Campus Life
I never spent any time on a college campus until the summer of 1971 when I left high school in Rome and flew to Cleveland, Ohio to spend the summer working in the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was friends with the Department Chair and he gave me a summer job as a research assistant, mostly coding forms on a study that the Department had conducted about he socioeconomic differences on attitudes towards sex and the related issues of contraception and potential procreation. It was a toss-up as to what I knew less about at that stage, sociology, sex, socioeconomic variations or, for that matter, campus life. Most high school students headed for college had the opportunity to go visit a number of college campuses during the application process, but being in Rome, I got none of that and had to use a combination of my imagination and whatever my older sister told me about life at Washington University in St. Louis to educate myself on this next step. I would be heading off to Cornell in the late summer and I am sad to say that even though my family came from the Ithaca area and my mother had attended Cornell, I’m not sure I had ever been on that campus either. In a word popularized by the 1995 Alicia Silverstone movie, I was Clueless.
I was perhaps even less clued in on things about campus life like fraternities and sororities. I had just assumed those were 1950’s institutions that had long vanished. It took me one day to learn otherwise as after one night at the Department Chair’s house in Shaker Heights, I was deposited at the fraternity house directly across the street from the Sociology Department building with the task of securing a summer room at low student rent, which would allow me to not be dependent on anyone (namely the Department Chair) for transportation. Indeed, I quickly learned that college campuses were designed for walking of bicycle riding and that everything that one might need was more or less within walking distance. My world that summer revolved around that fraternity house and that Sociology Department in some strange and intertwined ways. The first day at work, after doing the usual paperwork (yes, fortunately, my mother had caused us to all get Social Security numbers before we moved to Rome three years prior), I was introduced to two young secretaries who would be my mentors and who knew what work I was assigned to do. I even got a few moments of some random graduate student’s time to explain the basis of the study I would work on for the summer. He understood the research basis of the questionnaire I would be working with, but it was the two secretaries that knew the important and menial stuff to get me through the day. They explained that I had to translate that study into a coding form. That sounds very technical, but in actuality, the study was designed with 88 questions that were either yes/no, true/false or A/B/C/D. There were several more o[en-ended questions which I was expected to translate into something that could be numbered onto that coding form. The coding form had 88 boxes that I was to fill in and a 0 was to be the catch-all N/A or no answer given. It was explained to me that these forms would then be given to a keypuncher who would translate again into an IBM punch card from which the data could be captured and manipulated for whatever end purpose the study was designed to expose.
That seemed easy enough. I read through the questionnaire and it was more or less as the graduate student had portrayed it. But then I looked at the first answer form on which the interviewer had recorded his or her answers to the interview questions. You see, these respondents were a cross section of later-stage high school students ranging from inner-city kids to suburban kids. Some went to public schools, some went to parochial schools, some went to private schools and, judging from some of the answers, some barely went to school at all. There were some five survey takers who had done the interviews and it became very obvious which interviews were conducted by whom. They each used different writing instruments, had distinctive handwriting and seemed to have varying degrees of concern for the accuracy of the recordation of the interview responses. You could almost tell who was taking this survey seriously and who was just doing a job and therefore prepared to fill in the blanks with whatever they chose. I was so naive that I thought it was my duty to explain these variations to the Department Chair. I remember his reaction. Clearly he felt he had done his duty for his UN colleague (my mother) and he found dealing with me any further to be more of an annoyance than anything. He immediately told me to bring it up with the graduate student in charge of the study. When I did that it was clear that this person, who was perhaps five years older than me, didn’t have a clue how to deal with my concerns. He said to just do my best and not worry about it. I got a quick lesson in the concept of garbage-in, garbage-out data collection.
Being the diligent sort I was, I did as I was told and buckled down to crank through the questionnaires. At the end of the week I gave my tally to the two secretaries, who looked at one another and did some quick math for me. My project for the summer was to finish coding this study. They reviewed the math of how many surveys there were and how many I had done in the first week. That resulted in the obvious conclusion that at that rate I would be finished for the summer in 3-4 weeks rather than the 10 weeks budgeted. The message was made clear to me that I ws doing this too fast and that I needed to slow down my pace. THis had nothing to do with quality of output and everything to do with keeping themselves from having to find other work for me later in the summer. The first suggestion was that I needed to stop coming in early and start taking a full hour for lunch instead of eating a sandwich at my desk. When I mentioned that I had little else to do with my free time since I didn’t know Cleveland they spoke quietly with one another and said that they would help me with that.
These secretaries were both about 23-years old and while neither was a beauty queen, they were reasonably nice looking women. The first one asked me over to her room (she too rented a room at the fraternity where I lived, much to my surprise) for dinner that night and the other asked me if I would like to go to an outdoor rock concert with her that Saturday night. I said yes to both and figured this might not be such a bd summer after all. The dinner went fine and it became clear to me that what I had heard about the sexual revolution in the United States was indeed in full swing, with the social barriers between men and women changing before my eyes. While nothing really happened that first night, it was clearly a prelude for more good things to come the next week, when we arranged another tryst in her room for dinner.
Meanwhile, the rock concert ended up being a very early Cat Stevens concert (who knew?) which was very much a classic outdoor rock concert scene in the fashion of what I imagine Woodstock was like in its earliest moments. Lots of dancing and nakedness and wafting ganja in the air. None of this was going on on our blanket, where this somewhat more traditional young lady spent the time talking to me about anything and everything she could think of to avoid talking about sex, drugs or rock n’ roll.
I determined that my chances for fun were greater with the other young woman so I was all set when I went to her room the next week. Somewhere in the first hour as we rolled around on her bed with more pre-prandial preliminaries she asked me a question which stopped her in her tracks. She sat up and asked me how old I was. I suppose my porkchop sideburns might have made that difficult to guess, but it never occurred to me to tell her anything but the truth. When I said I was seventeen, she almost jumped out of her skin and immediately got off the bed. She said she thought I was 22 or 23 and that I needed to leave her room right away. My mother had taught me the meaning of statutory rape at some point, so I gave no argument.
I am sitting in the Learning Commons at University of San Diego, fifty-one years later. Once again I am clueless about what campus life is all about in this day and age, but the difference is that I don’t much care any more. I like teaching these young students and I like to think I can help them find their best paths forward, but what they do when they leave the classroom holds little or no interest to me. Campus life goes on and I have returned to casual observer status just like in 1971.