I found a paper for a American religious history course in a side compartment in my suitcase and decided to put it on my blog, but in the course of introducting it, I of course, produced a stand alone essay on Yale, the relative difficulty of different majors in the humanities, on and off campus living, Master Harry Stout, a historian of religion, and finally, Sarah Palin's college career. I will post the essay now--"Worlds Apart and a World Among: Italian Catholics and Second-Generation Jews"--which I will type by hand as I have of course no scanner here, or at home, for that matter.
When I found the paper, I thought it would be of interest to my many religious FB friends, mostly Catholic but some Jewish. The paper was for a lecture on American religious history, with Jon Butler a good from of my master, Harry Stout of Berkeley college, whom I saw at the restaurant in the Taft in December of 2009.
He was unchanged and apparently, so was I, and as I sat drinking a glass of wine, he caught my eye, and said, "Maria!" My real name is Maria Victoria Ordin but I never identified with Maria, and I had been tortured with the songs from Westside Story and The Sound of Music, so when I moved to Santa Barbara in 1996, I changed it to Victoria, paid 188 dollars to change it legally, but never posted the requisite newspaper ads, so my driver's licence and passport still say the full name. It was odd that I even responded to my first name, because after nearly 15 years I identify with it not at all.
Master Stout as probably 70 , full head of blonde not gray hair, almost no wrinkles, and the same weight, with a very attractive brunette in her mid-40s and when I told this to sweet Annette, the wonderful Jamaican dining hall manager whom I saw the next day, she said in her accent, "Oooh.. Masta Stout, he like deh ladies!" He apparently got divorced after his kids grew up and dated a few younger women. But he was no Mark Sloan. She just thought it was funny that he had had a couple younger, attractive women in his life after his long and faithful marriage which by all accounts was very happy, unlike the train wreck of a marriage between Dean Larry Winnie (modern French historian) and his bigshot wife Lee Wandel, historian of religion, whose specialty was the Reformation. Dean Winnie was a small, thin, kind man and quite honestly, everyone thought she was a ballbuster of the highest order.
At Yale, each residential college has both a Master and Dean, who live in the college , in a very nice multi-story residence in one of the entryways. Being Master and Dean is a prestigious thing, which doesn't pay more, but offers significant course relief to do research, as well as a fabulous home. But it's a lot of work also and you have to be a real people person to do a good job. Masters don't do as much as Deans, who really are responsible for your academic life, excuses , extensions, scheduling etc..
Master Stout was a jovial man and apparently quite a legend in Jonathan Edwards studies, though he was the Master of Berkeley, not Jonathan Edwards (JE). Once he came up to my studio in the Taft apartments, the old Taft Hotel on the corner of Chapel and College, across the street from one border of Yale College (Old Campus, where freshmen live--I refuse to capitulate to political correctness and call them "frosh" or "freshpersons," and yes, people actually use that abomination of a word, as in Freshperson Conference--the orientation for incoming first years). My good friend in CT, a mother and wife, posted a piece about college not being the best years of one's life, today, with so much addiction, eating disorders and depression. I can say, based on my own experience (and need) for intensive psychoanalysis during college, and all my bulimic friends (I'd say one in three to one in four girls were puking when I lived on campus), that college in the 90s was a very intense, rewarding but difficult time for me, and many others. It was nothing like the horrors of graduate school and I regard Yale as a glorious time , for which I often long, unable to get past the desire to do it over in my present happy state, but it was not easy.
Partly because I took off the second semester of freshman year, and did not return for 18 months ( a story for another day...) I didn't have a lot of friends in BK, and my single there was cute but very small. This is why, in the year of 1992-93, I lived with Dad's friend in the giant duplex on 88th between 2nd and 3rd, about three weekends a month. As Dad said when he saw my 4th floor Berkeley single, "The infantrymen barracks in WWII were bigger than this! We're paying 30K for this??!!" (Actually Grandma paid for the first half, which I never knew and which shocked me since my parents were obviously capable of doing so, no longer in government by the time I was in college.) So after one full year (sort of sophomore/junior combined, as I graduated in six, not eight, semesters), I moved to the Taft, where a graphic design grad student friend lived.
