["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 30, 2024]
We have a number of friends who are taking their high school seniors on college tours this fall. It really is important to let a student actually see a campus and imagine themselves there. That gut feeling is everything.
My older son, Rory, was convinced he wanted to go to the University of Hawaii but after the tour, he announced he just couldn't see himself on this campus. He couldn't explain why.
His bottom choice had been UC-Santa Cruz but after the tour, the school rose to the top of his list. The campus "spoke" to him. His only misgiving, he said at the time, was that he wasn't sure he wanted to go to school in a "cold" climate. Spoken like a true Southern California kid.
Suffice to say, he has never lived this comment down. And by the way, he did go to Santa Cruz, met his wife, and is still there 29 "cold" years later.
I had a similar experience looking at colleges. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and even my older brother had all attended the same New England university. But the school, despite the incredibly legacy, didn't excite me at all.
Fortuitously, I signed up for a tour sponsored by my high school for a different school and fell instantly in love with the beautiful campus, the strong feminist history, and the small size (900 students).
The school, one of the first women s colleges in the country, had been founded by a successful brewer in 1861 on an idyllic piece of New York State land. The founder designated pink and gray as the school's colors symbolizing "the rosy dawn on the gray matter of a woman s mind." Nauseatingly poetic, but OK. Everything in the school bookstore was either pink with gray lettering, or gray with pink lettering.
As women s education was only for the wealthy initially, some of the dorm rooms had a small attached room for one's maid, should a student choose to bring one.
While the student body had become more diversified, both ethnically and economically, by the time I got there, the school still held on to long-standing traditions like demitasse in the parlors (the dorms had actual parlors) after dinner. I loved the bucolic campus.
Some of the traditions, admittedly, were definitely behind the times. You had to live on campus in one of the eight dorms. If you were pregnant or married, you were gone the next day.
There was room inspection every other week to make sure you'd cleaned your room. We had to wear a skirt to dinner in the dining room (each dorm had their own) and should you have a male guest for dinner, he had to be wearing a jacket and tie. Since dates had often not expected to have to dress up, a selection of abandoned (probably purposefully given their innate hideousness) jackets and ties were available. Of course, they never fit the poor guy who sat there in embarrassed misery eager to escape.
For us to leave the campus in the vehicle of a male person, we had to sign a leave card with the guy s name and license plate number of car. Curfew was 12:30 on weekends.
Boys could only be in our rooms at very specific hours. Doors couldn't be fully closed, and a certain number of collective feet had to be on the floor. These were known as "parietals" (regulations governing the visiting privileges of the opposite sex in college dormitories). Mine was certainly not the only college in that era that had them.
In one throwback tradition leftover from the second World War when kitchen help was scarce, the school had continued a tradition requiring each student to do Scrape Duty once every 2 weeks, standing at the end of the kitchen conveyor belt and scraping plates into massive trash receptacles.
I never had a single class taught by a TA. All my professors knew me by name, or at least my last name as we were addressed as Miss [last name]. "Ms" hadn't quite come into common use yet.
It's amazing how fast social change can occur. In the middle of my junior year, in a decision to go co-ed, the first 70 guys, all transfers from other schools, joined our campus and moved into my dorm.
In two weeks, 100 years of rules and traditions evaporated. The guys laughed at room inspection, were not about to restrict who could come into their rooms, and balked at a school store full of pink and gray apparel. Scrape Duty? Not happening.
As for the leave cards, they no longer made any sense.
The guys were unwilling to dress for dinner (having not had to at their previous institutions) and often showed up for breakfast in ratty pajamas. We stopped wearing skirts at dinner and began showing up in pjs at breakfast too. Our dorm dining room started looking like a co-ed pajama party.
All the parietal rules basically vanished overnight. And no one missed them.
Well, one set of parents did, claiming breach of contract and alleging that the college was promoting fornication. Um, yeah! Bring on the fornication! Biggest improvement in the school in 100 years!
The law suit was ultimately settled by providing one corridor on campus where all the old parietal rules were still in effect. Suffice to say, no one volunteered and those rooms were assigned by a lottery that no one wanted to win.
Within a month, burgundy and navy apparel had appeared in the school store.
Now, of course, the school is fully co-ed and twice its original student body. There s a central dining hall. The campus is as idyllic as ever.
Was the brewer-founder turning over in his grave as all this was happening? Maybe. It's probably just as well that he didn't live to see it. But I'd want him to know that I m grateful for all that rosy dawning over my gray matter when I attended. I have every faith it is dawning over the gray matter of the male populace too. Rosy dawning is equal opportunity.
Just tell me they haven't done away with demitasse.
Me on Scrape Duty with Giuseppe, our dorm kitchen manager
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