Yale Daily News

Is this "get to know your administration" week? Don't take offense--these articles are great!

If you think I had a crush on Brenzel *before*...

Its pretty hard to claim the moral high gtound and proclaim your indifference to rankings, admission rates, yield rates and competition in the admissions sphere with Harvard and Princeton when you insist on hanging onto a yield-boosting, competition restricting early admissions program. Flip-flopping on early admissions and his leadership of the opposition campaign - presumably based on market research - was not President Levin's finest hour.

Here's hoping philosopher Brenzel will help him see the light.

Had a very nice chat with Dean Brenzel at Bulldog Days in 2007, and he was great. Learned a lot about DS from him in that talk, and my daughter ended up in DS, and thrived.

Keep up the good work, and keep Early Action. Early is evil if it binding, but not if it is not.

Early admission is evil either way.

The sole institutional purpose is to reduce the size of the overlap pool with rival schools, hoping to steal a few apps from Harvard and Princeton by admitting people 3 months early, before the top applicants have a choice.

Consider: more than 60% of Yale's freshman class this year was drawn from the early applicant pool, which constituted only 20% of the total number of applicants.

I understand this is the "administrator profile" time of year for the YDN, but they don't have to ignore all the interesting questions they raise.

- How did Brenzel go from blithely dismissing the Admissions Office to running it in a mere two months? What made him start thinking about it?

- How did he get the job without any admissions experience?

- By ALL accounts, he proved the skeptics wrong? There isn't ONE person who thinks he hasn't done a great job?

- The list of his "controversial" stands (sold as accomplishments, somehow) consists of three positions, one of which criticizes the established college-admissions game and the other two of which refuse to change it. How does he explain that dichotomy?

- Why did the young Brenzel dislike Notre Dame? Why did his father dislike Harvard? Did their mutual "screw-you" hurt their relationship with each other? What did Brenzel's mom think?

- What specifically in his Louisville/St. X background seems to inform Brenzel's desire to "grapple with the big questions"?

- What about the Spizzwinks (or a cappella generally) interested Brenzel? Was there some significance to his murder-spree solo, or why no one in the group has sung it since?

- What did Brenzel choose to be the only white guy in the black dorm, as opposed to Hennings living with him and other white people? Was TD known as the black college back in the seventies? Why? This would be extremely fascinating all by itself.

- Re: Kennedy: Does Brenzel fear his life becoming "ponderous"?

- What was it about his ETS and Securities Dealer work that prompted Brenzel to join the Jesuit order?

- Especially given that he decided not to join the order permanently, what changed Brenzel's mind about Notre Dame?

- Where did the money for all his nineties business ventures come from?

- How on earth did Brenzel go from lecture videographer to the head of AYA? Was that really his immediate next job?

- Is there a story behind Brenzel ironing out the Kentucky accent, as is alluded? Did his parents speak with accents?

- How often do the two alums communicate with Brenzel? How, specifically, has he counseled them?

- Again, it's suggested that Brenzel's relationship with Salovey was a prime mover in getting him considered for the job. Is that actually true?

- What are the "big-picture questions about education and society" that Brenzel hoped to "confront" by taking this job? How has he confronted them?

- The contrast between ostensibly unqualified Brenzel and the roomful of experienced admissions officers seems to suggest that Brenzel was the only "real intellectual concerned with education and students." This assertion deserves some fleshing out.

- What did the high school guidance counselors tell Brenzel when he asked them whether Early Action should go? Did they change his mind or force him to rethink anything? What happened?

- How did Brenzel "lean on" senior staff during his first year, and how was that different from the "team-based management model" and "staff ownership of issues" he subsequently introduced? That just makes it sound like he's consistently done less work than the position typically entails.

- Do Yale's career admissions officers really like that Brenzel "always goes beyond the strategic to what is right"? How does that actually impact their jobs? How the heck does that relate to his Halloween costumes?

- What exactly is the "Web-based alternative to the current rankings system"? How does it differ from the U.S. News ranking system, besides being Web-based and taking Yale's money?

- Again, what makes the Education Conservancy's program so ambitious? What is it?

- Wow. Only six sentences and a source and a half to represent the people who think Yale's financial aid and admissions policies are too reactive (not even that they're not generous or equitable enough!). This opposing position, of course, "respects Brenzel's thoughtful approach." Stunning. Does Ms. Roman work in the Admissions Office? Brenzel's personal impact on Yale's financial aid program and broader admissions decisions should be the focus of this piece (as informed, of course, by his personal history), and there are certainly reasonable arguments to be made against them. What we have here is an insult to straw men.

- Ah, of course: Brenzel doesn't have the final say over Yale's key admissions or financial aid decisions. How exactly does that give and take with Levin and Salovey operate, beyond being "dialogue"?

- Obviously Brenzel isn't evaluating every candidate alone. So how does the process actually work?

