The Runner (18 page)

James Hogue was held at the Princeton Township police station on Nassau Street, just

outside the university gates. He was interviewed there by Lieutenant John Redding, who

remembered that Hogue appeared sad but composed, and that he readily answered whatever

questions he was asked.

Q: Can you explain why you have done this twice—you have reported to be someone

you’re not?

A: I didn’t feel that I learned what I wanted to learn, and I wanted to go back to college.

Q: Under what name did you apply to Princeton University?

A: Under Alexi Santana.

Q: Where did you obtain that name?

A: I made that up.

Q: For what purpose?

A: I wanted to start all over again, without the burdens of my past.

In the course of the interview, Lieutenant Redding asked James Hogue exactly one

hundred and fifty questions and received exactly one hundred and fifty answers. Under terrible pressure, and facing the collapse of what was both a saving act of self-invention and his greatest con yet, Hogue answered every one of the lieutenant’s questions with a polite and deadpan calm, without telling lies and without revealing much of interest about himself or his past. Perhaps the mystery of Alexi Santana was too personal to share with a policeman. Or perhaps the mystery was all he had left.

Hogue’s story quickly caught the attention of the national media, but he refused to speak

to reporters. Charged with theft by deception and three counts of forgery, and unable to make bail, he was transferred to the Mercer County Correctional Center to await trial. There he

received visits from the Friedans, who found him sad but composed and adjusting well to the rigors of prison life, and from Peter Hessler, who hoped to write an article about his friend for
Rolling Stone
. While the article never appeared, Hessler did achieve his dream of becoming a Rhodes Scholar and later wrote an acclaimed book about his experiences teaching English in

rural China.

Larry Ellis had spent a lifetime compiling an impeccable record as a track coach that was

intended in some part as a reproof to those who questioned whether a black man was equipped to coach at the highest levels of his sport. A proud, caring man, and a consummate politician, Ellis had blazed new ground for black coaches in the formerly all-white American track-and-field

establishment, using the head coaching job at Princeton as a springboard to coaching the men’s Olympic track team and holding other high positions in national track-and-field organizations.

As the story of the Princeton impostor continued to make headlines, Ellis found himself in the humiliating position of the dupe. His enthusiasm for the unusual recruit he had treated with such paternal care had contributed to one of the more embarrassing incidents in Princeton University’s history.

The jokes from his fellow coaches on the college circuit were even harder for Ellis to

handle. Brian Sax recalled that the ribbing went on for the better part of the next year and a half.

“How about that Alexi?” rival coaches would ask, remarking on how Princeton had been fooled by a homeless drifter. “He’d get this look in his eyes like, ‘Oh my God, not this again,’ and sort of cower away from them,” Sax said, describing Ellis’s typical reaction to comments by other coaches about the impostor. Sax and others observed that Ellis’s hurt over the incident appeared to linger long after the comments stopped.

Opinion among students and faculty at Princeton seemed evenly divided between those

who thought that the impostor was guilty of very little besides the desire to get a good education, and those who saw him as a criminal and were glad that he was gone. For many, the fact that a homeless drifter had fooled the Princeton admissions office with a tall tale about running

barefoot in the desert canyons and reading Plato under the stars was the occasion for some

laughter at their own expense. A homeless drifter could get As at Princeton. For Brian Sax, the joke was as much on Hogue as it was on the Princeton admissions committee and all the people who took his made-up story so seriously Hogue’s own need for approval was so great that he

was willing to risk jail time for a piece of paper that he could have obtained legitimately with much less effort from a more low-key university.

The members of the Ivy Club were nonplussed by the fact that “the funny old man,” as

they had affectionately nicknamed the newest member of their exclusive social club—no one I spoke with could remember who tagged Santana with such a prescient name—was a convicted

felon. None of Hogue’s friends from the Ivy Club wrote letters on his behalf to the judge who heard his case or visited him in jail. As Tom Pinckney, a fellow Ivy Club member from the Class of 1993, recalled, “I think I thought that Alexi had changed into this guy James Hogue, who I wasn’t friends with. I don’t know anybody who tried to get in touch with him.”

Hogue’s most frequent visitor in jail was a Princeton professor named Giancinto Scoles, a

gentle man who had been educated in Italy and who taught classes in physical chemistry. Scoles was widely recognized in the scientific community for his work with vacuum beams, or lasers, which he used to solve problems related to the basic structure of matter. He was famous at

Princeton for his unorthodox method of determining the final grades that students would receive in his classes. After assigning a final project, Scoles would call his students into his office one by one and ask them what grade they thought they deserved. If the grade was similar to the grade Scoles thought they had earned, they would receive the grade they had assigned themselves. If the grade they suggested was more than one plus or minus removed from the grade Scoles chose, they would have to take a final exam in order to gauge their actual knowledge of the subject.

Hogue’s final project for Scoles’s class investigated the thermal dynamics of a children’s toy, a bird that dipped its beak in a glass of water. The B+ he received in Scoles’s class his freshman year was the only grade less than an A that he received at Princeton. When they met for a

counseling session after the class, Scoles suggested that he might want to major in geology.

Scoles saw Hogue as a con man, but one who had a strong sense of intellectual curiosity.

Seeing him in prison was a shock. Scoles was bothered by having to get permission in advance, stand in front of the prison gates as they slowly opened, and talk to his former student through a thick sheet of Plexiglas. Hogue wasn’t a person who belonged in prison, Scoles concluded. He was a person who needed psychological help. A friend and colleague at Princeton warned Scoles that cases like Hogue’s could not be solved by well-meaning intervention. Past a certain age, the colleague said, people never change—they won’t, or they can’t.

