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Admissions

Harvard Trial Reveals What Admissions Deans Are Made Of: Contradictions

By Eric Hoover October 22, 2018
William Fitzsimmons, who grew up working-class near Boston, has been dean of admissions at Harvard for 32 years. “He is honorable and very attentive to others,” says a longtime colleague, “but he always puts his institution first.”
William Fitzsimmons, who grew up working-class near Boston, has been dean of admissions at Harvard for 32 years. “He is honorable and very attentive to others,” says a longtime colleague, “but he always puts his institution first.” Jessica M. Wang, The Harvard Crimson

Everyone wanted to hear what William R. Fitzsimmons had to say. In September 2017, hundreds of people packed a ballroom at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference, in Boston. Some eager souls came an hour early to snag good seats, and many spectators had to stand or squat on the floor.

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William Fitzsimmons, who grew up working-class near Boston, has been dean of admissions at Harvard for 32 years. “He is honorable and very attentive to others,” says a longtime colleague, “but he always puts his institution first.”
William Fitzsimmons, who grew up working-class near Boston, has been dean of admissions at Harvard for 32 years. “He is honorable and very attentive to others,” says a longtime colleague, “but he always puts his institution first.” Jessica M. Wang, The Harvard Crimson

Everyone wanted to hear what William R. Fitzsimmons had to say. In September 2017, hundreds of people packed a ballroom at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference, in Boston. Some eager souls came an hour early to snag good seats, and many spectators had to stand or squat on the floor.

Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard University, was expected to give a sweeping speech about his profession’s past, present, and future. Yet “Fitz,” as he’s widely known, spoke for just a few minutes before ceding the stage to a racially diverse group of recent Harvard graduates he had invited. One by one, the former students described how the university and its generous scholarships had lifted them from humble beginnings.

As compelling as those stories were, some listeners were frustrated. Instead of hearing from the nation’s most famous admissions official, they got an hour of testimonials about the transformative power of Harvard. “This wasn’t what he was supposed to do,” one college counselor complained.

A few observers who know Fitzsimmons well later surmised that the dean, whom they described as unfailingly humble, had wanted to shine the spotlight on young people he admired. Still, one could have interpreted the moment as a shrewd attempt to shape the narrative about Harvard at the very moment it was bracing for unprecedented scrutiny. Fitzsimmons knew that a lawsuit filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions would soon lay bare the university’s secretive admissions process. And the details would confirm many people’s impression that the whole thing is unfair.

About 200 students, alumni, and employees of Harvard U. gathered in Harvard Square on October 14, 2018, as a lawsuit challenging the university’s use of race in admissions was about to open in federal court in Boston.
Harvard on Trial
Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.
  • Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants, U.S. Appeals Court Rules
  • 3 Takeaways From the Appeal of the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit
  • A Judge Advised Harvard to Give Its Admissions Officers Training to Stop Bias. Will That Help?

Last week, Fitzsimmons faced another attentive audience in Boston, but this time he wasn’t in charge of the script. He spent nearly four days in a wooden chair, a star witness answering questions from lawyers bent on winning a big-time trial. His testimony revealed a lot about how the university selects applicants. It also revealed something about the dean — and the complex job he has held for 32 years.

On every campus, admissions deans and enrollment chiefs are a walking bundle of contradictions. They must meet an array of competing institutional goals, some noble, some not. You don’t have to like that fact, but it’s worth understanding. To lead an admissions office is to manage trade-offs, 24/7.

“It’s really hard,” says Jerome A. (Jerry) Lucido, executive director of the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California. “You have to wear these many hats.”

Lucido, who previously led enrollment divisions at Southern California and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, thinks the Harvard trial could help illuminate the nuances of choosing a freshman class. “The public has a fundamental misunderstanding that individual admissions decisions are solely a single decision about a single applicant,” he says. “If I’m a student, that’s how it plays out for me. But it’s really about who you are as an individual, who you are among the applicant pool, and who you are in terms of what the college intends to accomplish and has to accomplish.”

In federal court last week, Fitzsimmons wore dark suits and wire-frame glasses. As the trial went on, it was easy to picture him wearing the many hats Lucido describes, too. One moment, the dean was explaining how Harvard scours the country for promising students, especially those from low-income families. The next moment, he was explaining how the admissions office gives special treatment to the children of some wealthy donors.

It’s not one job; it’s many jobs all at once.

The Man Behind the Crimson Curtain

Though the lawsuit names Harvard as the sole defendant in the lawsuit, the case has put Fitzsimmons and his legacy on trial as well. Lawyers for the plaintiffs have portrayed him as the architect of a process that’s illegal, tainted with prejudice, and tilted in favor of the wealthy and the well-connected. At every turn, the dean defended the university’s recruitment strategies and holistic admissions process, describing them as an equalizing force.

