My Alma Mama

Essay for the Stranger, 9/14/92

Congratulations to all of you who have placed yourselves in debt for the rest of your and your children’s lives in order to go to the University of Washington, the self-styled “University of a Thousand Years,” the largest single campus west of Texas (the Calif. system is decentralized among many smaller sites). I’ve been there. I know its secrets. You can get a lot out of this place, if you know how. It’s my job here to tell you how. But first, some fun facts.

The UW is not, as is sometimes claimed by outsiders, a football team with a college attached to it. It’s really a research hospital with a college attached to it. A half dozen med school profs make more money than the governor. The medical center grew to world-class status thanks to our late, influential Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson, who channeled a lot of big federal research grants its way. Call it pork barrel if you will; but if the AIDS vaccine they’re working on (now in preliminary human tests) proves effective, a lot of people will be thankful the place exists.

The UW’s already made one medical miracle, the artificial kidney machine. Back when the first experimental unit was built, they set up a committee to decide who got to use it. It was called the “God Squad,” because (1) it always included at least one minister, and (2) it chose patients from among people who would die without the treatment. You can learn more about this in the “Seattle Hits” exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry, and in Adam Woog’s book about local inventions, Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats.

While the lower campus (hospital, stadium) achieved national recognition, the arts and sciences departments on the upper campus struggled, due to their dependence on regular state funding. If good comp-lit and anthropology profs get better offers from Stanford, the UW won’t try too hard to keep them. Newer upper-campus buildings have been built in that brutal, “efficient” architecture that ends up costing in the long run because of all the cheap materials used. We don’t even get good graduation speakers.

The Times ran some recent “exposes” about the UW president’s lavish lifestyle. The stories first made it appear as an extravegance at taxpayer expense, but then it turned out that president Wm. Gerberding’s mansion and furnishings are largely paid for by a private fund, endowed by a timber baron who wanted a stately site for bigwig functions. So, while you can’t complain to the state about the palatial home most of you’ll never visit, you can complain to the fund that it ought to consider spending some dough on vital repairs to some of the functioning campus buildings. (At least the state found money this year to hire a window washer for the campus, a position that was left unfilled for over a decade.)

Our state government likes to congratulate itself on “supporting quality education” without having to actually do so, especially if it involves spending money. (Evergreen was created to be a profit center for the state college system, attracting rich kids at full out-of-state tuition.)

There’s always been an element in the Legislature that’s fearful of people with ideas. Various UW-related people were harassed by commie-bashers from the ’20s through the ’50s. One of these was Henry Suzzallo, whose support for progressive ideas got him hounded out of his post as university president in the ’30s; he eventually got a library named for him. The independent Seattle Repertory Playhouse, producers of “distinctive plays” for many years, got ousted from its UW-owned building on University Way amidst McCarthy-era red baiting against its provocative productions. Glenn Hughes, the late UW drama prof who backed the drive to put the Playhouse out of business, now has his name on the place. That was the context behind the harassment of Frances Farmer, a very cool UW actress who flirted with left-wing causes and caught a lot of flack in the local press for it, before she went off to L.A. and severe emotional burnout. While she was here, she reportedly dated another acting student, future news anchorman Chet Huntley.

This is a big institution, a good place to get lost in. It’s full of a lot of diverse people, doing a lot of diverse stuff. My advice: take the classes you think you’ll need to get a job to pay off your student loans. But also study anything and everything else. Do not, under any circumstances, become obsessed about a career to the exclusion of everything else (you’ll probably not find a job in your first-choice career anyway). Get a healthy dose of input from all facets of knowledge. Take regular classes, extension classes, Experimental College classes. Wander the 4.3-million volume library system every chance you get, especially the old and foreign magazines in Suzallo. Go to plays and shows. Get involved in a political group or two. Learn from experience about what you want out of sex (safely). Your high school personality and reputation are now erased; go out and learn who you really are.

The UW gathers a lot of people from across our great state. A lot of them are reasonably intelligent people whose decimated local schools didn’t prepare them right. They show up in class, blissfully unaware that some instructor who came from a decent educational background back East will humiliate ’em in class for not already knowing all the things they came here to learn. The following is a brief list of topics upon which you should bone:

• Antipopes
• Atwood, Margaret
• Borges, Jorges Luis
• Brecht, Bertolt
• Calvino, Italo
• Cassidy, Neal
• Cather, Willa
• Colon, Cristobol (evil deeds of)
• Combining forms
• Co-opting
• Derrida, Jacques
• Diacritical marks
• Endocrinology
• Fauvism
• Foucault, Jean Bernard
• Fourier, Charles
• Genet, Jean
• Goddess, The
• Hellman, Lillian
• Hurston, Zora Neale
• Inge, William
• Internet
• Ionesco, Eugene
• Kahlo, Frida
• Kampuchea
• Le Corbusier
• Levi-Strauss, Claude
• Marcuse, Herbert
• McCarthy, Eugene
• McCarthy, Mary
• Mingus, Charles
• Morrison, Toni
• Mott, Lucretia
• Multiculturalism
• National Security Agency
• Neopaganism
• New Guinea (the only place where societies live the way they should)
• O’Connor, Flannery
• Ortega, Manuel
• Other, The
• Paris Commune, The
• Patriarchy, The
• Physiology, human
• Postmodernism
• Quantum mechanics (aesthetic implications of)
• Paz, Octavio
• P.E.N.
• Physiological terminology
• Politics, office
• Politics, personal
• Politics, sexual
• Prepositions
• Rainforests
• Rand, Ayn
• Ray, Man
• Recorded history (why we were better off before it)
• Reifenstahl, Leni
• Reynolds, Malvina
• Rothko, Mark
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
• Sacco and Vanzetti
• Sappho
• Schoenberg, Arnold
• Schopenhauer, Arthur
• Symbolic logic
• Theory, literary
• Title IX
• Varese, Edgar
• Veganism
• Walker, Alice (early poetry of)
• Wertmuller, Lina
• Wheat (dangers of eating)

Stuff you won’t have to know to make it in college, but ought to anyway (you may never again have access to a 4-million-volume library system):

• Dance, modern
• Foreign currency
• Foreign languages
• Foreign magazines
• Greek and Roman gods
• Massage
• Rosicrucianism
• Shinto
• Shortwave radio
• Radio (old time)
• Rhythm and blues music, especially the original versions of all the songs you think Led Zep and the Stones wrote themselves
• Sexual experimentation (safely)
• Surrealism
• Word origins