Contentious Hargadon deanship colors admissions' past and future

On the second floor of Prospect House six years ago, nine faculty members sat at a dinner table with former Admission Dean Fred Hargadon and complained.

They thought he was admitting too many athletes, but too few artists and academics. They thought he wasn't receiving faculty input well, and not reaching out to particular high schools enough. David Wilkinson, the late physics professor an earshot from the Nobel Prize, demanded to know why the admission office no longer asked him to visit Stuyvesant, New York's best public high school, and sing Princeton's praises to its physics club.

Since the eight meetings of President Emeritus Harold Shapiro GS '64's Undergraduate Admission Study Group in winter 1998, things have changed dramatically. At her recent town-hall meeting, President Tilghman delighted at how many students from Stuyvesant were admitted this year, 16 versus seven last year, and explained her vision for admitting more students focused on the arts and humanities in the planned 500 student increase, beginning 2006, that had its roots in the study group.

The biggest change in Princeton admissions is the absence of Hargadon. He retired last June — earlier than he and Tilghman might have planned — after 15 years in admissions here. Janet Lavin Rapelye, former Wellesley College admission dean, replaced him, beating out two other final candidates, Nancy Hargrave Meislahn, Wesleyan College admission dean, and Anne-Marie Porras, Stanford University's associate admission dean. Both said they didn't want to discuss their experiences.

Hargadon was an idealized figure on campus, having made the final decision on every application himself. Students and administrators held a "Fred Fest" retirement party last year, and in the sixth residential college designed to handle the 500 student increase, there have been discussions about building a Hargadon Hall, an administration official and people who've seen copies of schematics said.

But a look at the past six years in admissions suggests a more controversial picture of Hargadon's career. As the study group, search for a new admission dean and circumstances surrounding his retirement reflect, Hargadon's deanship consisted of great success but also contention and sometimes tumult — largely unknown to the Princeton community but significant in the University's recent history, for reasons not wholly in his control.

— The Yale website scandal of summer 2002, when it was revealed that Princeton admission officials accessed a Yale admission notification website by using personal information on applicant forms, ended ongoing discussions about extending Hargadon's deanship past its ordinary expiration of June 2003.

— Despite a public report, salient details about that scandal have not been revealed, including why, in the view of Princeton officials, Yale officials contacted federal authorities over the matter.

— Princeton's treatment of Hargadon and Stephen LeMenager, his right-hand-man in the office who was removed after the scandal, was hotly debated, with some senior professors, admission officials and alumni viewing the Princeton response as unfair because of the reported, as well as unreported, actions of the two men. The scandal had an impact on the search for a new admission dean, by influencing at least to whom the search committee talked, and possibly the dean candidates.

— Throughout his deanship, Hargadon had chilly relations with the faculty, many of whom thought he was too closed to input, a view shared by some alumni and other constituents. The study group, on which Tilghman sat as a professor, ultimately found he made reasonable decisions. But it also proposed major reforms, calling for the recruitment of students of humanistic and artistic background in the planned 500-student increase and more interaction with high school guidance counselors. Hargadon expressed great skepticism about how well these changes could be accomplished.

This article, whose findings were made known to the administration Tuesday, is based on interviews with professors, coaches, trustees, administration officials and admission figures here and elsewhere. Most interviews were done on the condition of anonymity because people spoke about interpersonal affairs and were not authorized to comment.

Tilghman and Hargadon

When she came in, Tilghman wanted Hargadon to stay on past the end of his deanship in June 2003. He had an exemplary record of improving Princeton's image in the country, and she wanted him to stick around.

"Early in her tenure, President Tilghman asked me to consider staying a year beyond my appointment," Hargadon said in an email follow-up to a recent interview. "I agreed to consider it, although such a matter would (I believe) have had eventually gone to the board of trustees."

Tilghman's time sitting with the study group helped shape her views on admissions. But she was one of the more neutral members of it; several professors were known to have had poor relations with Hargadon and wanted to take a look at the process.

They felt he was unresponsive to faculty admission inquiries, according to group members who have positive and negative opinions of Hargadon. They were concerned that he cared more about admitting applicants who were athletes or took part in extracurricular activities than who were "academic 1's" — admission jargon for having high grades and standardized test scores.