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Depending on one’s view, the man who spent four days in the witness stand might be a villain or a hero. But who is the man behind the crimson curtain, really?

A handful of former admissions officers who have worked closely with Fitzsimmons describe him as compassionate, thoughtful, and relentlessly curious. The dean, they said, still gets into the weeds of admissions work, reading a heavy load of application folders each year — something his counterparts describe as both impressive and just plain nuts. One college counselor, calling the dean a “remarkable listener,” said whenever his students meet him, they walk away “feeling like they spoke with their favorite uncle.”

Growing up, Fitzsimmons learned about Harvard, just 15 miles away, from an encyclopedia. Two nuns at his high school refused to write him recommendations for Harvard.

Among admissions deans at highly selective colleges, Fitzsimmons has long been unusually accessible. At NACAC’s annual conference, he sits at Harvard’s table during the raucous college fair, a chore many deans delegate to underlings. Who really wants to talk with the near-endless line of people who line up to gab, shake hands, and, yes, gripe? Fitzsimmons does, college counselors say.

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Though some Ivy League deans are allergic to the news media, Fitzsimmons has often engaged with journalists. He contributed to The Choice, The New York Times’s now-defunct blog about admissions. Once he called a Chronicle reporter back late at night from a hotel in Atlanta, just to elaborate on something he had said in a previous interview.

Known for his dry, self-deprecating humor, Fitzsimmons often quips that he represents “the lunatic fringe” of college admissions. It’s an acknowledgment of the rarefied air in which Harvard operates and, perhaps, an apology for the angst that the university and its minuscule acceptance rate cause in high schools around the world.

Still, one counselor who has known Fitzsimmons for 20 years describes him as an unapologetic servant of Harvard’s interests: “He is honorable and very attentive to others, but he always puts his institution first.”

When Harvard dropped its early-admission program, in 2008, Fitzsimmons told The Chronicle that he hoped the move would help “ease the college-admissions frenzy” and level the playing field for low-income applicants. But the university reinstated its early-admission program in 2011 after concluding that many desirable students were applying early … to other colleges.

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In some ways, Fitzsimmons is a study in contrasts. The dean signs admissions letters for a university with a long tradition of rewarding privilege and a mind-boggling $39-billion endowment. Yet out on the links, he’s known to hunt for long-lost golf balls that other people hit into bushes, always taking home more than he brought. A former colleague says that though the dean could afford to buy a Jaguar, he prefers to drive modest cars “until they’ve got 200,000 miles on them and they just die.”

The tale of how Bill Fitzsimmons, the working-class kid from Weymouth, Mass., became Bill Fitzsimmons, the gatekeeper at an elite university in Cambridge, Mass., is widely known. He has told his origin story so often that some admissions officials and college counselors can recite it from memory, mimicking his Boston accent and fondness for saying “wicked smaht.”

Growing up, Fitzsimmons learned about Harvard, just 15 miles away, from an encyclopedia. His parents ran a gas station and convenience store. Two nuns at his high school refused to write him recommendations for Harvard, saying that it was full of atheists, Communists, and snobs. Undeterred, he got a scholarship from the university, paid the rest of the tuition himself, and had a transformative experience on campus, where he excelled as a goalie on the hockey team. He graduated in 1967, in love with the place. Five years later, he became admissions director.

It’s a stirring tale, especially for an admissions dean who has long tried to convince the world that Harvard isn’t just for privileged prep-schoolers. “His passion for finding low-income and first-generation kids is what motivates him more than anything else,” says Charles A. Deacon, dean of admissions at Georgetown University.

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Fitzsimmons and Deacon have traveled together for decades on joint recruitment trips. On those annual excursions, the deans typically start their day at 7:30 a.m. and attend a reception in the evening. “It will be 9:30, and he will have 20 people standing around him, and I’ll have to say ‘Fitz, time for dinner, the restaurant’s closing!’” Deacon says. “He’s happy to stay until the last person leaves, and you can’t say that about most people.”

‘The Weight of the Admissions World’

When Fitzsimmons took the stand last week to describe and defend Harvard’s elaborate admissions process, he essentially spoke for colleagues at selective colleges everywhere. Though the key question in the trial is whether the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants, the case is widely seen as an attack on race-conscious admission plans everywhere, as well as the practice of holistic review, involving both objective and subjective evaluations of applicants.

Two sources close to Fitzsimmons, who is 74, tell The Chronicle that he has vowed to stay in his job until the case is resolved, even if, as most everyone expects, it ends up going all the way to the Supreme Court. “It’s not just Harvard he’s worried about,” one source says. “He knows that if Harvard loses this, it could blow up college admissions for everybody.”

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Deacon says, “He’s carrying the weight of the admissions world on his shoulders.”

