March 18, 2019--The College Retention Game

For the past week we've understandably been focusing on college admissions. 

The public is learning about how our society's ultimate expression of meritocracy, where if you have the goods, no matter your background, opportunities await, is in large part a corrupt, hypocritical scam. 

Pay-for-play in its many forms is how college admissions works when it comes to admitting students to many of the nation's elite colleges. The truth is that the process is not a competition on a level playing field where merit wins out, but a rigged system where the already successful and entitled have two legs up.

But then there is another game--how students admitted to the Ivies and similar institutions are coddled and protected even when they don't deserve it.

Allow me to illustrate by an example from my own undergraduate years at Columbia.

What did I know. I was an inexperienced, striver kid from a Brooklyn immigrant family. But I did notice that a few of my classmates, who associated with each other, had family names that were familiar.

There was Arthur MacArthur IV (the general's son), Peter Fairchild (whose family were scions of the aircraft industry), and others whose people founded some of America's most successful businesses and whose surnames revealed that they came from the world of Who's-Who.

At freshman orientation the dean welcomed us by among things indicating that now that we were Columbia Men (women were not yet admitted) the college would do all it could to help us succeed. 

He went on to tell a story about an orientation he attended at a large state university. Its dean told the assembled class, "Look to your left," which everyone did, "Now look to your right," which the freshmen did. "By this time next year, one of you will have dropped out or been expelled."

The Columbia dean continued, "Though this was that university's policy--admit many and then prune the class based on academic progress, or lack thereof--Columbia's policy was just the opposite. "We expect all of you, 100 percent of you, to thrive. And we will do what we can to help assure that."

To already cynical me this sounded like cheerleading. I intended to work hard and do well all on my own and not wind up in academic trouble.

But this was not true for all my classmates. In fact, I came to know a few, including some from prominent families (neither Peter nor Arthur, who did well), who majored more in carousing and beer drinking than literature or mathematics or sociology.

I knew one quite well. At the end of the first semester he had not completed all his courses and for the ones he did finish he earned straight Ds.

He was summoned to meet with the dean who told him though it is not unusual for freshman to fall pray to campus enticements, he needed to work harder and do better or he would find himself at the end of the academic year on probation.

Which is precisely what my friend did not do--he continued to get Ds and was as promised placed on probation.

He did not do much better during his sophomore year and once again was invited to meet with the dean, who informed him that unless he improved he would be faced with the possibility of academic dismissal.

The dean this time remind my friend that his family sent generations of their sons to Columbia and all had done well and graduated. For that reason, and because of his family's generosity to the college, he was making an exception. He would get one final chance to raise his grades.

But again my classmate failed to do so and he (and I) expected him to be expelled. 

He wasn't.

The dean one final time time told him that since he was going into his third year and that the college had a policy of not expelling students who were versions of juniors. "Versions" because he had not completed enough courses to be an actual junior. 

The dean shrugged and told him that he therefore could continue until he graduated.

I wondered about how my friend would have fared in that midwestern university we heard about at orientation. The answer is obvious. And I wondered about his family's generosity. What they must have been doing to show their "appreciation" to the dean and the college for their "understanding" treatment of the son who was expected to enter the family business after four years at Columbia. 

The answer to that is equally obvious. 

If I had thought to search, I likely would have found a lecture hall newly inscribed with his family name.

June 25, 2018--Arthur MacArthur & Queen Hope

My friend Boyce Martin died two years ago and his wife and my great friend, Anne Ogden, knowing that I too am a history buff invited me to rummage through his shelves of books, thinking correctly that I might like to have a few of Boyce's books. After all, I wear his Kentucky hat every day.

As our reading interests are similar many of the books he had read were among those I had devoured. But I did find a few that I knew would interest me that I hadn't known about, including one devoted to the middle years of Winston Churchill's career (Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill) and the breathlessly titled, The Most Dangerous Man In America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur.

I had a peripheral connection to General MacArthur because his only child, Arthur MacArthur IV, was a college classmate and friend. A fellow literature major. We both sat and studied at the feet of the mesmerizing Lionel Trilling.

Though we were friends, Arthur was very private, which I understood, considering the endless controversies that swirled around his father, even years after he was fired by President Truman for insubordination during the Korean War, and his failed attempt in 1952 to secure the Republican nomination for president. Ironically, losing it to his former aide, General Dwight Eisenhower. 