- Finally, at the VERY end, we get a hint of the argument against Brenzel's tenure: The philosopher so concerned with education and students isn't actually doing anything to help them in the admissions office. No one besides Chauncey wanted to talk about that at all? Well, what does Chauncey think they should be doing, then? What would those other admissions vets do differently? What are their pet projects?

- HOW exactly is the admissions office working to become class-blind(tm)? Does this agenda conflict with Brenzel's professed bias toward science and engineering majors (which is VERY interesting, and deserves more attention)?

- HOW do Brenzel's business experience and philosophy background actually inform his role as admissions director?

- Most important: Come on, none of Brenzel's buddies could give us a good naked volleyball story?

There’s so much interesting stuff to explore here, but instead the story just makes an awful lot of statements it doesn’t support, and until the very end it’s so uniformly positive it might as well be running in the AYA magazine.

P.S. A cursory Google search might also have produced some more color than Brenzel himself, who seems reluctant to say anything interesting in these interviews. Apparently he contributed to a book about superheroes and philosophy. Did he become a comic-book fan before or after his naked volleyball career?

As someone who applied early, was accepted in December, and withdrew all my other applications, I'm struggling to understand how early action is "evil." Rather, it reduced my stress and allowed me to focus on my senior year.

Admitting students early certainly doesn't take away any "choice"; if students want to attend Harvard/Princeton, they can apply there regular decision.

Bosch,

Your judgement of this article is exceedingly unfair. It is clear that an exceptional amount of sourcing has gone into its composition, and the volume of questions you seek to have answered would require the writing of a full-blown biography. Remember that what you are reading is a newspaper article, and thus your critiques should be reasonably tailored to fit the genre.

If anything, the fact that you have been inspired to think so thoroughly about this article is an indication that the author has in fact been successful in bringing the critical issues to light for the reader's consideration.

If you are truly so desperate to learn every facet of Dean Brenzel's life (as the plethora of suggestions you have written suggests), your energy could clearly be applied in a more constructive way then to denigrate a reporting job that you would clearly be unable to reproduce yourself.

Yalie0703,

I take Bosch's point to be that the article should have been a bit more balanced, rather than a wholly uncritical wet kiss applied to Brenzel's posterior.

My complaint lies not with the amount of sourcing, 0703, but with its nature. What's clear is that an interview or interviews with the subject produced a general biographical sketch, which, rather than being filled in by other sources, is merely accented by a series of his Spizzwinks friends and fellow administrators saying what a good guy he is. What "critical issues" does the story elucidate, exactly? It steadfastly refrains from any critical analysis whatsoever, and denies the reader a significantly improved sense of how the pertinent offices operate (or will operate in the future) or why.

In one sense, you're right: There's a lot of interesting stuff here, and addressing all my sundry nitpicks about unanswered personal questions might have lengthened the story to the point that it belonged in the YDN magazine instead. But a lot of the personal stuff is ultimately window dressing, and the story certainly didn't need to be "a full-blown biography" to contain more than a hint of balance, or to address its own central question -- the effect of this unconventional management choice on his critical purview, Yale's admissions and financial aid offices.

It's not that there isn't a decent amount of color here; it's that the color consistently fails to contribute to our understanding of the story's thesis, which Ms. Roman takes for granted without really making the case.

Ms. Roman his historically shown herself unwilling to dig too deeply when writing admissions-related sources. She has failed to highlight Yale's increasingly heavy reliance on the smaller, less diverse early applicant pool to fill its freshman class.

See: http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22867

885 were admitted from the early pool for a class of 1320. If (as has historically been the case) 88% of the early admits enrolled, then at least 779 of the Class of the 1,320 applied early, and possibly more.

65% of the 4,842 early applicants were deferred to the regular round, and may well have been admitted in disproportionate numbers at that stage by an admissions office well aware that such applicants statistically more likely to enroll than other applicants who had not signalled they preference for Yale by applying early.

The bottom line is that upwards of 2/3 of the class may have come from the 4,842 early applicants, while only 1/3 came from the nearly 18,000 "regular" applicants. I don't know about Caitlin or Dean Brenzel - or the lucky early admits themselves - but I find these numbers disturbing.

Brenzel is a control freak. He uses his extensive background in philosophy to adeptly manipulate everyone around him. The moment you disagree or show a better argument, or cause him to lose control of any aspect of his work, he'll be after you.
Look at how he handled the running of David Lee for the Corporation seat when Brenzel was director of AYA. Once it was obvious that Lee was garnering a lot of support, Brenzel quickly - and at the last minute - found someone to challenge him, Maya Lin. Lin was able to pull out some of the Lee supporters because they had similar liberal politics but Lin was much more palatable and would not make waves. So, she won and was just window dressing for the Corporation (whenever she bothered to show up and contribute to a meeting.)
Brenzel gets kudos for being one of the most successfully conniving and self-centered men on the planet.