Dalton's Admissions Director Likes Fudge, Long Walks

If Elisabeth "Babby" Krents didn't have a healthy ego before—doubtful since she's been running admissions for the posh UES Dalton School for 15 years now—she's gotta have one now! In the last four months the 61-year-old has been the subject of praise-filled profiles first in the Wall Street Journal and now in the New York Times. But we can live with that—because really, how else would we know that Babby defended her Ph.D dissertation at Columbia on the same day she delivered her second daughter? No wonder she scares people.

Other things we (and obsessive parents across the land) learned today? Krents "loves eating hot fudge sundaes, reading Wilkie Collins novels and trying, often unsuccessfully, to grow tomatoes." Nobody can agree on how best to address her (Elisabeth is fine "though only her mother, now deceased, called her that") and she really doesn't mean to upset you when she rejects your kid and ruins their future chances of ever getting into Harvard. She's trying to teach her first grandchild the Dalton school song...and in case we weren't clear, parents are absolutely terrified of her. Like, to the point that none of them will go on the record with the paper of record for fear of upsetting her.

Both the Times and the Journal's stories on Babby are ostensibly about folks getting worried about the school's increasing "diversity" and how that hurts the chances for legacies, siblings and rich kids. But considering the fact that in both Babby denies it does ("'This is a misconception,' she said, adding that siblings make up a third to a half of each class, a portion that has not changed. 'First and foremost, the spots go to siblings and alumni and faculty.'") it seems the real point of these stories is to make parents feel okay about their obsession with appeasing a small group of admissions directors in hoity-toity schools across the city. And for those parents, well, now they know that while Babby may really like fudge, if you offer her a vat of the stuff she is going to have to politely decline it—with tears in her eyes.