Delayed Echoes

As a child of the rural Midwest, I felt decidedly out of place at Princeton among the debonair Eastern prep-school graduates who still, in the early 1980s (just a decade or so after the campus went co-ed) seemed to embody its privileged heritage, so I could scarcely imagine the alienation of these other yet more marginalized students. And while I happened to know that some of them gained admission on special terms meant to make up for their social disadvantages, I didn’t resent them for this. Not at all. Because I came from a geographic region that Princeton hadn’t favored in the past, but which it was now intent on drawing from, I was also a sort of affirmative-action student.

What’s more, the poorer and browner of my classmates — particularly the women — seemed to study twice as hard as I did, clocking endless hours in the library and forgoing weekend parties for late-night cram sessions. Maybe their SAT scores were lower than mine, but they ranked higher than I did on the effort scale. And on the bravery scale too.

A system of advancement by aptitude, by statistical measurements of mental acuity, doesn’t concern itself with determination and courage, but if the world were truly fair, it would.

As friend said once “There are geniuses, and then there are the rest of us, who make it up through hard work.”