And there was the relentless interest the media of the time had in all things MacArthur, including Arthur. There had even been a 1942 Life magazine cover story about him as a four-year-old that reported on his life with his parents in Brisbane, Australia, where they resided, having sought safety after escaping from the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Life told about little Arthur's "curiously mixed-up accent," his kindergarten routine, and his new tricycle.

In contrast, at that time, in East Flatbush, I spoke Brooklynese and made a scooter out of an old orange crate and a disassembled roller-skate.

As an unlikely couple, we read and discussed Dostoevsky and Kafka and Conrad together, but during those years Arthur never said a word about his early life, though I did know he was born in the Philippines the same year I was in Brooklyn, and he and his parents had barely escaped with their lives when the Japanese overran the archipelago. 

I assumed from knowing a little about the military careers of generations of MacArthurs that there must have been unimanageable pressure on him, the general's only child, named for many heroic MacArthur "Arthurs," including his grandfather, to fulfill the family military destiny. But he was as unlike a warrior as anyone I knew and it must have taken a different kind of courage, psychological courage, to want to be at Columbia studying Proust, rather than at West Point immersed in Napoleon's campaigns.

Now, with The Most Dangerous Man In America in hand, enough new details about Arthur's life were included to have me searching the Internet to see what I could learn about him. Including, is he still alive!

He is and appears to have continued to lead a hermetic life, including evidence that he changed his name after his father was relieved of his command by President Truman as there were apparently threats on Arthur's life.

No one, though, knows the name he assumed nor where he lives. Most likely in Greenwich Village, where I too reside, though I suspect if we passed each other on the street, which we likely have, that neither one of us would recognize the other. But once back in the City I will be looking around more than usual as I would like to pick up our college discussions as well as belatedly get to know more about him and how he has been faring.

One additional curiosity--

From reading the little that is available about Arthur it appears that during the late 1960s he was considered, within certain elevated social circles, a very eligible bachelor. (I suspect this is not true since the Arthur I knew had no interest whatsoever in dating.) 

In fact, he had no inclination to date Hope Cooke, who, rejected by him, in 1963, married the crown prince of Sikkim and two years later, when he became king, became, as she was known in the tabloids, "Queen Hope." But before that, in spite of Arthur's lack of interest, she was apparently quite interested in him.

She never converted to Buddhism but, as Henry Kissinger noted, she was "more Buddhist than the population of Sikkim." 

As it turns out I knew Hope rather well as she was a classmate and close friend at Sarah Lawrence of my first wife's and, at the time, we found it more than amusing that by this marriage, the daughter of a San Francisco flight instructor, transformed herself into a Queen. 

Since Hope does not live as privately as Arthur (in 1975 her husband-king was deposed and five years later she divorced him and moved back to New York City), we do occasionally run into her. The last time on an escalator in Bloomingdale's. We were descending, she of course was going up.

September 7, 2016--The Fly (Part One)

I was all excited as my classmate English majors and I stumbled out of Professor Jim Zito's class on Shakespeare's Late Plays.

He had just finished his Lear lectures, this most desperate of tragedies, citing Gloucester in Act 4's most desperate of utterances--

As fles to wanton boys are we to th' gods. 

They kill us for their sport.

This gave me a reason to approach him. Something I had never done, intimidated by his brilliance.

Somehow finding my voice, I called to him, "Mr. Zito. Mr. Zito."

At Columbia, with Oxbridge-like unpretension, even the most esteemed professors were always addressed as Mister.

"What is it Zwerling?" he said, though born in the Bronx, with his academic version of a modified British accent.

We were all known by our last names, if known at all. I was struck that he recognized mine. I had never  felt secure enough to speak in class or even pose a question. Those student colleagues who did were already ready for graduate school--they were geniuses--or even professorships. I was still struggling to find something at which I could excel.

And so how did he know who I was? I supposed it was yet another example of his brilliance.

"Sir, I was wondering about the Gloucester quote.  Act 4, Scene 1."

"The one about the gods and wanton boys?"

"How did you know that . . . ?"

"Among the most vivid."

"I was wondering about William Blake. About the Song of Experience, his poem, 'The Fly,' and how . . ."