The group's final report acknowledged as much, noting that some of the professors "came to the study group with some skepticism about the focus on academic quality of the admissions process."

But the report also praised Hargadon's decisions, saying the group's findings allayed the professors' concerns and "were, for the most part, entirely reasonable — in those cases where students were admitted, the reasons seemed, in the main, to be clear and compelling."

Group members, however, said the report, which Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel drafted several times, was less heated than the Prospect House discussions. While the report expressed satisfaction with Hargadon's process, it called for an increase in the number of students admitted to focus on the "academic 1's" and other changes in the way the University reached out to high schools.

"The study group expressed the strong sense that more weight should be given in assembling a class to the potential contributions of intellectually engaged students pursuing such extracurricular activities as playing a musical instrument, acting, writing poetry, painting and playing chess," said the report.

Malkiel was insistent, at the time, that Princeton could change the nature of its student body by increasing the size of the classes. Hargadon was doubtful, and group members said the two had several exchanges about how much increasing the size of the student body could alter its makeup.

Asked about the exchanges, Hargadon said: "I can remember saying then and now that people should not expect that with 125 more students in each class that every constituency is going to get a majority of those students."

He added, "My hunch is that 125 are going to be pretty much spread around. I would have pointed that out. One hundred twenty five people in a class, from where I was sitting, it didn't seem a huge number."

However, the 125 students-per-class increase has been billed as the best way to bring in the students focused on the humanities and arts.

The report said, "The pressing justification for increasing the size of the entering class is the opportunity it offers to increase the proportion of academically excellent students at Princeton and to further diversify the student body. The point cannot be made too strongly: the additional slots must be used for these purposes."

Asked about Hargadon's skepticism, Malkiel said in an interview: "We'll just have to wait and see what happens."

She said the increase in the student body "gives us the opportunity to recruit more broadly" from academically-talented, artistic, international or poorer students.

Hargadon was considered one of the best admission deans in the country for his job at Stanford and then Princeton. He increased the socioeconomic diversity of the class while attracting a more talented student body. And while athletes were a high number of the admits, that was largely because Princeton has the third smallest student body in the eight-member Ivy League but the second highest number of athletic teams.

In the following years, Tilghman became president, and a committee led by trustee Paul Wythes '55 codified the plans for the student body enlargement.

Relations remained chilly with many of Hargadon's constituencies, except coaches. He had a bitter falling out with the Center for Jewish Life over the numeric decline in Jewish students at Princeton — aside from the study group, the only time Shapiro intervened on another constituency's behalf. Even people inside the admission office felt Hargadon dominated and didn't leave room for junior admission officer input, according to two authoritative sources.

"The buck stopped with me," Hargadon said. "I had the responsibility."

"It's a large faculty . . . and you know some faculty thought we had a good process and others didn't," he said. "I think it's fair to say that each faculty member has a view of what they'd do if they were in my position. I don't think there's a way of avoiding that."

The trustees and senior administrative officials backed him. "It was on his watch that Princeton concretely got to terms with the need for a much better profile in admissions," said former trustee Hodding Carter '57 in an interview. "He was a person who dealt in a master craftsmen's kind of way with a number of constituency interests simultaneously."

Nonetheless, from the view of alumni groups that interview prospective applicants, they still viewed Hargadon as saying he was boss — and nobody was going to have much influence.

That message may have been more internally divisive if it weren't for LeMenager.

Crisis point

LeMenager, who arrived in the admission office five years before Hargadon, was his associate admission dean and later his second-in-command as director of admissions. He filled in during the December 2000 early decision round while Hargadon was on leave. He was the soft-spoken deputy loved by public school guidance counselors and alumni. While Hargadon took on the big issues, LeMenager handled daily operations.

"[Hargadon] would really turn more to Steve to work on matters of kind of calming down the waters," said an alumnus who's worked for over two decades on one of the alumni committees that interviews applicants. "He would put out the small fires."

Professors, alumni, coaches and admission officials widely expected LeMenager one day to replace Hargadon, who passed retirement age several years ago. But today LeMenager works in the office of Vice President for Campus Life Janet Dickerson, as director of planning and administration.

