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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Spring 2006 : Flashbacks & Reflections

Flashbacks & Reflections

When we decided that this issue of the magazine would celebrate the relationships that spawn everything from research breakthroughs to careers to lifelong friendships, I couldn’t help but think back on the relationships that brought me to where I am today. There are, of course, those relationships that are best forgotten; but then there are those, some vividly present and others dimly remembered, that never fail to gladden and inspire.

When I was in high school 40-plus years ago, I knew I’d go to college—to realize the “promise” my high school counselor kept haranguing me about. But that promise was constrained by the realities of the times. Like so many young women who had been fed a steady diet of husband-acquisition strategies, I was offered a meager snack of career options—secretary, teacher, nurse. I couldn’t type, and I was no Clara Barton—or Sue Barton, for that matter. So much for the “Help Wanted: Women” classifieds.

Just after dawn in late September, 1963, I arrived on campus in my freshman uniform—penny loafers, wheat jeans, pink Gant, navy lambswool crew neck. I parked my ’57 Ford Fairlane in the River Flats lot, trudged up about 800 stairs to Coffman Union, and sat down to my first cup of Ski-U-Mah coffee. Then I was off to Vincent Hall—home to the Department of English.

Over the course of the day I would find my way, map in hand, from Coffman to Folwell to Vincent to Ford and back again to Coffman. I would deliver my key-punched Class Entry Permits to a succession of professors and TAs in anthropology, humanities, sociology, and freshman English. By sixth hour, my penny loafers were badly scuffed, my brain ached, and my carefully sculpted hairdo had lost its bearings. But I was finding mine. My world was opening up.

The U's vastness suited me. It offered me the anonymity I hankered for, a vast landscape for my newly uncosseted self to explore, and plenty of places to hide. In the company of strangers, some of whom would become my allies and friends, I could reinvent myself beyond the prying and critical gaze of intimates whose assumptions and expectations had held me captive.

Early on, I found a champion in my freshman English teacher, Richard Donovan, who kindled my love of language and talent for writing. A young philosophy professor, Doug Lewis, taught me words like metaphysics and epistemology and stoked my love of ideas. And another offered up words like weltschmertz and angst that nailed what afflicted me and so many other self-absorbed Cold War post-adolescents—JFK's “new generation”—whose duck-and-cover intellects were slowly creaking open to the challenges and responsibilities of the nuclear age.

(Some of us were in no mood to carry the torch being passed to us, and we certainly weren’t asking what we could do for our country. November 22 would soon shock us out of our self-absorption.)

And then there were those historians who taught me that history was a living, evolving collection of human stories, not a tableau frozen in time and viewable only through an intellectual and cultural monocle.

And of course there were those English professors who took me on mind-expanding literary travels through some six centuries of verse and prose, royal and not-so-royal courtships and couplings, empires lost and regained, and critical and metacritical texts that helped me put it all in perspective.

Everyone who receives CLA Today could conjure such memories and tell stories of lives unfolding at the University of Minnesota. So last year, to mark CLA's 135th anniversary year, we asked 135 alumni/ae to share their stories—stories about the CLA relationships that left deep imprints on their hearts and minds. We asked them to share stories of discovery and transformation. We asked them especially to remember those professors whose voices still echo in their brains, whose teaching and mentoring were truly memorable and life-changing.

A few excerpts from 135 Voices—a bound collection of their reminiscences—are reproduced here. They are intimate narrative glimpses of what Dean Steven Rosenstone, in his introduction to the volume, called a “grand sweep of CLA history.” —E.S.