I met her in a small linguistics class for a man who had gotten his Ph.D. at the insanely young age of 23 and was, quite frankly, half senile. I am crushed I cannot find the paper, over 20 pages, I wrote on the differences between written and spoken language. (It is fascinating, truly, that without taking one theory course, I would gravitate toward one of the central themes of deconstruction: speech/writing.) At the time, really since freshman year (also on the fourth floor , though Old Campus and Vanderbilt in particular had monster stairs, so it felt like the sixth floor), I was in chronic pain, from years of dancing, emotional conflict, a fourth floor room, and daily workouts of at least 75 minutes, not counting the 30 of yoga and steam/sauna. Part of the draw of living off-campus (obviously a kitchen held no charm for me!) was having a bathtub. Arlyn allowed me in the spring of 1993 to go to her apartment and take baths and after a few baths , I was determined to move off-campus in the fall of 1993.
When I went to my reunion in 2010--one of the best weeks of my life--the class of '95 stayed in Davenport, a college with far larger rooms than any in BK. Of course, if you have roommates, you have a common room as well as bedrooms. But even the singles in DC are much bigger and nicer than the singles in BK. I know if I had been in DC rather than BK I would have stayed on campus and quite honestly, had a lot more fun and social interaction. I don't know, however, if I would have graduated with Phi Beta Kappa, as I would have been up talking late in the night over pizza and wine (well, I would have bought my wine, and let friends drink their beer, something I have never enjoyed), rather than revising papers in a meticulous-bordering-on-compulsive manner.
But also, I liked the friends of my friends in other colleges--Ezra Stiles in particular--better than people in BK, and transferring colleges, which is allowed, is a strange and rare occurrence. Still, I had dear girlfriends and some male friends and I was not at all unhappy. I also had a 300 dollar a month phone bill or so, sometimes 200 when moved off campus, talking to my best friend at the time in LA, as well as my mother. It's hard to believe there was no email, and of course, no Facebook in those days. (I got email my first year of grad school, in September of 1996, through UCSB and then in 1998 I got AOL, which I still use, along with lots of porn people and spammers, apparently, because my first emails to new people so often go to junk or spam folders!)
So, while the residential college system--which really is not anything like the house system at Harvard--can be wonderful, producing the intimacy of a very small liberal arts college within the experience of a decent-sized private college--4.5K to 5K undergraduates--it was not that way for me.
So, Master Stout wanted to see what the Taft was like. I cannot recall if he was like Dick Brodhead, Dean of Yale and now President of Duke, who had come to Yale at 18 and left at 60 or so, and was a true product of Yale, or if he simply came after his Ph.D. But he had never seen the Taft--the nicest building off-campus other than some newer buildings further away, but in less safe areas--and I invited him for tea and scones one afternoon. In the old days, long before coeducation, the Taft was where Yale men imported girls from Wellesley and Smith to sleep with. The saying was, "Smith to wed, Wellesley to bed," as the perception (I have no idea if it is true), was that Smith girls were very serious and intellectual, wherease Wellesley girls were social butterflies with more relaxed morals. (Hillary Clinton of course went to Wellesley and made it into Time Magazine with her commencement speech--I will not here launch into a eulogy of Hillary's virtues, but I think she's a dedicated, disciplined, brilliant woman who has cared about women's and children's issues her entire life.)
He came up in the nice elevator, not the freight one I used as it was closer to the back entrance of the building and my gym, Downtown Health and Raquet, and sat on the Pier One chair I still have but never use because it is very uncomfortable and we ate scones and tea and talked about the courses I was taking that semester: Victorian Poetry and Bible as Literature, both taught by Leslie Brisman, a tall version of Woody Allen. That was one hell of a dose of Brisman, who is very quiet but demanding and probing into one's psychic life if he discerns that this life has any significant tension or energy or power. He knew I had been in analysis and later tried to dissuade me--and everyone else--from graduate school in English. Brisman encourages every top student to go to law or med school. (There were no really dumb kids , well, a few quite mediocre students we'd wonder how and why were there, but only the top 15% or so of the class thinks about graduate school. It is quite possible to be a great, talented lawyer without having any significantly original or scholarly ideas about law. This is not true of professors of humanities subjects.)
