Last Call: School's Out, Forever
Giffurda, Joe
LAST CALL by Joe Giffurda School's Out, Forever ALMOST EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, WHILE UNPACKING my bags in my first college dorm room, precisely at the moment that I hung up my pair of lemon-yellow...
...Given the growing racial divisions—one part of college life that's gotten indisputably worse—that would really be a miracle...
...There may be hope for the next generation...
...But nowadays, at the rival northeastern university where I switched to do my doctoral work, conservatism is approximately as common—and as accepted—as Judaism must have been a half-century ago...
...Luckily my lifestyle was, and remains, far too dull to make that diagnosis plausible...
...Even the freshmen I taught English composition were obstinate about this...
...So I have decided to head out into the world and make my living with my word processor...
...THERE SEEMS TO BE MORE FAITH, ANYWAY...
...Nothing will ever be the same...
...FOR ONE THING, there are hardly any teaching jobs to he had in the humanities or the social sciences...
...This fall, that child himself will arrive at college, perhaps the same one I went to...
...Sooner or later...
...almost anybody on campus would rather violate grammar than use a male pronoun for a non-specific referent...
...Probably no graduate of my university is driving the proverbial cab, but most count themselves among the blessed if—after several years of unanswered letters, unfriendly interviews, and humiliation before peers and family—they can land a $35,000 job at Carcinoma State...
...Most students and faculty are still uneasy with right-wing ideas, especially when so labeled, but few would deny those ideas should be heard...
...If more of the whites follow suit, students of different colors might start eating together again...
...So why am I dropping out...
...Shamefully I fled, putting popularity above principle...
...I have spent 28 of my 35 years in one educational institution or another, from Montessori to the Ivy League...
...I don't know what advice to give him, except to forget lemon-yellow golf pants...
...Once an otolaryngologist working the emergency room night shift mistook my chicken pox for AIDS...
...Most of those praying are Asian and black...
...Only a few blocks farther is the infirmary, where I can get treated for whatever ails me...
...WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED at a prestigious northeastern university in the first year of the Reagan era, there were easily twice as many socialists as Republicans among the undergraduates...
...He may even wind up in my old room...
...Nonetheless, I have cornpleted my last year as an enrolled student...
...And this without even a draft to dodge...
...Who knows...
...I recall the university cop who told my roommate to move his pot plant away from the window lest it be spotted by the municipal police...
...Yards from my door is an open-stack lending library with over io million volumes...
...How's that for a dated reference...
...They can send me mine in the mail...
...and I've discovered that neither is my calling...
...I'M NOT OUT OF THE GROVES YET...
...AS MY ADVISER would quickly remind me (thankfully he doesn't read TAS), my dissertation is not quite finished...
...Now I will have to pay full price for magazines and museum admissions...
...A Gro-lite in the closet would work even better, the friendly officer suggested...
...There was a small conservative club, but when I showed up for the first meeting, it seemed I had stepped onto the set of Revenge of the Nerds...
...9iti 82 June 1999 • The American Spectator...
...But basically I am a provincial, albeit a privileged one...
...A block away is a dining hall where I eat three meals a day with nothing to cook or clean...
...MUCH HAS ALREADY CHANGED...
...LAST CALL by Joe Giffurda School's Out, Forever ALMOST EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, WHILE UNPACKING my bags in my first college dorm room, precisely at the moment that I hung up my pair of lemon-yellow golf pants—somewhere in this country a child was born...
...All of this has been quite cozy, but now it begins to grow stuffy...
...My field is medieval history...
...True, there are certain assumptions, about "gender" for instance, that grow firmer each day...
...I will henceforth be fully subject to the laws of the state, unshielded by a private security force...
...No one truly devoted to a life of scholarship would let that stop him, of course...
...But I do know this means that it's time for me to leave school...
...Never again will I stand in line at registration, or watch wistfully as others troop down the aisle to pick up their diplomas...
...THERE HAVE BEEN MIND-BROADENING FURLOUGHS: a year in Europe, a month in China, numerous visits to Northern Virginia...
...Yet some of those same students surprised me with unabashed endorsements of what I assumed were unfashionable ideas: More than one turned in a paper supporting the death penalty, welfare reform, or the end of racial preferences in college admissions...
...There are two reasons to be a professor: teaching and research...
...No MERE WHIMSY DRIVES ME...
...I don't remember fellow undergraduates bowing their heads at the table (unless they happened to be drunk), but now there's nothing remarkable about saying grace in the dining hall...
...With tenure soon to join Latin dissertations and master's robes among the relics of academic history, that doesn't leave much besides three-month vacations, and I don't really like the beach...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
