intoxicating.
We played Bob Dylan albums
in her dorm,
luxuriating.
She gave not a whit about education
at the time.
She wanted to have kids and a picket fence,
and - I long assumed - me.
But we split in her senior year,
and we drifted.
When she started teaching,
a few years after I did,
she found her way to Wellesley.
I was pleased for her,
and envious.
I trudged along in my own way,
saw her time to time at reunions.
I thought once, "Hmmm, is she smarter
than me?"
"Nah," I replied - sometimes. "How could she be smarter than me?"
But then I remember;
she did dump me.
She tells me tales about her students,
the famous Wellesley alumna.
She's not bragging. She knows she's been fortunate.
But she's also earned her stripes there.
Would I have held her back? Would my career,
started first, relegate her to second choices?
[+]
Wellesley College professors rated tops by Princeton Review
Looking for the nation’s best college professors? Look no farther than Wellesley College, according to the Princeton Review.
According to a press release from Wellesley College, the Princeton Review asked 122,000 students from 376 of the nations top colleges to rate their schools and report their campus experiences, rating the institutions in dozens of categories.
Wellesley students said that while their school draws "fiercely driven and deeply passionate women," it is a “very friendly, respectful, intellectual environment where professors believe in your ability to do great things and the whole world seems to open up to you."
FULL ARTICLE.
According to a press release from Wellesley College, the Princeton Review asked 122,000 students from 376 of the nations top colleges to rate their schools and report their campus experiences, rating the institutions in dozens of categories.
Wellesley students said that while their school draws "fiercely driven and deeply passionate women," it is a “very friendly, respectful, intellectual environment where professors believe in your ability to do great things and the whole world seems to open up to you."
FULL ARTICLE.
I also have a Wellesley College memory: Worst. Conference. Interview. Ever. It was a long, long time ago, and I was just an ABD whippersnapper, but to say they behaved badly would be generous.If they were anything to go by, you definitely have nothing to envy. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteLove the poem! Don't believe the article. :o)
ReplyDeleteTo: Richard Tingle
ReplyDeleteWhen you start doubting things, that can become crippling; you might have wound up at Oxford, she might have become brillant in some non-academic thing, or both of you could have taught at Moscow University, we could've met, I could've gotten you to sell secrets (if you had anything we wanted) to Moscow Center, or possibly become our mole in American academia....it's all "maybe", or "possibly", or "still No because it wasn't in the cards." And that way lies madness.
Hmm. I have a niece who is looking at Wellesley, and has been assuming she has a bit of an "in" thanks to her grandmother/my mother being an alum. Looks like the competition she'll face just got stiffer (but she's a good student, so that's not really a problem).
ReplyDeleteMy only memory of the place is following a little stream to its origin the day my father took us for a nostalgic visit to the campus, deep in the middle of summer, the year after my mother died. I was still in elementary school, and I don't think he was trying to convince me to go there, just return to a spot where they had been together, and where she'd never gotten to take us. I eventually went somewhere else, mostly because I wanted the coed experience (my brother, obviously, didn't have the option; then again, at the time of our visit, my father's alma mater had only opened its doors to women a year or two before, so anything could have happened in the years before we went to college).
So my associations with the place are also nostalgic, but not exactly relevant to its academic quality. I think I've met a Wellesley prof or two at conferences over the years, but I can't say I remember them standing head and shoulders above the crowd. Maybe Wellesley students just really like their school, and everything associated with it?
Well, people keep telling me we can't blame ourselves for what happens to us in this job market. I still think it is a meritocracy overall (although Donoghue's "The Last Professors" implies that this belief is part of the problem). Statistically, the better academics will tend to get the better jobs - but there is enough randomness and circumstance in the mix that comparing any two particular people based on current jobs is problematic. There will be brilliant people chronically underemployed and a few dolts will get tenure at good schools. Yes, she might be better than you are. Or she just matched that place at the time they had an opening that fit. Or both. Or not.
ReplyDeleteIf you had stayed together maybe you'd have given her - or helped her make - that little white fence and you'd both be happier. Maybe she'd be miserable and make you miserable. Maybe she would have dragged you along for her career. Or not.
Maybe, just maybe, if you had stayed together, it would have somehow via the "butterfly effect" caused global thermonuclear war and all of us, except Strelinikov in his bunker 100m beneath Akademgorodok, would be dead. But probably not.
Use this memory and chain of thought for occasional recreational reverie, but don't obsess over it or have any regrets.
Ugh, ptooey. The most awful person in my graduate program, an awful pseudo-feminist who was really a brownshirt, truly awful, had gone to Wellesley. So I have a bit of a bias.
ReplyDelete