Looking up, over all of our clustered heads, he recited--

Little Fly

Thy summer's play, 

My thoughtless hand

Has brush'd away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance

And drink & sing

Til some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength & breath;

And the want 

Of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live

Or if I die.

"How did you . . . ?"

"Not Blake's most nuanced. But, yes, I can see that it might refer to Gloucester."

"For Romantic Lit I'm writing a paper about . . ."

By then Mr. Zito had turned away surrounded by the chattering of his groupie geniuses.

This close encounter helped me realize that I too might have academic potential. If Mr. Zito hadn't seen the connection between Gloucester and Blake, then perhaps, maybe . . .

Though I was far from ready for graduate school, like Morris Dickstein or Sam Cherniak, both a year behind me, I began to imagine myself ten years hence on the faculty of an out-of-the-way state college or two-year community college.

These memories flooded back this past weekend when an actual fly flew into my life.

To be continued . . .

August 29, 2104--Best of Behind: Velcro Parents

This first appeared near the end of August 2010. Since then not much has changed--

It is still a few days until Labor Day, the traditional end of summer, but already things are getting quieter here on the coast of Maine where many families have been vacationing. 

Especially noticeable is the thinning out of the wait staffs at restaurants in the area. They depend on college students during the summer and now clearly older crews are struggling to cover more tables.

Schools for students of all ages are starting their fall terms earlier and earlier. To extend the school year for youngsters in an effort to provide more instruction than in the past; and, in the case of colleges, to get the semester's work done by Christmas so that students do not have to return after the holidays to finish their classes and take their exams.

This means that they, frequently with the help of their parents, have to head off to campus in late August with SUVs loaded with the things college kids these days squeeze into their undersized dorm rooms. I am showing my age, but when I went to college there were no computers and printers, microwave ovens, or stuffed animals and all sorts of non-allergic pillows. Just a bag or two of clothing.

But in addition to what undergraduates transport with them these days, they also, in more and more cases, bring their parents along with them. Not just to help with all the stuff but also to share the college-going experience. 

As a result, an increasing number of colleges are concerned about what some refer to as "over-parenting." They are for the most part happy to see an increase in parental involvement--and in response many colleges have opened offices of Parents Affairs to manage and take advantage of this increased interest. But they are also concerned that things for some are getting out of hand. So many parents, they feel, are hovering too close and pressing for more involvement than colleges feel is good for their students that they are instituting practices to help parents and their children go through the adjustment required when a youngster enters college.

After all, they say, college is supposed to be a major step toward young people becoming independent. To help facilitate the letting-go, some colleges have added activities and even ceremonies to wean parents from over-involvement, especially during freshman orientation.

According to the New York Times, Morehouse College in Atlanta now has a formal "Parting Ceremony." After introductory speeches attended by both students and parents at an off-campus chapel, freshman march through the gates of the campus which then are ceremonially closed with parents both literally and symbolically left outside. Emotionally difficult to be sure, but college officials feel it is necessary to help with the complicated transition.

At Grinnell, move-in day for freshmen was last Saturday; and after duffel bags and iPods were dropped off at the dorms, students and parents were invited to the gymnasium where they were placed on opposite sets of bleachers. According to the vice president for student affairs this was designed to be "an aha! moment, an epiphany where parents realize. 'My student is feeling more comfortable sitting with 400 people they just met.'" And then, after that hoped-for epiphany, parents are encouraged to leave campus.

At the University of Minnesota the same goal is being pursued but a bit more subtly and gently. There, when students are finished moving into their dorm rooms, they proceed to orientation activities that are just for them (at many places some parents insist on accompanying their children to these) while parents are invited to a reception held elsewhere.

But in some dramatic instances, after the colleges have done their carefully-orchestrated thing, so-called Velcro Parents manage to find ways to stay deeply involved with their children. Some go so far as to rent or buy apartments near where their kids are enrolled and travel there every weekend. As surprising as it may seem, many children of these parents seem to be happy with this arrangement, even bringing friends along to hang out with their parents and, of course, do their laundry. 

School administrators and sociologists are struggling to figure out what is going on. Some say it's because adolescence is continuing longer than in the past--perhaps extending well into children's 20s. Others are saying that parents are living vicariously through their children and, in effect, going to college as if walking in their footsteps. It is also speculated that this is a class-based phenomenon--that it is only middle-class and affluent parents who can afford to do this and/or feel sufficiently comfortable on college campuses to spend so much time there with their children. 

