Do Accepted Students Have to Be ‘Effervescent’?

Frame from a 1958 Alka-Seltzer commercial

In recent weeks, the Harvard admissions office, normally thought of in the homes of children of high-school age as the great secret trial chamber of higher ed, has itself been on trial.

The investigation into allegations of bias, as well as the reportage of that investigation, has released some curious details. What does Harvard look for in a candidate, presumably besides excellence and potential?

One answer that has emerged from the testimony is something called “effervescence.”

Lingua Franca readers of a certain age and afflicted with heartburn may associate effervescence with Alka-Seltzer. Dancing in a glass of water, those “effervescent tablets” throw off tiny bubbles and the promise of instant relief. Not for nothing was the brand’s mascot the cheerful Speedy.

Effervescent tablets produce bubbles, though the word effervescence comes from the Latin meaning “to begin to boil.” Macbeth’s witches were big into effervescence, as well as toiling and troubling.

Cooks know that “boiling” is too crude a term for the range of states in which heated water can display its agitation. Hard boil, gentle boil, simmer.

Somewhere I have a recipe that calls for water to be “smiling.” In 2011, Chef Rob Mullooly of the Culinary Institute of America gave an interview to the Huffington Post in which he described the difference between water that was simmering but not boiling as “smiling but not laughing.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for effervescence shows no sign of having been updated in a century, so it is innocent of usage later than George Eliot. There’s not much to help us with thinking about its deployment today as a tool for choosing whom to admit to a college.

The OED does teach us, though, that the term enters English by 1651, when it is used to indicate something called “fermentall turbulency.” Beer-brewing comes to mind.

Among the OED’s historical examples, I especially like a phrase from Dr. Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage about a century later: “the effervescence of invention.” By the mid-18th century, effervescence’s bubbles and gassy little explosions have become metaphor.

Speaking in a 21st-century voice, the online Cambridge Dictionary briefly defines effervescent as  “active, positive, and full of energy,” though it continues with this gruesome example: “She’s one of those effervescent personalities that you often see hosting TV game shows.”

None of this, alas, gets us any closer to the nature of the effervescence cited as a distinguished positive in successful Harvard applications.

Nor should it. This isn’t a Harvard problem, any more than it’s a problem isolated to your campus or mine.

What do we want from students? Potential? Achievement? A personality as bubbly as beer or a game-show host? The promise that they’ll fit in, whatever that means, exactly? Does effervescent simply mean happy? Not exhibiting signs of self-doubt or anxiety or depression? Unlikely to put pressure on a college’s already overworked student services?

I hope it’s obvious to all readers of this column that no institution would — or could — limit itself to admitting the happy, the bubbly, and the fermentative.

A moment’s thought reveals the great and surprising work done by wonderful young people who are quiet, shy, struggling to find their footing in the mess of a world they’re being handed, fighting through limitations and disabilities that range from what can be easily seen to what can never be seen. Depression, for instance, which is never one thing, or anxiety, or foreignness, or less robust high-school preparation, or simply being the first in the family to reach the college door. We call some of these disabilities, and we call others inequalities, but how often do they work together to keep students from succeeding?

Each incoming class of students is different from the last, each emerging from a world just a bit different from that of the year before. What they have in common is the unpredictability and range of their creativity and potential.

Would it be easy to teach a classroom composed only of effervescent personalities? I don’t think I’ll ever have the opportunity to find out. Nor, frankly, would I want to.

Like boiling, effervescence may be too crude a term for a range of personal characteristics. Besides, there are lots of ways, after all, for  students to possess Dr. Johnson’s “effervescence of invention” without bubbling or even “smiling.”

As for those of us who teach and work with students, we’re only the cooks and vintners. They’re the thing itself, and so different from one another that a semester of classroom interaction is hardly room and time enough for us to find out what they might become.