Hargadon and LeMenager are out of the office because of what began on April 3, 2002, and ultimately ended in the Yale website scandal of that summer. Contrary to suggestions at the time that he was already planning to step down, the scandal ended discussion about Hargadon extending his term.

"It mooted the point," Hargadon said of the scandal, "in that it was a disappointing experience."

Indeed, the impact and details of that experience are wider and more significant than originally disclosed.

Two weeks after the scandal made national headlines, the University issued a public report, based on an investigation by a former federal prosecutor, on how several members of the admission staff breached the Yale website. At that time, Tilghman also announced that LeMenager, who was the first to breach the site, would leave the admission office.

But, according to administration officials and authoritative sources at Princeton and elsewhere, the chronology left out several details about Hargadon's role and decisions, what happened at Yale that brought the peer university to contact federal authorities over the matter and LeMenager's role.

The Princeton administration believed Yale acted unfairly, and then when Princeton responded as it did — by removing LeMenager and punishing members of the admission office here (mostly through minor fines) — it disappointed some professors, alumni and admission officials.

The public report left out what happened before noon on April 3, 2002, when LeMenager breached the site, authoritative sources said.

On that day — the morning after application decisions were mailed out to the class of 2006 — there was a full staff meeting at 9 a.m. in the big conference room on the south side of West College, the home of the admission office.

This was a routine meeting where such issues as how to respond to angry alumni and parents whose children weren't admitted were discussed. Hargadon sat at the head of the table.

At the meeting, Hargadon, a self-confessed skeptic of technology, and admission officers had a back-and-forth about the Yale site and they wondered out loud if the Yale site was secure, since it only required a name, birth date and social security number to access, people who were there said. Hargadon said he couldn't remember what he said at the meeting.

Princeton was also considering setting up such a site, but three issues concerned Hargadon: It was impersonal, there was too great a possibility of making mistakes and security was an issue.

Later in the day, LeMenager checked the site on his own accord. Using data provided on forms of applicants to the Princeton admission office, according to the University investigation's public report, he gained access, though he expected to have needed to enter a password. He later demonstrated his finding to other members of the staff, who repeated them, checking whether the site was secure and whether certain applicants were admitted.

Nothing came out into public view about the breaches until the end of July, when Yale President Richard Levin called up Tilghman to tell her that on June 20 Yale compiled a confidential report identifying the breaches. The next day, The Yale Daily News broke the story, quoting LeMenager as saying that the accesses were "really an innocent way for us to check out the security" of the site.

Some officials were surprised that when reporters called the admission office in July 2002 about the incident, LeMenager was quoted. It was a longstanding and well-known policy in the office, including with The Daily Princetonian, that only Hargadon would respond to press inquiries. Hargadon said he doesn't remember if he was in on that day.

A national media storm descended on Princeton, culminating in a press conference at Maclean House on August 13, 2002, where Tilghman released the results of the Princeton investigation. Neither Hargadon nor LeMenager attended the press conference.

Hargadon did release a statement at the press conference, saying that as admission dean, he must take responsibility.

"As Princeton's dean of admissions, I am ultimately responsible for the manner in which we conduct the University's admissions process and the manner in which members of the admission office staff conducted themselves in the course of the process," he said. "Therefore I have to accept responsibility for the inappropriate actions of those members of our staff who sought unauthorized access to Yale's website."

Asked for comment for this article, LeMenager said, "My years spent in the admission office were a great privilege and a pleasure, both personally and professionally."

"My current position in campus life — working closely with Vice President Dickerson to enhance the quality of the Princeton experience for all students — is equally enriching and rewarding," he said. "In whatever ways I can, I look forward to continuing to serve Princeton and to helping make it an even better place in the future."

The scandal again revealed raw tensions between Hargadon and the faculty, with some believing he should have taken the hit.

"In a situation like that, the dean should have taken full responsibility, and nobody else should have to take the fall," said Wilson School professor Stanley Katz, the manager of the Wilson School's undergraduate program who teaches courses on universities, adding that he thought Tilghman was in an impossible spot.

Hargadon said professors were "welcome" to think whatever they wanted.