Scoles disagreed. Hogue, he believed, was simply careless about the consequences of his

actions. When he asked Hogue questions about his life, he learned that his student had grown up in a blue-collar family in Kansas, and that he liked running. Although the answers Hogue gave were honest, Scoles saw, they were also strangely detached. It was as if Hogue were answering questions about someone else. To occupy his friend in prison, Scoles gave him a

thermodynamics textbook in Italian to translate into English. When he was released from prison before his trial date, Scoles offered him money, which Hogue refused. He also helped him

relocate to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he took classes at the Harvard Extension School and was hired part-time to help curate the university’s collection of precious minerals and gems.

More than $40,000 worth of minerals and gems, along with an expensive microscope belonging

to the university and a chair with the Harvard seal, were later discovered in Hogue’s room.

Princeton could now enjoy a laugh at Harvard’s expense.

• • •

Hogue’s attorney, Bob Obler, had hoped to put Princeton University on trial before a

jury, which might sympathize with the young runner from a poor family who had tried to better himself by seeking an Ivy League education. Instead, on February 10, 1992, his client appeared before Judge Paulette Sapp-Peterson at the Mercer County Courthouse and pled guilty to a

charge of theft by deception.

“I submitted an application at Princeton University which had a different name and date

of birth,” he explained, as he stood before the court in an orange prison jumpsuit, which

reminded at least some observers of the Princeton colors, orange and black. “It was my intent to gain admission by deception.”

“It was your intent to gain admission by deception,” Judge Sapp-Peterson repeated, “and

when you say it was your intent to gain admission by deception, your deception occurred by

submitting false information on your application?”

“Correct.”

“And using a false name?”

“Yes.”

In the audience, members of the Princeton track team watched, mouths agape, as their

former teammate was sentenced to two hundred and seventy days at the Mercer County

Correction Center, one hundred hours of community service, and five years’ probation; he was also ordered to make restitution of $21,124 upon his release. Stories about the Princeton

impostor duly appeared in
People, Sports Illustrated,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
and various other national and local publications. “He was average, I guess,” Hogue’s father Eugene Hogue told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
“I don’t have any idea why it would happen.”

For Justin Harmon, the peppy university spokesman who spent months handling gleeful

press inquiries about how Princeton had been fooled, Alexi Santana remained a terrific candidate for admission, “a very bright, imaginative young man who appeared to have a hunger for

learning and a willingness to pursue learning energetically, and who had, over the course of his life’s experiences, faced a number of circumstances that kids don’t commonly face, from the experience on the ranch to his travels in Europe, to his relationship with his mother in

Switzerland—I believe that was the story—to the books that he’d read, to his way of describing the books.” Santana was a model applicant in every respect, except for the fact that he was a fictional character. The idea of allowing Santana’s creator to proceed with his studies never crossed anyone’s mind. Allowing Hogue to stay at Princeton would have been a serious breach of the university’s responsibility to other applicants and to U.S. taxpayers, whose contributions help fund wealthy private universities that sit on multibillion-dollar endowments while using public moneys to build dorms and pay for scientific equipment and to fund an admissions

process that actively discriminates in favor of their own alumni.

“The fact is that alumni children do have a better chance than the average kid of getting

in,” Harmon explained to me in a subsequent interview. “There’s a sense of tradition about the thing.” I asked him why Princeton continues to favor the children of alumni while accepting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in public money.

“That’s a good question,” he answered. “There’s a sense on the part of the school that

they’re from families who know the institution well, are familiar with the faculty, who do

interviewing for us, who help raise money, who set up programs for students to help them find jobs, and so it’s a factor in the admissions process. There are no two ways about it.” When I mentioned that the children of alumni at Harvard and Princeton had SAT scores that were 150

points lower on average than the children of non-alumni, Harmon didn’t exactly disagree. “I think it’s dangerous to focus an assessment of the relative strength of various applications on a number like SAT scores,” he purred. “We admit kids with much better scores and much lower

scores.”

The children of alumni, it turns out, have experiences and talents that cannot be reduced

to a crude number, like an SAT score. I suggested to Harmon that many kids with low scores

who are admitted to Princeton are minority candidates who come from backgrounds that are

defined as economically or culturally deprived. I asked Harmon whether being the child of a Princeton alumnus also qualified as a form of deprivation, like growing up poor in inner-city Cleveland.

“No,” the Princeton spokesman answered, adding again that SAT scores are an imperfect

gauge of a student’s ability. As he explained that the wording of questions of the SAT could reflect cultural biases that could lead to lesser scores for certain groups, it seemed plain to me that there was something terribly warped in the conjunction of Princeton’s old-boy network and textbook socially progressive attitudes espoused by the admissions committee: in the university’s own mind, it seemed, discrimination in favor of one class of candidates gave Princeton a free pass to discriminate in favor of the children of its own alumni.

“Certainly, none of these arguments apply to alumni children, who tend to be by and

large economically advantaged and have had good school experiences,” Harmon admitted, when

I suggested that there was something disgusting about using the same arguments intended to help poor black kids from the inner city in order to favor the children of the most wealthy and

privileged members of American society. “It’s an article of faith in American higher education that having a class that represents a broad array of experiences and backgrounds is a good thing.”

Hogue’s application to Princeton may have started out as a prank, or as a calculated con,

or as the heartfelt dream of a lonely young man who was eager to change the circumstances of his life and leave his checkered past behind him. When it became public, it became part of a large referendum on the self-appointed, self-described meritocracy that presented itself as the new and hopeful face of a forward-looking America. The country’s meritocrat-in-chief at the time was Bill Clinton, a poor boy from Arkansas whose father had left home when he was two