The Review: The Scandal of Admissions; Foucault and Administration

How much power should college admissions have over students' souls? ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( [logo] [Read this newsletter on the web](. At elite colleges, where application numbers are higher than ever, admissions officers have more power than ever. And it's not just a question of deciding whether to weight an incoming class toward English or engineering. As [Matt Feeney explains]( in The Chronicle Review, admissions now demands "authenticity" above all else. "The tacit directive in all this — 'Be authentic for us or we won’t admit you' — puts kids in a tough position," Feeney writes. "It’s bad that kids have to suffer this torment. It’s also bad that admissions departments actually think that the anxiously curated renderings that appear in applications can in any way be called 'authentic.'" In other words, admissions officers are now in the business of soul formation, which they manage via ever-more-intrusive confessional solicitations, mainly in the form of the personal essay. "As in psychoanalysis," Feeney says, "this process is haunted by uncertainty. There’s always the risk that the applicant’s personal confessions hide new evasions, new obstructions that block insight, prevent the healing appearance of the young self’s uncorrupted truth." Playing along, the anxious families of aspiring elite-college students mold themselves and their offspring to the ever-subtler, ever-more-specific desires of college admissions — whose power is thereby enhanced even further ("How can we get our kid to have the kind of soul Harvard wants?"). Is this OK? As Feeney puts it, "The social theorist Michel Foucault … described the intimate, burrowing power that moves and works through therapeutic methods, especially when these methods are plied by authoritative institutions. But one hears few Foucault-style complaints about the intimate and invasive moral training by which their universities are populated." Read on for a conversation with Feeney about soul formation, college admissions, and Foucault. Paid for and Created by Cisco [Enabling Science to Quickly Span the Globe]( As scientists at research universities put their minds to work to address global problems, they continue to wrestle with very large and complex sets of data. Now with a Cisco-powered upgrade to technology, sharing this data around the world is possible. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( Subscribe to The Chronicle The Chronicle’s award-winning journalism challenges conventional wisdom, holds academic leaders accountable, and empowers you to do your job better — and it’s your support that makes our work possible. [Subscribe Today]( The Latest THE REVIEW [The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions]( By Matt Feeney [image] The process has become an intrusive and morally presumptuous inquisition of an applicant’s soul. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( THE REVIEW [Merve Emre’s Critical Vision]( By Jonathan Russell Clark [image] The Oxford professor on being torn between academe and literary journalism — and stalked by a spy in the archives. College Admissions as Soul Formation Your essay reminded me of a recent article in Tablet by Blake Smith. Smith writes: "I had asked students to explain how institutions like the university elicit us to speak ’the truth’ about ourselves, and in doing so reshape who we are. They told me about their college admissions essays, narratives about themselves that both reflected a cunning sense of what their audience wanted to hear, and reached, more deeply than I think students know, into their own souls." Why haven't humanists in the university turned a Foucaultian lens on this stuff? I'm hesitant to slant it politically, but I feel like there's a convenient way of turning your analytical framework onto politically agreeable targets. There are enough of those out there that what's happening closer to home is easily ignored. I am not as familiar with the institutional cultures of universities as I used to be, but maybe there's a degree of unwillingness to take on administration. There are a lot of obvious areas in which a therapeutic-administrative method is applied to people for the sake of administrative control. Especially on campuses. It's a big miss. I hesitate to speculate on people's motives, but it's a big miss. On the other hand you have conservative pundits who are under the impression that Foucault is the philosophical sponsor for all of the things on the cultural left that they hate. There's an incoherence in the conservative way of grappling with Foucault. Everyone wants to have a convenient villain. Almost 20 years ago I pitched an article to the now-shuttered Public Interest, in which I wanted to make the argument that Foucault was a really good diagnostician of a lot of the things that conservatives were complaining about back then. As the authority of the teacher becomes relativized, as the authority of the text becomes relativized, you have this idea that the real knowledge is produced by students. The institutional authority becomes, instead of a speaker or a lecturer, a listener. Which always struck me as very much the configuration Foucault was describing in, especially, History of Sexuality (Vol. 1), where he inverts the power dynamic assumed in a model that celebrates self-expression as self-empowerment. As administration becomes hypertrophic in universities, businesses, everywhere else, and as the methods used by this body of administrators increasingly consist of quasi-therapeutic incitements to self-divulgence or confession, turning to Foucault is an obvious move for understanding what they're up to. Concretely and in the medium term, how can admissions be reformed, in your view? I can propose things: That they stop trying to obfuscate the arbitrariness of their process. They obfuscate the arbitrariness and aggrandize themselves. It's got to be a heck of a drug to give up. So the first thing you need to do is convince admissions administrators that they need to give up this drug. The first step is to point out the problem. It's not adequately dwelt on, just how much power this transfers to admissions administrators and how shameless, how unreflective, they are in exploiting it. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the decline in governing power on the part of the faculty. I wonder if admissions could become an issue for them. They could say: To the extent that the soul formation of the student is an appropriate role, it's our job, not yours. Yes. Someone would have to formulate it as a problem in the first place. Soul formation has been usurped by administrators, which they both deny and celebrate. Maybe pointing this out will raise a healthy pridefulness in the faculty. Recommended - "The critic must make you care. Donoghue performed that task beautifully." At Commonweal, Anthony Domestico [writes in memoriam]( of Denis Donoghue, who died earlier this month. - "It is strange that the futures of so many women — or, from another perspective, the negated futures of so many somethings — hang on a lack of consensus among men trained in philosophy, medicine, and theology. In a way, my now-unpregnant body embodies interdisciplinary impasse." In "[Something That Would Have Been Somebody]( at Salmagundi, Erin Greer begins with a personal story and ends with political philosophy. - "The informality and spontaneity of the southern worship experience bumped up against more structured northern church services, and class divisions within Black communities were on full display on Sunday mornings." At The New York Review of Books, [Erica Armstrong Dunbar on the Black church](. - "It’s a model for a self-aware liberalism that’s democratic and diverse without being smug or snobby." At The Point, Scott Spillman's [overview]( of Louis Menand's career. For a less admiring assessment, [see Evan Kindley]( in The New Republic: "Menand’s tone is so disenchanted that we wonder why we’re supposed to care about the events, ideas, and figures he chronicles at all." (And watch for my interview with Menand in the Review, publishing the week of April 19.) I'm always hoping to hear from you — write to opinion@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin Paid for and Created by New Jersey Institute of Technology [The U.S. Finds an Enterprising Partner in Higher Ed as it Moves to Invest in Infrastructure]( Managing the growth of urban centers, NJIT students, faculty and alumni are evaluating the impact of transportation as well as building sustainable infrastructure in efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the infrastructure sector. Today's Global Campus Strategies for Reviving International Enrollments and Study Abroad Pandemic travel restrictions cut both ways, causing international enrollments to plummet and limiting study-abroad opportunities. This Chronicle report provides an in-depth look at how the global education experience has changed and offers strategies for assessing and adapting programs to ensure students' exposure to cultural and global diversity. [Order your copy today.]( Job Opportunities [Search the Chronicle's jobs database]( to view the latest jobs in higher education. What did you think of today’s newsletter? [Strongly disliked]( // [It was OK]( // [Loved it](. [logo]( This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2021 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037