Impact and perception

The huge gap of time between the accesses in April and the scandal in July raised skepticism in the Princeton administration about what happened at Yale, and when Princeton came down on the admission office here, some outside observers were disappointed.

"I thought [LeMenager] was treated unfairly by Princeton," said Michael Goldberger, Brown admission dean, in an interview.

"It was probably difficult because the administration was relatively new and probably felt it had to take a harsh stance," said the alumnus with over 20 years experience. "I think it was unfair; someone had to be the sacrificial lamb."

Yale officials suggested that the long period of time between when Yale found out about the breaches and when it contacted federal authorities in New Haven was a matter of wanting to be comprehensive.

Helene Klasky, a Yale spokeswoman, said at the time that Yale didn't inform Princeton of the June 20 investigation until just before the story broke because it wanted to have "thoroughly scrubbed" the report.

In particular, some outside admission officials were surprised by Princeton's response toward LeMenager because he was the first one to inform Yale of the breaches at a May 15 meeting in Philadelphia. Hargadon didn't attend that meeting, and, according to the report, nobody at the meeting seemed shocked that Princeton accessed the site, including Yale officials. Rather, they wanted to discuss how to fix the problem.

LeMenager brought it up at a meeting a month later in June in California. Again, there was no vociferous reaction.

By June 20, Yale had compiled a report. Klasky said, "Yale really wanted to make sure that they had all the facts."

"We felt a need to both determine the potential problem and then to try to figure out if there were possibly any other incidences of it."

But in the view of Princeton administration officials, the situation was different. From their point of view, Yale President Richard Levin succumbed to pressures from the school's general counsel's office to take public action after The Yale Daily News broke the story. Princeton administration officials also were curious as to the role of Alexander Clark, a member of the Yale Class of 2004, who ran the admission website and many other parts of Yale's online site and compiled the report on Princeton's breaches.

Talks between Yale and Princeton lawyers broke down in the immediate wake of the news. The Yale president decided to file a complaint with federal authorities in New Haven. An FBI spokeswoman recently said the case was still pending.

"I think it was unfortunate in the way it surfaced the way it did," said Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee '69. "In the normal collegial relationship we had, we thought they would have called and talked to us before they went and talked to the local prosecutor's office. But I think they felt a need to take action."

Attempts to get comment from Yale, by email to Klasky early Sunday and by telephone call Sunday evening. were unsuccessful. Attempts to reach Clark were also unsuccessful.

Some admissions officials felt that, in light of some of these events, the treatment the admission office received from the Princeton administration became a negative factor in the minds of some candidates when Princeton began its search for a new admission dean in winter 2003.

"That could be a possibility," Brown's Goldberger said. "There could be some truth to that."

There was no question in the minds of the committee of faculty, students and administrators who met to find a new admission dean that the ultimate choice, Rapelye, was an extraordinarily qualified candidate. But there were just as qualified, if not more prestigious, available candidates who were uninterested, said a member of the search committee and a knowledgeable official at Princeton.

Among the names cited as more prestigious included Goldberger, who denied any interest, and Karl Furstenberg, admission dean at Dartmouth, who declined comment. Also named as someone who specifically would have been interested was Jim Montoya, a College Board vice president, who declined comment. The admission deans at Northwestern and the University of Chicago were also mentioned.

The search

Malkiel, the dean of college who headed the search for a new admission dean, denied categorically that the website scandal had any negative impact on the search process.

"I absolutely do not believe that for a minute," she said. "Anybody can say that something is a possibility."

In considering a list of candidates in the search for a new dean, Malkiel said she had "frank and candid conversations" with a range of senior admissions officials in the country and that not one brought up the Yale issue, except to say that "a number of people said they regretted how Yale handled the matter and that we had been put in the situation that we did."

"They wished it had been handled more privately between Princeton and Yale," she said.

To start off the search process, she reached out to admission officials at all of Princeton's peer institutions, except for Yale, because, she said, of the previous summer's experience.

Though she would have liked a number of candidates to apply who declined, she said they gave personal or professional reasons they didn't. And she said it is uncommon for someone already dean at a peer institution to switch universities.

