TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100190/1001170.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.2 KB | 150 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 23

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

College Days: Then and Now


A TIME writer revisits the past during freshman orientation week
at Franklin & Marshall

By SUSAN TIFFT


    "Hi. My name is Jessica, and I'm from Havertown, Pa. I like
softball, and I play the saxophone, the flute and the piano.
I also have a tattoo." The small dormitory room erupts in
whistles and whoops. "Where? Where?" Jessica draws out the
answer for effect: "On my shoulder blade."

    Getting noticed is the name of the game for a college
freshman, and Jessica knows she has just scored a touchdown.
I am nearly as fortunate. Like Jessica and the rest of the 20
new Franklin & Marshall students on my hall, I am attending a
getting-to-know-you session called by my resident adviser --
a lanky upperclassman named Dan -- to introduce myself and make
an attention-grabbing statement. I think I have a winner: I am
39 years old and I am going through freshman orientation on
assignment for TIME. I needn't have wasted my breath. One look
at my adult face and khaki shorts -- so dull compared with the
colorful ersatz boxers in vogue among the young -- and they
know I am not one of them.

    It would be hard for someone who started college in 1969 to
be an undercover freshman. My speech would betray me as surely
as my graying hair. Awesome is a word I would use to describe
the Grand Canyon -- not the latest Jon Bon Jovi album, which
is, like, totally awesome to my young classmates. Still, some
collegespeak can be surprisingly descriptive. "Yeah, it was
great," one student says of his summer vacation in Paris.
"Except I felt like a total Piltdown when I tried to order
food." I know exactly what he means.

    When I was a freshman at Duke University, orientation
consisted of posture tests in a drafty gym and an awkward mixer
in the chapel parking lot. We received a reading list before
our arrival that included such books as Black Rage and Living
with Sex: The Student's Dilemma, but no one bothered to discuss
them with us. Adrift in the temporary calm between Martin
Luther King Jr.'s assassination and the shootings at Kent
State, we struggled to survive the transition from high school
to college with as much grace as we could muster. Being a
freshman was a necessary stage of growth, like the chrysalis
before the butterfly. But it was not fun.

    How times have changed, I say to myself as I help build a
human pyramid on the F&M quad -- one of the many organized
games meant to break the ice among the 500 students in the
class of 1994. "This is ridiculous," scoffs an athletically
built freshman standing to one side of the mayhem. "My parents
are spending $20,000 a year for this?" Moments later, he is
engrossed in a finger-painting version of charades, his haughty
disdain replaced by keen concentration as he tries to make his
teammates guess what he is drawing.

    For a freshman, acting cool is all important. "I'm from
Rumson, N.J.," Jonathan, a dark-haired freshman, announces to
two female companions while waiting to be filmed for the class
of 1994 video -- another inhibition dissolver. "Do you know who
lives there?" The women shake their heads. "Bruce Springsteen."
He pauses to let the statement sink in. The girls' eyes widen
approvingly. "And Cher," he adds. They move slightly closer.
"Oh, yeah," he goes on, with the confident air of a man who
knows he has made an impression. "In fact, I live right next
door to Bruce." The come-on seems irresistible.

    Relations between men and women were much more artificial
in my undergraduate years. For most of us, sex was unfamiliar
territory -- both tantalizing and terrifying. Like other
freshman women, I had a curfew (regularly flouted) and lived
in a fortress so thoroughly female that I could pad to the
basement cafeteria each morning in a bathrobe and slippers.

    F&M freshmen live in coed dorms and come and go as they
please. Posters in the bathrooms describe birth-control methods
and the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. Several of
the women on my hall chatter excitedly about having their
hometown boyfriends come for a visit. There is no doubt about
where they will sleep. "We know many of you are already
sexually active," an administrator tells us during a
freshman-week assembly on the freedoms and responsibilities of
college life. "Talk to your lover about protection."

    Twenty years ago, "coeds," as women were then called, had
few adult role models. Most of our mothers were members of the
Donna Reed generation. Our teachers were overwhelmingly male.
When I realized, as a college senior, that I had never had a
female professor, I set out to find one and had to scour the
course catalog for hours.

    My new classmates don't have that problem: 29% of the F&M
faculty is female. No one here would even understand the old
line about women going to college to get an M.R.S. degree. To
the women on my hall, the future holds the promise of
successful careers as well as husbands and families. Even race
relations, so turbulent during the Black Power era, seem more
relaxed on this campus close to the cornfields of the Amish
countryside. "We have a much more intermingled society now,"
says F&M president Richard Kneedler, who graduated from the
school in 1965.

    One thing's for sure: these kids are less angry than we
were. They're more optimistic, more cheerful; they have a
better sense of humor. What did we have to laugh about in 1969?
Vietnam? Civil rights? Those were sober causes, even though
they had a cosmic majesty about them that seems to be lacking
today. Watching these students sort out bottles and cans for
their dormitory recycling bins, I wonder if they will ever feel
the electric thrill that I experienced during my first march
on Washington, in 1970. "I wish I'd gone to school in the
'60s," Tom, a cello-voiced freshman from London, tells me
wistfully as we trudge back to our dorm. "That seems like a
great time to have been a student."

    For an instant, I wonder if a spark of '60s-style liberalism
may still be flickering on campus. Not so. These kids were in
third grade when Ronald Reagan became President. Some
18-year-olds may feel that he "was not the greatest influence
to be growing up under," as Elizabeth, a student from Long
Island, N.Y., put it over the din of rap music at the freshman
picnic. But Reagan's values have seeped into their generation
as deeply as John F. Kennedy's values affected mine. "It
shouldn't be the duty of the whole country to help the less
well-off," Bob, a freshman from Doylestown, Pa., tells me over
breakfast, as if quoting a speech by the Great Communicator
himself. "They shouldn't use tax money for it. It should be
voluntary."

    Were we ever this young, this sure, this innocent? There is
a bittersweet melancholy about seeing someone on the brink of
adulthood, all elbows and knees and untested conviction. Four
years. It goes so quickly, but who can tell them? On my last
day, I steal out early, trying not to disturb my two roommates.
Danielle sleeps clutching her black-and-white teddy bear.
Jennie has left a note on her desk. Underneath her name she has
drawn a smile face.