60 Minutes had a good story Sunday on the strategic partnership between colleges and universities and the U.S. government to make America the research mecca that, more than anything else, has made our country the envy of the world—and more importantly, the aspiration of the world.
That’s probably the most intellectually salient argument to make against the Trump administration’s monstrous campaign to rob higher education institutions of resources and to threaten them with cultural destruction and existential demise on phony pretenses.
But I don’t think that’s why I feel so protective of higher education, personally.
I think it’s because of:
Dr. Null, the Kent State University professor who was southern, may have been gay and possibly was a drunk, and partly because of those characteristics helped me understand what made the Great Books great, while tossing off comments I would repeat in his sing-song drawl for the rest of my life, “Henry James chews more than he bites off.”
And Dr. Lough, the sociology prof who spent a whole semester trying to convince us that the 1970 National Guard shootings at Kent were the result of a direct order from Richard Nixon. I didn’t leave Kent believing that, but I left knowing a little about the radical left, after an upbringing in a comfortable, upper-middle-class town. A bit un-indoctrinated, maybe would be the term.
Spending four years trying to integrate into my mind the theories and perspectives of Dr. Null and Dr. Lough and the anthropology professors and the history professors and the psychology professors …
I visited Kent recently, on a motorcycle trip. As I turned left from South Lincoln on to Summit Street, I remembered walking home the other way, lost in thought from a class at Bowman Hall. I remembered turning down the hill on that very sidewalk and picking up my pace, because the meaning of life was on the tip of my tongue and I thought if it came, I’d better get back to the house and get it down on paper.
Not to mention the night walking across campus in the pouring rain, sobbing heartsick over a girl. And other nights, with other girls. Endless afternoons, playing pool and learning about Ray Charles and telling a roommate what it was like to have my mother die. A thousand sessions at Brady’s Cafe—and one unforgettable morning there. The $25 International Harvester Scout. Staring in the mirror for long minutes, asking: Who are you? (And sometimes answering, “Someone great.”) And beating that bogus campus arson rap, of course.
There are many other wonderful kinds of moments in life—there have been many in mine. But not too many moments like those for most of us, after we’ve graduated from college. A lot of things happen in college—relationships, discoveries, moods and moments—that never happen the same way again. Or feel the same way, anyway.
Why do you think people smile so big when they hear their school’s name and say, “That’s my alma mater!”? Why do they root for their college sports teams with intensity they rarely bring to their work or even their family lives? Why do people who won’t donate to a homeless shelter that surely needs it will send money to their college, which maybe doesn’t?
Because college is the best time in many American lives. And in many ways, it’s the foundation of many good American lives.
And lest you, like me, suspect these as the lightweight lyrics of an English major, I have a Republican accountant friend, whose daughter wanted after high school to do nothing more than go to cosmetology school and become a hairdresser.
He told her that cosmetology school was a fine plan. As soon as she finished a four-year college degree. My man could have saved a lot of money. And my man cares about money. But he wanted his daughter to, as he put it more plainly than me, “Grow up.”
Yep.
There are other places than colleges to grow up, of course, and other ways.
But college was a wonderful one, for a lot of us. And a clear one, too: I think of my high school self as some kid. My college self, I feel accountable to still.
And it seems to me that people who feel such fondness for our own higher education should defend with equal fierceness, all higher education.
And just days after she graduated from college my daughter told me she was enrolled in cosmetology school for the next year. She worked harder than anyone in her class, got a fantastic job doing exactly what she wanted to do and is happy as a parent could ever hope for one of their kids. Side note, she grew up nicely and I could not be more proud of her.
Well done, Pops.