Twenty-five years ago this month, Harvard said no. So did Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia and Williams. I can still see my 18-year-old self standing by the mailbox in stunned disbelief, holding six white envelopes. Six anorexically thin white envelopes. The precise wording of the form letters has been lost to history, but I can still conjure up their face-saving phrases like “many strong candidates” and “very difficult decisions.” Reading them one right after another, it seemed like an Ivy League chorus was cheerfully wishing me “the best of luck with your college career.” Best of luck, that is, as long as I enrolled somewhere else. Even with good grades and high test scores, I should have known that I was courting rejection by the sheer act of applying. The odds of getting into schools like Harvard and Dartmouth that year were worse than 1 out of 4. Perhaps if I had lived somewhere distant like Indiana or California, I might have found comfort in raging against the injustice of East Coast elitism. My problem was that by my senior year in high school, I was already an insufferable East Coast snob. So by the social standards of suburban Connecticut in the mid-1960s, the multiple rejections consigned me to the outer darkness, destined to be shunned on commuter trains, blackballed at country clubs and never allowed to buy a home in a community with four-acre zoning. I would have to plod through life stigmatized by the knowledge that I had been judged “Not Ivy League material.” Such adolescent angst was, of course, ludicrous. Every life has its disappointments; rejection by the college of your choice is probably more serious than not finding a date for the prom and less grievous than your mother throwing out a collection of 1950s baseball cards. Even then I was aware that my safety school was far better than most. So I stoically trudged off to the University of Michigan, a college that seemed majestically impervious to the damaged goods it was receiving. Michigan more than fulfilled its part of the bargain; the lingering gaps in my education are entirely my own fault. At 43 I can safely conclude that the lack of an Ivy League imprimatur has neither marred my career nor deprived me of any social entree that I would have enjoyed. Why then, a quarter of a century later, do I still find painful the memory of those six undernourished envelopes? Why do I periodically peek into college-rating handbooks to see how Michigan is faring against the Ivy League? And why do I sometimes blanch when friends innocently suggest lunch at the Harvard Club?
