Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Page B

style than I was used to. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise at class. They were very inquisitive. Asking questions all the time. I was crammed into a dorm room. There were four of us, and the other three guys had a whole different other lifestyle. They were smoking pot. They would bring their girlfriends into the room. I had never smoked pot before. So basically I took to hiding in the library.”
    He continued: “Then I lost that scholarship....My mother was supposed to fill out a parents’ financial statement for the renewal of that scholarship. She neglected to do so. She was confused by the requirements or whatever. At some point, it came to my attention that my scholarship had not been renewed. So I went to the office to ask why, and they told me, Well, no one sent us the financial statement, and we allocated all the scholarship money and it’s all gone, so I’m afraid that you don’t have a scholarship here anymore. That was the style of the place. They simply didn’t care. They didn’t give a shit about their students. There was no counseling, no mentoring, nothing.”
    Chris left Reed before the final set of exams, leaving him with a row of Fs on his transcript. In the first semester, he had earned As. He went back to Bozeman and worked in construction and as a forest services firefighter for a year and a half. Then he enrolled at Montana State University.
    “I was taking math and philosophy classes,” he recalled. “And then in the winter quarter, I was living thirteen miles out of town, out on Beach Hill Road, and the transmission fell out of my car. My brothers had used it when I was gone that summer. They were working for the railroad and had driven it on the railroad tracks. I didn’t have the money to repair it. So I went to my adviser and the dean in sequence and said, I have a problem. The transmission fell out of my car, and you have me in a seven-thirty a.m. and eight-thirty a.m. class. If you could please just transfer me to the afternoon sections of these classes, I would appreciate it because of this car problem. There was a neighbor who was a rancher who was going to take me in at eleven o’clock. My adviser was this cowboy-looking guy with a handlebar mustache, dressed in a tweed jacket. He said, ‘Well, son, after looking at your transcript at Reed College, I see that you have yet to learn that everyone has to make sacrifices to get an education. Request denied.’ So then I went to the dean. Same treatment.”
    His voice grew tight. He was describing things that had happened more than thirty years ago, but the memory still made him angry. “At that point I realized, here I was, knocking myself out to make the money to make my way back to school, and it’s the middle of the Montana winter. I am willing to hitchhike into town every day, do whatever I had to do, just to get into school and back, and they are unwilling to do anything for me. So bananas. And that was the point I decided I could do without the higher-education system. Even if I couldn’t do without it, it was sufficiently repugnant to me that I wouldn’t do it anymore. So I dropped out of college, simple as that.”
    Chris Langan’s experiences at Reed and Montana State represented a turning point in his life. As a child, he had dreamt of becoming an academic. He
should
have gotten a PhD; universities are institutions structured, in large part, for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity. “Once he got into the university environment, I thought he would prosper, I really did,” his brother Mark says. “I thought he would somehow find a niche. It made absolutely no sense to me when he left that.”
    Without a degree, Langan floundered. He worked in construction. One frigid winter he worked on a clam boat on Long Island. He took factory jobs and minor civil service positions and eventually became a bouncer in a bar on Long Island, which was his principal occupation for much of his adult years.