A few months after we started dating, John (not his real name), a successful professional, confided to me that his ex-wife called his relationship with his alma mater pathological. He was indeed a little obsessive: He wore Harvard neckties, went to alumni events regularly, read all the alumni magazines and newsletters, talked about Harvard constantly. In 30-plus years since graduating, he had been extremely active in the national alumni association.
This appealed to me, initially. As a literary scholar, I am surrounded by stories of fanatical preoccupations—Gatsby’s with Daisy, Charles Ryder’s with Brideshead, Ahab’s with a white whale—so John’s didn’t seem extraordinarily odd. Plus, I had also gone to Harvard (for a graduate degree) and the ex-wife had not, so I chalked her complaint up to jealousy.
Harvard had, in fact, brought John and me together. My daughter was starting the 11th grade, and everyone said that being an active alumna would help in the competitive admissions process. “You need to know John ___,” a mutual friend advised. “He’s really plugged in.” So I Googled him, found his company’s Web site, and discovered that he had written a little poetry. I sent a complimentary e-mail, he responded, we met for dinner, and a relationship blossomed. I had been divorced for three years and was ending a long-distance relationship. John was a handsome, successful Harvard man who lived in a neighboring town and shared my love of poetry and politics. Clearly his ex-wife didn’t understand him. I was in heaven.
At a Harvard event a few months later, someone asked us how we met. I mentioned my daughter’s college applications before I got to the funny part of the story—how I had described John’s poetry in my first e-mail to him as “not bad” and how that had provoked him to want to meet me immediately. But on the way home, he scowled and said that I shouldn’t have said anything about my daughter applying to college. “Why not?” I asked. “It was the setup to the story. Besides, all parents say things like that.”
“I don’t want people thinking that I help people get their kids into Harvard,” he lectured, gripping the steering wheel. He proceeded to tell me a long story about a rich financier who tried to buy his son’s way into the university but couldn’t because Harvard took seriously its charge to weigh all applicants on the basis of merit.
“Oh, for goodness sakes,” I said aloud, and added, to myself, “Don’t be a prig.” I couldn’t tell him that my story was actually meant to humor him, to stroke his ego: I had no intention of asking him for help. It turned out my daughter had no interest in Harvard. Her top choices were Johns Hopkins (my alma mater) and Claremont McKenna; she liked the relatively small size of their undergraduate classes and strong focus on international relations and economics. My son, in ninth grade, was interested in engineering and didn’t care about status or rankings at all. I was glad.
I have spent most of my life on college and university campuses as an undergraduate, graduate student, researcher, and faculty member, yet somehow I have escaped forming a close attachment to any of them. Though I support my institutions, they aren’t part of my identity. But as a member of the educated class in America—and as the mother of two teenagers who will surely enter that class—I am aware of institutional attachments that border on the obsessive. In school parking lots and next to soccer fields, I am surrounded by SUV’s bearing stickers from prep schools and colleges. Yet my car remains bare.
I hadn’t really minded other people’s college chauvinism until John’s preoccupation with Harvard began structuring our relationship. He talked about his alma mater endlessly; every time we visited Cambridge, we had to tour the Mount Auburn Cemetery, where so many Harvard men are buried. In a supportive mood, I created a Wikipedia page for one of his former professors, long dead and nearly forgotten, to buttress John’s sense of the importance of a class he had taken long ago.
John’s attachment to Harvard seemed a little like what Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat’s Cradle, called a “granfalloon,” a “seeming team” of people whose connection is tenuous and essentially meaningless, like Hoosiers or people who work at General Electric. There’s no substantial basis for the grouping. A “karass,” by contrast, is a group whose connections are unpredictable but of cosmic significance, perhaps based on a deeply shared commitment. That I could understand. Still, I am, or was, a good girlfriend, so I kept to myself Vonnegut’s wicked rhyme: “If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”
Meanwhile, though John claimed to like dating a college professor, he became less and less interested in my work—the books and articles I was writing, my teaching, the reason I had pursued a doctorate in the first place. A few months after we met, I signed a contract with Penguin to write the introduction and notes to a minor 19th-century novel; I delivered my work and saw the edition through the editing and publication process before the romance ended. John never read the book or my introduction, though it was designed for the college classroom, perhaps even at Harvard, I once mentioned acidly. He dismissed my concerns about my field as “silly academic politics.” I complained to my friends, who advised me to move on.
“College,” writes the literary historian Elisa Tamarkin, “is deeply invested in producing nostalgia for college.” Toward the end of my year with John, I had gone, alone, to hear Professor Tamarkin give a talk from her recent book, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, in which she describes how America produced in the early 19th century an “iconography of attachment and belonging that came to signify the very essence of the college years.” Yearbooks, college reunions, and college social clubs, such as fraternities and sororities, were invented. Colleges created distinctive characters for themselves. In short, the early 19th century produced the idea that “colleges should predispose us to love colleges.” American embrace of British pageantry, Tamarkin argues, combined with a 20th-century summer-camp culture—particularly camps with Native American names—created generations of youths accustomed to tribal rituals, team colors, athletic competitions, songs, bonfires, class rings, and rites of passage.
On the one hand, the idea of a deep attachment to one’s alma mater seems harmless enough, but on the other hand, what about those members of our society shut out from the four-year-college experience? What about community colleges and commuter schools? What about night-school or returning or international students? Other countries and cultures manage to educate their youths without indoctrinating them with school spirit. Certainly, as a professor, I find it easier to teach students who care more about their education than their social status. As a parent, I want my children to feel that their choice of college isn’t a matter of their permanent identity.
I drove home from Professor Tamarkin’s talk with a clearer sense of what was beginning to bother me about John’s devotion to Harvard. I also knew that if he had to choose between his alumni association and me, I didn’t have a chance. And frankly, I found his obsession taxing. So I ended it—not right away, but soon enough. It was an unpleasant breakup; unkind words were spoken, phones were hung up abruptly. I may have been cruel about his poetry. Literature has already covered this ground in sufficient detail.
This spring, my daughter chose Claremont McKenna College, founded in 1946, less than 70 years ago. I couldn’t be happier—though I confess that after my last visit, I stopped in the bookstore to buy myself a T-shirt bearing the college’s logo.