Brisman's view--and it is not wrong--is that law school in particular , for a highly intelligent and verbal person, is just a lot easier and shorter than a Ph.D. in the humanities, and that at least in those days, it was a guarantee of financial stability and perhaps, wealth. "Why torture yourself?" he asked me one day, when I was agonizing over a paper, talking about how intensely emotional was the act of writing critical papers, however rewarding.
As anyone who knows me through FB knows, I lost my college laptop in 2006, and then found two floppy disks with about 35% of my work on it. But the papers of 1993-94, with the six 10 page papers from Brisman's two courses, are sadly not on them.
This is all by way of preface to the paper I will now type , but put in the next post, about the differences between Italian Catholic immigrants and second-generation Jews, based on two books, whose titles I forget, but whose authors are Deborah Moore and Robert Orsi. In 2009, my first time in New Haven in nine yers, when Master Stout saw me at the bar, the first thing he said after the usual pleasantries (which in this case were true, he looked young and great and I didn't look that much different from the last time he saw me at graduation) was his recollection of a phone call Jon Butler, a fellow historian of religion and longtime friend, placed to him about this paper. Butler was enormously impressed and my TA gave me an A+. It doesn't seem all that wonderful to me, but this supports what I have been writing on the page of James Strock, one of my favorite people on FB. He is a Harvard lawyer (not practicing) who did his undergrad at Harvard as well. He has worked for Bush junior as well as Pete Wilson in CA, who destroyed Mom's longtime boss and friend, John Van de Kamp, in the CA gubernatorial election and was a Republican that Democrats could tolerate. James thinks very highly of Mom and it has been really fun to get to know him. He is also a leadership consultant, Reagan Republican, and author of books on leadership, Reagan, and Teddy Rooosevelt.
He posted something about Ivy League employees and hard work. Only three percent of employers considered Ivy graduates were considered better, more productive workers. I have been making the same point both on Gregg Hilton's page (where you get a lot of bashing of Ivy people and intellectuals, consistent with the kind of anti-intellectual Sarah Palin embodies and champions in my view) and James's page: in colleges of a certain caliber (good public schools as well as Ivies), the ranking or prestige of the college matters less than the major one selects.
This A+ proves, or at least goes some way toward proving, my theory. It was written very quickly, not like an English or philosophy paper. I wrote it in a day or two, after having read the two books earlier in the semester. One reason Yale is harder than Harvard (by many accounts, not just mine), and indeed a lot of other Ivies, is that you have to take 9 courses a year, which means, if you are measuring by units, you have 16 units one term and 20 the next.
My senior year, I had my Paul Fry Wordsworth senior seminar (honestly I could do only about 60% of the voluminous primary and secondary reading), Jon Butler American religious history, John Rogers (love , love, love him) Milton lecture, Laura King and Katherine Gill Renaissance Studies course (history, literature, some philosophy), and Steven Meyer (20th-century Experimental writing: Gertrude Stein (yuck) and Laura Riding (fascinating).
That is a shitload of reading and writing. I took the interdisciplinary course--absolutely phenomenal reading list, including Binding Passions, a cultural studies work by a SCSU professor I still remember--Guido Ruggiero, George Eliot's Romola (my first Eliot novel, oddly enough), St Teresa of Avila's autobiography, and so much more--credit/D/Fail so if I got a B, it wouldn't fuck up my GPA. (And I never got a B in college, just As and A-s, but got a C- (!!) in the biology of AIDS which I am convinced was a clerical error I was just too lazy to fix, because the previous year, I got an A- or B+ in the very similar gut (guts are science courses for humanities majors--stars for gazers, rocks for jocks and so on) at UCLA summer school: --biology of Cancer.
