At the crack of dawn on Friday, we fly off to San Francisco
for my sister's eighty-fifth birthday party, which I am hosting. Naturally, I shall make a speech. I plan to read a few passages from the
hundreds of letters Barbara wrote home to our parents from Swarthmore College,
where she matriculated in the Fall of 1948.
Re-reading those letters evokes some feeling for what a first-class
college education could be back then. I
don't wish entirely to tip my hand [my sister sometimes reads my blog], but
this line caught my attention. It is
from her junior year, dated Nov. 6, 1950:
"Guess what? T.
S. Eliot is coming to speak here. I may
go to hear him. What with Russell
[Bertrand], and Sandburg [Carl], and the madrigal concerts and Alexander
Schneider [a great classical violinist] and the [William] Saroyan reading I've
been doing, I feel quite intellectual and artistic."
Professor Wolff --
ReplyDeleteI think a college education, for the most part, can still be like that. The thing is, it is really the responsibility of the student to take advantage of all that college life has to offer. For example, did your sister wind up going to see Eliot speak, or did she, like probably many others in her campus community at the time, pass on that opportunity? Despite all the changes in university life over the past half century, many opportunities continue to remain for the earnest and sincere student.
-- Jim