The Review: Should Administrators Be Saving Souls?

On the therapeutic turn in college ... everything. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. The personal statement became a component of the college admissions process in the 1920s. Although originally introduced as a tool to discriminate against Jews, it has come to serve a much broader and more nebulous ideological function. “Applicants are encouraged,” Kathryn Murphy and Thomas Karshan [write]( in the introduction to their edited volume, On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, “to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle.” As Merve Emre [elaborates]( in The New York Review of Books, this confessional development tracked a larger shift in the genre of the essay, which would become ever more wedded to the therapeutic exercise of self-exposure — a tendency that has perhaps peaked in our own time. Last year, writing for the Review about “holistic admissions” at highly selective colleges and universities, Matt Feeney [described]( the sort of “authenticity effects” such personal statements are designed to produce. They must tell of some personal failing or trauma and then of its overcoming — but in a decorously restrained way that doesn’t offend the sensibilities of admissions committees. (Feeney shares the story of one teenage girl who wrote about the humiliation of pissing herself. She was not accepted — “she needed a more refined sort of self-abasement.”) As in the old days of institutionalized anti-Semitism, the right kinds of authenticity effects turn out to be highly class-linked: “What ends up resembling ‘authenticity’ to admissions officers is an uncannily WASPy mix of dispensations better understood as discretion, or, perhaps, good taste.” But the problem is deeper and more general than class or ethnic prejudice. Whomever it includes or excludes, the demand on the part of colleges that applicants produce versions of themselves at once convincingly deep and honest and palatable to an admissions bureaucracy involves the sinister corruption of the very idea of self. “Two very different things get blithely bundled together,” as Feeney writes: “the profound matter of who a young person is becoming, and the administrative preference that the young person be more legible within a process of selection and rejection.” Identity and application become one and the same. The imperatives of therapeutic confession have come to occupy much more space in the university than just the application process. As Blake Smith explored in a Review [essay]( this summer, identity-based mentorship programs are another area in which administrative bureaucracies encourage members of the college community to enact their deep selves — within, of course, the limits of propriety. Smith describes his own feelings of ambivalence as a gay man asked to provide such mentorship to LGBT students: “Queer mentees participating in the University of Chicago’s program are imagined, at least in its own discourse, as engaged in a process of supervised self-construction — a process at once utterly intimate and folded unproblematically into the university’s institutional workings and academic agendas. ... One would never suspect from the program’s literature that the identities with which this sort of mentoring is concerned have anything to do with sex.” Smith’s [new essay]( in the Review, “Do Administrators Think They’re Spiritual Healers?,” develops his themes further, and fleshes out his portrait of the administrative side of the confessional dialectic in which students are enmeshed. This one takes on the administrative tendency, whenever something terrible happens, to write universitywide emails offering moral bromides and therapeutic resources. “Most of us never open the emails,” Smith writes. So what are they for? In a close reading of the form and rhetoric of such messages, Smith elucidates their purpose. They “summon ... members of an imaginary unanimous body to feel and think in common.” They are forms of address not unlike a minister’s to his flock; they speak not in a fully individuated voice but with the corporate weight of the church behind them. They attempt to bring a public into being, and to give it cues for right thinking. That their messages are often met with derision by segments of the congregation does not, on its own, distinguish the ministerial care of the deans and deanlets from that of the ministers proper. Smith does not think that the job of the university is to produce this sort of imagined collectivity. In his view, the official statements meant to do so foreclose the kind of debate the university is supposed to encourage. Instead, they attempt to replace the cultivated dissensus that should be the university’s raison d'être with secular homilies. Read Merve Emre’s “The Illusion of the First Person” [here]( Matt Feeney’s “The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions” [here]( and Blake Smith’s “Do Administrators Think They’re Spiritual Healers?” [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Academic Freedom Has Always Been Dirty. That’s a Good Thing.]( By Joan W. Scott [STORY IMAGE]( Three new studies address academic freedom. One succeeds. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [The Reckless Rankings Game]( By Akil Bello [STORY IMAGE]( Columbia’s recent data scandal undermines the pretense of objectivity at U.S. News. 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Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Diverse Leadership for a New Era - The Chronicle Store]( [Diverse Leadership for a New Era]( Diversity in leadership can help support colleges’ mission as enrollments of low-income and minority students increase. [Order your copy today]( to explore whether colleges are meeting goals they set following the 2020 racial justice movement and implementing best practices to recruit and support an inclusive administration. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2022 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037