Whatever is going on, when I went to college I recall being dropped off on Manhattan's Amsterdam Avenue by my double-parking parents. I think they didn't even accompany me to my dorm room. I schlepped the bags up there myself. They were involved and loving parents and certainly had very mixed feelings about my going off to college, realizing how big a step it was for me and them. But they also knew that if I was to get the most from the experience I needed to do more of it on my own than many today appear to feel.

November 26, 2013--Roar Lion, Roar

When decades ago I arrived at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus for freshman orientation, upper classmen devoted themselves to two things--first, to find unique ways to haze and humiliate us (a favorite was making us at all times carry a roll of toilet paper) and, second, to teach us the three essential college songs--

The alma mater, Sans Souci ("What if tomorrow brings sorrow or anything other than joy?"); and the fight songs, Who Owns New York? ( "Who beat West Point the people say") and Roar Lion, Roar (" . . . and wake the echoes in the Hudson Valley").

Though we had two fight songs, my classmates and I quickly learned that the college had forgotten one thing--to get the football team to fight. My freshman year the team went 0 and 10, losing all its games by lopsided scores.

I was reminded of this last weekend when the Lions lost to Brown 48 to 7 and ended another winless season. Again they went 0 and 10. We couldn't even beat Brown where I always assumed no one played football since all the students were busy writing poetry or organizing food banks for the homeless.

Sure, half of Columbia students were premeds who slept in the zoology labs; but the other half came from normal high schools where sports were as important as SAT scores. Maybe more important. And yet, year after year, decade after decade, we were fortunate if we managed to win two games against godforsaken teams from downscale places such as Fordham in the Bronx and Monmouth College in West Long Branch, New Jersey. This year we lost to Monmouth 37-14 and to Fordham 52-7.

In the past 50 years the Lions managed just three winning seasons and in the last 100 years, only 23. Back in the day the team somehow managed to beat Army and that improbable victory was instantly memorialized in the lyrics to Who Owns New York--"Who beat West Point?"; and in 1934 we shocked Stanford and won the Rose Bowl 7-0. The Rose Bowl. Well before it hit the big time and well before my time. But still . . .

The best thing about Columbia football was the marching band, a ragtag group of about 19 sort-of musicians. In addition to the inevitable Roar Lion, Roar, where we sang about waking the echoes of the Hudson Valley (whatever that means), each week they came up with special material. Witty stuff about politics and college life.

My favorite was when one year we made the mistake of playing Rutgers University, a big-time team and like Monmouth (and Princeton!) in New Jersey.

At halftime, as usual, we were behind by about 30 points and to have pity on us Rutgers had already taken out its starters and deployed the junior varsity. Thankfully, it was time for the marching bands.

The Rutgers band, in resplendent uniforms and numbering at least 100, engaged in well-rehearsed and intricate routines and formations. They played a medley of other colleges' fight songs--Michigan's legendary--

Hail to the victors valiant
Hail to the conquering heroes
Hail, hail to Michigan
The leaders and best.

And Notre Dame's even more famous--

Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame
Wake up the echoes cheering her name
Send the volley cheer on high,
Shake down the thunder from the sky.

What is it, I thought, about waking up all these echoes?

While having these thoughts, out sauntered the Columbia band in uniforms so rumpled that it looked as if they had been worn by their predecessors in Pasadena in 1934.

If you can believe it, the special material that day was about Columbia professors. About I. I. Rabi, a father of the atomic bomb who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1944; about Moses Hadas, the world's leading authority on Greek literature; and my favorite, world-class literary critic, Lionel Trilling.

They taunted Rutgers and the team's fans, singing about how while we listened to Trilling lecture about Kafka, Rutgers students were studying such grimy subjects as mechanical engineering and cattle raising.

Mean spirited as it was, it helped make us feel better about ourselves while our pathetic Lions were getting their asses whipped.

Looking back on this, it seems so puerile. All of it. The hazing, the toilet paper, the school songs, fraternity life, and the obsession with football. (Columbia, however, did have a strong chess team!)

Rutgers, it turns out, had an excellent English department and Columbia had quite a good engineering school. Things were more complicated than they seemed. Even our alma mater was something to think about--San Souci, to be "carefree." Yet, "what if tomorrow brings sorrow or anything other than joy?" By now we know how true that is.