In her talks with admission officials around the country about who the best candidate would be, she said Rapelye's name constantly came up. Rapelye was a rising star, having worked at Bowdoin, Williams and Stanford. She had been up for the post of Swarthmore admission dean in 2001, when she told students there, in an open talk on the college's issues, "I wanted to look [at the job offer] because opportunities like this don't come along often," according to the Swarthmore student newspaper, The Phoenix. She was offered the post but declined.

Malkiel mainly sought to accomplish three things in her talks with outside admission officials, she said:

— "To discuss their perception of Princeton admissions, the way Princeton admissions fits into the national selective college admissions process and the strengths and limitations of the way Princeton does its admissions business."

— "To ask for advice about the best people in the business: 'If you were in my spot, who would you talk to and who would you try to go after?'"

— "To ask, 'Would you be interested in having some conversations yourself about this opportunity?'"

For the first question, Malkiel cited an example: "On the positive side, Princeton does a terrific job attracting a splendid student body. On the negative side, we don't have the relationships we might have with high school guidance counselors. We have historically been less communicative with high school guidance counselors than other competitive institutions."

This recalls the issues in the 1998 study group, which traced some of the challenges admissions faced to fundamental issues in campus life.

"The study group believes that some of the realities of campus life make Princeton less attractive than it should be to many outstanding students," the report said. "For all of the changes at Princeton over the past four decades . . . [t]he study group urges continuing attention to the aspects of the campus climate that are often cited by prospective students who choose not to apply to Princeton and by admitted students who choose not to matriculate, such as the limited range of dining and social opportunities, the alcohol-centered nature of social life, and the less than fully comfortable climate for minority students."

James Sturm '79, an electrical engineering professor and the only member of the faculty to sit on both the study group and the admission dean search committee, reinforced this point, noting how the search committee evaluated candidates in part based on three components: how they viewed the evolving "image" of Princeton, "the quality of the undergraduate" experience and how much of a "pressure cooker" the admission dean post could be.

As noted in the study group material, Sturm said the search committee was particularly concerned with reaching out to students who couldn't be captain of a team or be on Model U.N. because he might have to "go work in his parent's restaurant."

The Stuyvesant example sticks out. During the study group, members, some said, often discussed how they wanted more "Stuyvesant" students, curling their fingers into quote marks. One official familiar with Princeton admissions compared urban Stuyvesant, where there are academic superstars but a relative lack of extracurricular activities, to the suburban Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, which also has academic superstars but dozens of teams.

Under Rapelye, the new admission dean, it is clear the University has moved away from the more concentrated admission procedure embraced by Hargadon. Indeed, it is a dramatic departure; Rapelye uses a committee structure to determine admission decisions.

"I think our faculty are wonderful ambassadors for Princeton, and when they can visit high schools in either areas of their discipline or responding to a school's needs it can reap benefits for Princeton in the way high school students see the University," she said.

Tilghman visited Stuyvesant this year to raise the University's profile there, part of her efforts in recent years to visit schools known for academic quality. Despite a decrease in applications to Princeton this year, Rapeleye nevertheless reported an increase in the number of academically talented students — though from 11 percent fewer schools.

Still, Hargadon said he did the best job he could, and is skeptical about making it seem that one "school might seem more special than the next school" of the 5,000 high schools who offer applicants each year to the pool of 14,000.

As dean, Hargadon said in an email that he "implemented a policy of treating all school visits equally, changing the traditional pattern of allocating more staff time at independent schools than at public schools. The other somewhat related change we made was not to discuss individual applicants from any school with the counselor of that school (a practice that had previously been enjoyed by many independent schools and a select number of public schools) since there simply wasn't enough time to accord that same privilege to all five thousand or so schools from which we received applicants in a given year."

Looking back, Hargadon remembers many complexities to his period as dean.

"The thing that was hardest when I look over my whole career in admissions was the tendency of people to generally confuse the universal with the local," he said. "In any given year, if the only one who happened to get in was a valedictorian, then the word spreads around that to get in to Princeton you have to be valedictorian."

"People kind of theorize about it themselves without much information," he added. "We tried our best wherever they were in the context of the whole applicant pool."