COMPARE AND CONTRAST UNIVERSITY

My Mother's retirement gift was this old school bell.

At her funeral my Marine veteran brother used it to ring the maritime code.

Because I attended college twice at widely separated intervals, enrolling in institutions physically separated by the City of Chicago:   Northwestern University (1957-61) on the North Side and U of Chicago on the South Side (1978-82), I should be able to do a “compare and contrast” essay.  But I am not.  They aren't enough alike.

In the first place, the two episodes — my 4 year sojourns in each place — were both atypical.  I did not take a standard curriculum at NU, based on conventions reaching back centuries, but rather joined an atypical cadre of actors with a focused intention of understanding human beings as expressed onstage.  At the U of Chicago I entered from the beginning as an atypical member (I was forty) of a minority (UU) separated seminary, with privileged access to an almost austere circle of prestigious scholars, predominantly at the U of Chicago Div School but also a cluster of denominational seminaries.  

Strangely, they complemented each other for my purposes, but it’s hard to explain how or why, particularly since I didn’t “embed” but wasn’t quite iconoclastic.  (The watching cat.)  Part of the reason I give so much attention to these two academic experiences is that I wrestle with how they are relevant to what I think today.  And partly, I see them to be as shadowy as American Indian tribes — almost secret and impossible to define —nothing like the state universities portrayed in the media with all their craziness and xenophobia.

And yet my testimony is unreliable in the present.  Once I had driven off from Hyde Park in the smallest U-Haul truck possible, navigating the June Midwest torrential rains with a stuffed panda bear bouncing alongside for a co-pilot, I never went back.  Never wanted to go back.  Well, maybe recently a tiny bit to see what the renewal of the Meadville building and the new Seminary Co-op Bookstore look like.  The scholars I needed while I was there — but didn’t know about — all moved to California.  I do not go to California.

While I attended the U of Chicago, I did revisit NU a few times, but it was so changed that I couldn't even find Annie May Swift Hall.  They say Eagles Mere Theatre, where the summer repertory was housed has collapsed.

To my friends and relatives from early years of my life, even the Sixties in Browning, I’ve become inscrutable and possibly self-destructive.  For them, life is a matter of keeping calm and carrying on, responding to the needs of loved ones.  Isolation is the worst fate.  Fame is an unmitigated good, but fortune is even better.  None of that matches what I have learned.  But I wonder if I can communicate with those people now.  It seems dubious, mostly because they are sure of what THEY know.  It worked for them.

Standard mainstream NU today, as represented online and in alumni magazines, makes me shudder.  In the thrall of corporations, nevertheless, in pockets, it indulges in post-colonial rhetoric and technological expertise, almost as a disguise — certainly as justification.  People with money still attend there, justifying their own lives since they are not quite Ivy League.  I don’t have any evidence for how theatre is taught in the splendid new buildings.  But I’ve tried to show that in Annie May Swift Hall there were indestructible seeds of what I still understand to be the path to meaning.  I’m glad it was recently renovated instead of being torn down.

Some of the same factors come to bear on the U of Chicago.  Their biggest challenge is the necessity of surrendering some of the entitlement based on a rigidly precedented sequence of philosophers.  It will be decades before they give up the philosophy “Modern Thinkers”.  (We used to call them “Modern Stinkers”, since they were the subject of one of the qualifying exams.)  The new understanding of how brains and bodies work in the most basic molecular interactions challenges the cult of the young brainy and handsome male who sees the universe in his navel.

Lifelong, apart from these two giant universities, I attended a slew of random classes as part of teacher recertification or just a practical way to get certain knowledge.  A course in producing art in Cheney, WA, was useful.  A summer seminar for white people teaching reservation kindergarten was amazing.  Some Portland State University classes required for a degree in clinical psychology were both boring and revealing: more stuff about white rats and a self-serving prof who offered psychotherapy in her private practice.  At least I learned enough about statistics to recognize a standard deviation on a bell curve and how arbitrary it is.  

These random courses in different places for different reasons do not provide a concentrated focus that any big university can offer:  the formation of a lifelong cohort and possibly formal family alliances through marriage.  Particularly in seminary it is important to establish ties among each other that can be called on through the future.  This is also true of preparation for careers in small towns where people are widely separated by highway time but have common interests.  Various boards, committees, NGO’s, and other selected gatherings can offer both support and inspiration, even intervention when things go badly wrong.  But they require loyalty and cooperation — they can be enforcers.  

As far as education goes, by which I mean personal acquisition of knowledge and skills, I see autodidacts who do better.  Apprenticeships.  On-line courses.  But they have no cohort of familiars.  And none of the accesses to expensive labs and libraries that the wealthy endowed institutions can support.  So it’s always a tradeoff.  As well, these connections established when people are young are generally gender-sorted.  Guys help guys and gals . . . some play the game and others don’t.  Some pair off.

My mother and a scholarship paid for my NU degree, which my mother interpreted as a guarantee of prosperity and safety that she never had.  To her, a returning student to Portland State alongside Korean veterans, her diploma opened the door to one job, teaching elementary school in one school, Columbia, which got its name from being almost on the levee along the Columbia River, with a low-income student body partly from house boats.  She was there until retirement.  It was her world.  Not mine.

My oldest friend says that she always thought I was brave about following my heart and ideals.  But in the Sixties, starting out, I had no idea what they were.  A more recent deep friendship taught me that I was not the only one whose community identified them as future stars and loaded them with expectations that couldn’t be fulfilled.  We escaped to worlds unknown, sometimes secret, occasionally riding behind stereotypes that were stigmas, and with absolutely no relationship to prosperity or safety.  That friend grew up next to a university.  I grew through but away from universities.  

The PSU shrink/prof I went to for counselling said that in her own life she had thought it would be wonderful to have all the people she knew and valued come together in one place for a party.  But finally she realized it would kick off an enormous fight, a donnybrook something like the political battle that is consuming many of us now.  It was one of her most useful stories.