It's been less than a week since I heard from the last of the business schools I'd applied to. Stanford doesn't want me. I had been on tenterhooks for weeks waiting for this last decision. For overall quality of school, faculty, curriculum, I knew I couldn't do better than MIT, but Stanford had two important factors in its favor. The first was its location, which is only five blocks from where I live, a place which, nestled in the coastal hills of the San Francisco peninsula, is as much like paradise as any earthly place I can imagine. The other is that when you finish school there, the piece of paper they give you says Stanford on it. For these two reasons alone, I was rather hoping they'd invite me to attend there.
My friends, not quite understanding how delighted I am at the prospect of going to MIT, try to cheer me up.
"I have a friend, Bob," says Lorelei, "who went to Stanford Business School. He quit after a year. They said to him, 'No one quits Stanford.' He said 'watch me'. Know what his complaint with Stanford was?"
"What?", I asked.
"The students there were stupid. He just lost patience with them."
I knew from a prior conversation that the Bob in question had gotten his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard, and I guessed that he'd probably have found me distressingly dull as well. But I knew Lorelei's intention was to cheer me up, and I appreciated that and made no comment.
Now, it ought to be understood that I was a sufficiently poor student as an undergraduate that I wasn't a shoo-in at any of the places I applied. But my undergraduate years are a ways behind, and I've done better since then. So I wondered a lot at not being admitted to Stanford.
Was it the diversity thing? At the informational session I attended, I was told that the school's desire for diversity won't do you much good if you wait until the last admissions deadline (as I had done). "By May," the man explained, "we've already got our left-handed Finnish figure-skater for this year."
Did he really mean "for this year"? This might have made a difference, you see. I refuse to believe they have one of me in next year's class, even by May. So their desire for diversity should have worked in my favor, unless they look at the school in aggregate, and not just at one year's class. My friend Theresa will be in her second year, and if they looked at both years' students together, then I can imagine some member of the admissions committee murmuring, "One devout, highly articulate and occasionally dignified Quaker is enough", and penning a thick black line through my name.
Or did I do something wrong on those miserable essays? Did I over-write? (I get a small lump in my throat every time I remember Lorelei saying "Of course you'll get in. You got a great GMAT score and you write like Joyce". She meant well, of course, but I was nagged by the near certainty that James Joyce would never get into any business school I ran.) I had gone so far as to excise the Shakespeare from my ethics essay, but was it enough?
Ah! the ethics essay. I knew, the moment I learned that business schools had adopted the fashion of asking candidates to write about ethics, that this could be the kiss of death for me.
What in the world are you supposed to say about ethics to an unknown group of people trying to pick you out of a crowd? That your own are fine? That of course the life of a businessperson is fraught with ethical dilemmas, but that of course you always make the right choice? That you don't always make the right choice? That there are no dilemmas at all and that you never have any doubts? Forgive me, but I cannot imagine myself doing any of these.
I can think of one and only one instance in which I said something about my ethics in public and forgave myself for it:
A Minnesotan named Jeremy Iggers was a guest in our household for a while. He was doing a bit of teaching at Stanford, and putting some touches on his Ph.D. dissertation, and enjoying California. As recompense for our hospitality, he gave us a copy of one of his books. On the back cover, it said about the author: "Jeremy Iggers works for the Minneapolis Tribune, where he writes on food, restaurants and ethics." When I asked Jeremy how many journalists specialized in food, restaurants and ethics, he replied, "Well, ... we don't hold conventions."
Once he came home when I was making tacos. I fed him some. He declared them to be the best tacos he'd ever eaten. I was stopped in my tracks. I thought long and hard about the source of this compliment - this wasn't just anybody praising my tacos, but a journalist specializing in food, restaurants and ethics.
"Thank you Jeremy. I appreciate that. And, Jeremy?"
"Yes?"
"My ethics are pretty good, too."
"Yes," he nodded with only a slight roll of his eyes, "I suppose they are."
So I've known for a long time that if Stanford wanted me to tout my ethics, I was out of luck. But perhaps Stanford didn't want me to brag.
Perhaps another story will get us nearer the heart of the matter, the story of how, last Saturday, a number of Stanford students found themselves painting our Quaker meeting house.
It seems that a certain fraternity became environmentally conscious. They started self-education programs. They began to recycle carefully. They did various Ecological Good Things. I don't know all the Good Things they did, because I didn't read the article about them in the local paper. I didn't even see the picture of them on the front page of the paper. I have it on good authority, though, that in the background of that picture was a handsome hand-carved wooden sign which read "Palo Alto Friends Meeting."
The hand carving was the labor of love of a now-deceased Friend. We had missed that sign sorely, and had even talked for several months about maybe some day replacing it (demographic studies have shown that Quakers live about six years longer than the general population; it's because it takes us so long to decide on anything). Our meeting clerk, Bill, phoned the fraternity and requested its return.
Caught red-handed, they complied, and also graciously offered to make restitution. It was agreed that they would come over on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and stain the wood siding of the meeting house.
I had errands to run on Saturday, and so by the time I joined them, the work was nearly done. Everyone was in good spirits. They completed the work handsomely, we fed them bountifully, we shook their hands, and they departed.
They weren't really bad kids, they were just...Stanford students...
Hmmm...
Was Bob right, after all? Now of course, it can always be argued that these were undergraduates, and that the Graduate School of Business takes pains to weed out this sort. Come to think of it, that may be the very purpose of the ethics essay.
Yes, that must be it! This fall, as I in Cambridge am being both instructed and charmed by Dr. Rebecca Henderson, far away in California, I know who will be settling into the seat which might have been mine at Stanford. It will be the man who wrote in his ethics essay:
"When you, like, steal something, you shouldn't, you know, call in a newspaper and have your, like, picture taken with what you stole. Because that's, like, really lame? You know?"
