Word: granted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...aware that you have been deluged with letters regarding the Gina Grant controversy, but I would like to add my particular viewpoint to the debate...
What disturbs me about this story has less to do with Ms. Grant's culpability than with the problematic state of te College admissions process that her case so vividly illustrates. The New York Times reported that Grant had been questioned about the death of her parents by a Harvard alumni interviewer who was "interested in the orphan angle." How typically shallow of the college admissions process to refer to personal tragedy as an "angle." When I applied to college in 1987, my counselor told me to do some hands-on community service to improve my application. I remember being...
...other question that the "orphan angle" brings up is this: Is any student's personal life really an admissions committee's business? Obviously the Grant case is extreme, but I wonder if a healthy, middle-class kid with two living parents isn't fighting something of an uphill battle to convince an admissions committee that she is interesting. Likewise, is a student with a painful past obligated to bare her soul to a total stranger in order to obtain a high quality education...
...Gina Grant is probably better off not attending Harvard. I read of her plight and I sympathized . I wondered how I might help her, but the little bit of academic pull I have is at Barnard, and--be she fair, four or indifferent--I wouldn't wish that on her. Barnard exemplifies the have your-cake-and-eat-it-too admissions paradox in the worst way. Whole forests of trees are slaughtered yearly to disseminate its admissions propaganda about attending to the particular needs of women, blah blah blah...
...ultimately a matter of messy versus clean problems. At Barnard, sexual discrimination was a clean problem, suicidal depression was not. In Gina Grant's case cancer and car accidents were clean tragedy, child abuse and murder decidedly not. Colleges favor clean cut, easy-answer problems. Sexism bad, car accident sad. Sticky ambiguities, it would seem, are just a lot more of a hassle than they're worth. Gina Gionfriddo New York...