Ted Spencer knows what that feels like. He was director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor when two plaintiffs challenged the institution’s consideration of race among undergraduate and law-school applicants back in 1997.

“In the beginning, I was in a defensive posture,” Spencer recalls. “I was worried about whether we did anything wrong, whether there was something we overlooked in our process.”

As the two cases — Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger — wore on, Spencer came to feel more confident in the university’s position. Yet the scrutiny was relentless. He couldn’t go to a cocktail party or a football game without someone asking him a question or second-guessing the university’s admissions practices. He tried to acknowledge their opinions and respond calmly.

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“I kind of detached myself,” Spencer says. “I was able to put the cases away in a little part of my brain so that I didn’t feed off the message every day that I was this bad person who was doing all these things wrong.”

In 2003 the Supreme Court handed Michigan a split decision, yet it was really a victory for supporters of affirmative action. In Grutter a 5-to-4 majority upheld the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, ruling that the institution had a compelling interest in promoting student diversity. As a result, colleges could continue to consider race as one of many factors in their assessments of applicants.

Still, the landmark ruling didn’t remove the public’s misconceptions — and understandable suspicions — about holistic evaluations. “It’s very hard to explain to people that you can’t just look at applicants’ grades and test scores,” Spencer says. “What did teachers and counselors say in their recommendations? What courses did they take? What courses did their high school offer? How many students there go on to college? It’s like treating a patient. You don’t treat all patients the same way, and you don’t treat all applications the same way.”

Applicants have every reason to think that admissions deans oversee a contest in which the competition is based on clear-cut measures of merit. The applicants have every reason to hate that it’s not so.

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“It’s also about the needs of the university,” Spencer says. “You make your own rules based on your needs.”

Competing Narratives

Colleges, though, don’t always describe the admissions process as a means of satisfying their many wants and needs. They tend to cast the ritual as a deeply personal exercise, a way of getting to know Who Students Really Are.

Why? Because that makes for a pleasing story, like the one William Fitzsimmons often tells about himself in hopes of dispelling stereotypes about Harvard. “People really relate to individual stories,” he said in a 2012 interview. “It’s refreshing for them to know Harvard isn’t something you’re born to. It’s something available to everyone.”

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Of course, it’s available to everyone only in theory. Generally, a student must have high test scores, stellar grades, and a slew of other qualifications. Oh, and it helps to attend a high-performing high school, with plenty of resources, in an affluent part of the nation.

Even then their chances are slim. Harvard accepted about 1,962 of its 42,749 applicants for the Class of 2022. And though the university introduced a financial-aid initiative in 2004 that helped changed the national conversation about college affordability, students who enroll there are still much more likely to come from the wealthiest segments of society than from the poorest.

It’s not just Harvard he’s worried about. He knows that if Harvard loses this, it could blow up college admissions for everybody.

Fitzsimmons testified that Harvard has tried to counter the advantage that its wealthiest applicants enjoy. This year a record 20 percent of the admitted class was eligible for federal Pell Grants for low-income students..

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Yet throughout the trial, a competing narrative about access to Harvard has emerged. Though the university has opened its doors to more low-income and first-generation students over the past decade, it also goes all out for applicants with many advantages. Internal emails shown in the courtroom revealed exactly how connections to a major donor tend to increase an applicant’s chances of getting in.

In one 2013 email a Harvard dean wrote to Fitzsimmons that he “had done wonders” because some admitted students were connected to important people, including some who had “already committed to a building.” In another email, a tennis coach told Fitzsimmons that the family of an applicant had donated $1.1 million to the university over a four-year period. The coach appeared to thank Fitzsimmons for rolling out the “red carpet” for a campus visitor.

Documents filed in federal court this summer revealed that the university maintains two lists of well-connected students, whose acceptance rates are significantly higher than those for other applicants.

Though the children of donors and influential alumni aren’t guaranteed admission, Fitzsimmons said, they do get careful treatment, which was “important for the long-term strength of the institution.”

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None of that should surprise anyone. If it does, go read The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden’s eye-popping account of how the admissions process serves children of the rich and powerful.

“Catering to legacies, important contributors — we all do it to one degree or another. [Fitzsimmons] is just being forced to explain how,” says Deacon, at Georgetown. “Deans of admissions, in many cases, are acting as the agent of the university. They have to carry things out whether they like it or not.”

Advocate for poor and disadvantaged students.

Provider of institutional wealth.

Proponent of the “wicked smaht.”

Protector of prestige.

In the end, there isn’t just one story to tell about any admissions dean. Many are true all at once.

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Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.

Nell Gluckman, who contributed reporting from Boston, writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

A version of this article appeared in the November 2, 2018, issue.
Read other items in Harvard on Trial.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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Eric Hoover
About the Author
Eric Hoover
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
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