College
Writing about College from Joyce Abell, Terry Miller, and Winifred Hughes.
TRANSCRIPT
Harvard University was founded October 28, 1636. And Yale University was also founded in October, the 16th, 1701. To acknowledge the beginnings of higher education in the United States, some pieces about college.
First, from Joyce Abell’s book Prickly Roses, this excerpt from the chapter titled “How I Got to College.”
I was headed for Berkeley by train from my hometown of Chicago. The year was 1942. I stuffed my suitcase with all my summer clothes and half my winter clothes, plus five of the most important books in my life. And I could hardly lift the damn thing.
As I climbed into the train, the reality hit me that I had very little idea of what to expect once the train ride was over nor, to be more practical, how to even find my way to Berkeley from San Francisco. Colleges were not in the least parental back in those days. Nor were my parents.
There were no campus dorms, and I needed cheap accommodations. The closest and cheapest one was a co-op house (room and board: $33 plus 25 hours of housework per month). So I knocked on the door of the large, shabby house. A tall, angular woman opened the door. “I’m the student they just called you about for a room,” I said.
Then she took me upstairs to meet my roommate. Although I’d pictured another freshman with whom I could share my deep thoughts and delicate soul, my roommate turned out to be nearly 10 years older than I was. Grace was Berkeley’s first-ever woman mining engineering graduate student. And she wasn’t about to share her soul, if she had one, with the likes of me. “Let’s get things clear from the git-go,” she told me as I stood, still swaying, in the middle of the room. “You do things my way.”
And that was what I did. One night, Grace’s way was my finding another place to sleep when her boyfriend was so drunk that she got him to climb through the window into our room so he could sleep in my bed.
That’s from Joyce Abell’s memoir, Prickly Roses.
Terry Miller said that after she retired, one of the things she did was return to school. Here’s an excerpt from her journal entry “The Professor.”
The professor is tall and thin, awkward, uncomfortable meeting all these strangers for the first time. His attitude plus my instinctive expectation that a teacher be older than I, forgetting totally that that is not possible anymore, causes me a jolt of surprise when he begins talking about having been caught up in the activism of the 60s. It is a shock to realize that my essay teacher is the age of my children.
I watch the professor, dressed the way academics like to dress, in sloppy wide wale corduroy pants, either gray or tan, ingratiate himself with the students who are film majors. But I overlook his attempt to be younger than his age because he knows the essay, from Virginia Woolf’s about the death of the moth to Lewis Thomas’s about death in general. One day I go to his office for feedback on my essay.
From the beginning there has been something peculiar about my reactions in this class, something I don’t understand. I am a confident woman with a lot to feel satisfied about, someone who, in youth, was insouciant, bold, disrespectful of authority. Why have I suddenly turned into a timid school girl?
I think I’ve figured it out. We’re both a little scared of each other. He’s aware that I’m older, with more of the coin of the realm than he has. . . the doctorate . . . and in psychology yet. He is afraid that I will know him. And I am afraid that my writing will turn out to be laughable, not humorous, laughable, and that he will know me.
An excerpt from Terry Miller’s essay “The Professor,” which Passager published in its book Keeping Time: 150 Years of Journal Writing.
Here’s another take on the student-professor relationship. Winifred Hughes’s poem “Architecture Student” from her book The Village of New Ghosts.
Given latitude and map,
she fixes Venice
for her site plan,
conjures up a floating
opera house
mid-canal—anchorless,
flung against no sky,
its matchbox chambers
measuring a spatial music.
The professor wants a “story,”
persuasiveness
of line, meta-geometry
not lived-in storeys,
cracked plaster,
gutters and plumbing.
It doesn’t have to hold
water, just hover
over the mind’s grid.
You have to learn, he says,
how to play, how
not to fasten things
with bolts and mortar,
design no place to be
but to imagine being.
“Architecture Student,” Winifred Hughes.
We began this episode on college with an excerpt from Joyce Abell’s book Prickly Roses. We’ll end with another.
I gradually worked out how to support myself by becoming an artist’s model and a switchboard operator. Learned enough of the Russian language to read Dostoevsky aloud in the original. Also acquired the knack of whipping round and round my Russian history professor’s desk and out the door of his office before he could catch me for a kiss and a feel. Took delight in finding a few good friends to talk Nietzsche and Freud with and foolishly admired some pretentious fakers. Found love and then saw that it wasn’t. And narrowly saved myself from the precipice of life time and time again.
And, when you think of it, what else is college for?
Joyce Abell from her book Prickly Roses.
To buy, Prickly Roses, The Village of New Ghosts, or Keeping Time: 150 Years of Journal Writing, or to subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
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For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
