poor and free is possible, valid and also rewarding.