AIDS and cancer are not that different on a biological/physiological level, or at least, there are some fundamental similarities. There's some deal with the DNA, RNA, retrovirus, transcription blah blah blah... And to get a C-, I would have had to get a 55 or 60 on the final. You know when you've tanked on an exam and that was not at all my perception when I walked out of the Yale Law auditorium, where this old queen taught the course, at least 65, probably 70, and cantankerous as hell. (He had, apparently, lost many friends to AIDS, but was not at all impressed when I told him I had been Emotional Support Volunteer at LA Shanti. I had very little contact with this professor of a large lecture/gut, and don't even remember his name, but I do remember the dorky red-haired male TA being a total dick!)
So due to my C- in AIDS biology, quite ironic as I did AIDS work for 16 months the year before, I graduated magna cum laude, not summa. This is not a big deal in the scheme of things of course, but it did annoy me when watching Gilmore Girls and Rory was summa and I was magna! The most annoying thing is that after being burned with that grade, I took three other courses Credit/D/Fail (you used to just have Pass/Fail, but people would pass with a D and the administration felt this was unseemly). And the truth is, it's hard to study for a C--you end up doing most of the work and getting a B or higher). I think you can take four courses Cr/D/Fail, and I took three after my stupid choice with AIDS course, and got A-s on all of them.
Thus, the final term of senior year, Butler's history of religion class was the easy , no-stress course. I didn't have to outline the reading and the major textbook--Gaustad's pretty famous book whose title I don't remember--was just a breeze, not intellectually demanding at all, though quite fascinating. We did read William James , Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as a wonderful book on spiritualism (Radical Spirits, I think by a woman whose first name was Ann), and about six or seven other books. The paper on Catholics and Jews was the final paper, and it really does prove, that while history at Yale especially is a legendary major, it just is not that hard. You write less than half the papers of English and philosophy majors and the papers you write don't produce emotional pain, angst, conflict, tension, bad dreams etc.. My new FB friend, a B.A. in English from Berkeley or UCLA, I forget, said that she didn't want to end up with her head in an oven , like Sylvia Plath, and that both writing poetry , and studying 20th-century poetry, was likely to result in such an ignominious and tragic end. I would not go that far, but there is no question: history majors, political science majors have to work far less hard at Yale and UCLA and UCSB for the same grades, and tend to be happy-go-lucky folks. English and philosophy majors obsess about life and work.
You learn a lot and of course you can deliberate and agonize over seminar papers, but the run of the mill lecture course in history and political science is truly half, at most, of the work of a run of the mill lecture in philosophy and English, which is why, when I get off on a Palin rant, as I am wont to do, I am quick to point out the following: I don't give a shit if she didn't go to an Ivy. It would have been nice if she could have gone to a great public school in the Pacific Northwest, like the University of Washington or University of Oregon (I don't know how University of Alaska is, I'm assuming there is one), rather than bouncing around the community college system. But some community colleges are top notch--Santa Barbara City College, for instance, has top of the line faculty--and you can study difficult subjects at a high level, including biochemistry and physics.
But she didn't major in any significant discipline with a political valence: political science, international relations, US history, world history, regional studies (Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Africa), economics, or even business. She was a communications/journalism major. As she would say, WTF? It's fine to double major in a real, substantive major and then study a secondary, more methodological subject such journalism--though it doesn't exactly seem to have turned her into stellar wordsmith! But how can you hope to lead the United States of America when you don't grasp world history, politics, and culture, and/or economics and domestic policy/history? (It's also provincial-bordering-on-xenophobic to presume to be president when you haven't traveled abroad till your early- to mid-forties.) Even my most Catholic, Tea Party female friend from Hillsdale in Michigan , who regards her conservative principles as "spot on," concedes she "lacks intellectual gravitas" and that the GOP can do "so much better."
I will now post the essay which gave rise to this rambling reflection on Yale, Master Stout, the relative difficulty of different majors, and finally Sarah Palin. Now that I have enunciated my position on someone I dislike very intensely, I can forget about her forever in a public forum, at least! (I have said this, though, many times: I admire her hair more than I can say. When I turn 50, if Dysport no longer does the trick, I'm going for the full-on Sarah Palin do, complete with the bangs, which at 39, I don't need as I have no wrinkles on forehead thanks to twice a year Dysport (newer, better, cheaper version of Botox which does not immobilize the forehead).
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