I attended the Class of 1982's twenty-fifth anniversary reunion at Macalester College in June, and have been digesting the experience ever since. Some thoughts....

Many people find value in a reunion's networking: Reconnecting with old friends, retelling old tales, and spinning new tales about the shared trip to middle age. I'm not one of those folks. My reunion was more about memory, about exploring a familiar neighborhood, about revisiting a place that still gives my life a foundation.

My networking efforts failed, anyway. Of eighty or so classmates who attended the reunion, only two clearly remembered me. My odd academic history made for some discomfort, as many conversations necessarily began with a discussion of why I didn't seem familiar. My response involved enrolling at Mac in 1967, dropping out as a sophomore, a Vietnam year, classes at another institution, a decade spent mostly working in politics, and returning to complete my degree. My January graduation further confounds things.

Our Class Reunion theme was "Get Over It." This theme implies an unasked question: Was (is) the Macalester experience worth the price? The question came up by implication in those conversations with imperfectly-remembered classmates, by reference in a presentation exploring our responses to a reunion survey, and quite explicitly twice at the Class Dinner: Our hostess (Mary Morse Marti, I think) wandered around the topic for several minutes before explicitly raising the question as something she still found difficult to answer, and Macalester's President Brian Rosenberg told us he considers all the early-eighties classes to be problems because their members have largely detached themselves from the community. These concerns have causes.

My classmates experienced the tail-end of the school's budget crisis, and it's quite possible to portray their college years harshly. They (we) remember the classrooms and dorms at their worst--old buildings, in many cases, whose maintenance had been deferred, then deferred again, as the college stumbled through the seventies. They attended a school whose glory years--the sixties--seemed impossible to recover in a very different political and economic climate, and whose present was dominated by fiscal concerns. Entire departments were, in the memories of my classmates, academically inadequate; students who concentrated in those disciplines feel particularly aggrieved about their Macalester experience. And, of course, my class directly remembers the football losing streak, which ended during "our" junior year (quotes because I wasn't actually there).

For many of my classmates, then, their college career is a bitter-sweet memory. It strained the family budget, and left them personally in heavy debt, without delivering the satisfactions they'd thought--and still think--they should get from a liberal arts education. Their dissatisfaction is grounded in reality, and their questions about value are reasonable. Perhaps it really was an exercise in futility.

A final annoyance: After we graduated, the school's finances recovered. While no one begrudges our successors their good fortune, it gives us yet another unsatisfactory comparison. It's really quite sane to believe the early-80s classes at Mac drew a bad hand.

While I think this is a fair summary of the sentiments I heard at the reunion, it's certainly as distorted a portrait of Macalester as the Oversimplified History I sketched a few days ago. I'll talk about why in the next installment.

Context: Macalester is a small liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was a Mac freshman in 1967, and graduated with the class of 1982.

Anyone from the Mac community who stumbles upon this essay is encouraged correct or enhance it in the comments. Thanks.

A Vastly Oversimplified History of Macalester College

Every campus has a narrative, and that narrative shapes the college culture. These stories may emphasize unimportant details; they ignore entire decades. Macalester's, like most, begins with a founder, has a key figure who shaped the college, skips lightly through the decades, mentions some key teachers and graduates, describes a major crisis, and looks brightly to the future. To the best of my ability, here's the Macalester story.

If anyone's done a similar narrative for another school, I'd be grateful for a pointer. Thanks.

Edward Duffield Neill & Charles Macalester

Edward Duffield Neill founded Macalester College in 1874, served as its first president, and taught classes for many years. The minister to St. Paul's First Presbyterian Church, Neill had been Minnesota's Superintendent of Public Education and Chancellor of the State University (The U's ancestor, apparently). He'd subsequently had positions in the Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Grant administrations. Banker/financier Charles Macalester, now famous mostly for owning a fancy house overlooking the Delaware, made a real estate contribution to the young school, but plays no other role in this tale. Since Neill and Macalester were both Philadelphia natives, prominent Presbyterians, and politically active, albeit from different generations, I presume they were acquainted.

James Wallace

James Wallace, who joined the faculty in 1887 and taught until 1939, is the most important single individual in the school's history. Dr. Wallace was Macalester's president from 1894 through 1906; his presidential term both stabilized the college finances and established the college culture. One of the dorms is named after President Wallace, and the Fine Arts Center bears his wife's name.

Among Dr. Wallace's legacies to his college was his son....

DeWitt Wallace

If you've spent a few days on the campus, you've likely heard a Readers Digest joke. All Mac students and alumni recognize a heavy debt to the magazine; that recognition generally expresses itself as irony.

DeWitt Wallace began his student career at Mac about the time Dr. Wallace surrendered his presidency and returned to teaching. The younger Wallace made his fortune as the founder/editor of Readers Digest. While he did not graduate from Macalester, his affection for the school ensured the school's financial stability for much of the twentieth century.

There's more about Wallace down the page, but we'll skip to the end for now: DeWitt Wallace passed away on March 30, 1981. (Concert Choir, of which I was a member, sang at his memorial service.) It soon became clear that his will provided a substantial endowment for the college, though the gift had significant emcumbrances.

The school's library, built in the mid-eighties, bears DeWitt Wallace's name.

Macalester students are told a story involving DeWitt Wallace, a cow, a stairway, and Old Main. Dunno if it's true.

Charles Turck

Dr. Turck was President of Macalester College from 1939 through 1958. The school has a decidedly international focus; this is a Turck legacy.

Digression: Hubie & Others

Hubert Humphrey taught at Macalester during World War II; he returned to the school after his Vice-Presidency. The Humphrey anecdote at Mac describes a class session which continued for hours, adjourned for supper, and resumed in the evening.

Macalester's most generally famous current faculty members appear to be Diane Glancy and Wang Ping; former choral director Dale Warland also has some fame, as does one-time Newton's Apple host Jan Serie. As you'd anticipate, many current and former faculty members are well-known within their academic disciplines. David White, Mary Gwen Owen, Ted Mitau, Dave McCurdy, Hildegard Johnson, Chuck Green--these fine teachers, famous within Macalester's community memory, had less public impact beyond the campus.

Walter and Joan Mondale are Macalester alumni. Kofi Annan graduated from Mac. More recent alums include Tim O'Brien (the writer, not the singer), Bob Mould, Charles Baxter, Dorothy Benham, Jeremy & JJ Allaire, Stephen Paulus, Pete Fenn, and Peter Berg. (Someone please mention more women I should include on this list. Miji Reoch seems to be the best I can manage, and it's likely you've never heard of her.)

The two preceding paragraphs are necessarily time and interest bound. Another author would certainly name different names, though I'd anticipate some overlaps.

Alex Haley spent a lot of time on campus, though he wasn't part of the faculty. Apparently he wrote Roots (or was it Malcolm X's autobiography?) in what used to be International House but is now the President's Residence.

Then there's the football thing.

Steeples

Macalester sought to raise its academic profile during the sixties. This campaign had several components; these included a building spree, several new faculty hires, and a fair bit of curricular experimentation. The key component, to all appearances, was a decision to enlist better students. Ten percent of my freshman classmates were National Merit Scholarship finalists. Other schools recruit football players; Mac recruited--and still recruits--bright kids. The school also went out of its way to encourage the enrollment of international and minority students, with interesting effects on the campus culture.

At my first Macalester convocation, someone (I think it was the provost) compared Mac to Stanford, and talked about creating "Pinnacles of Excellence" within the college community. Rich Greenwood turned this image into a parody of the Up with People theme song: "Up, Up, with Steeples! You meet 'em wherever you go. Up, Up, with Steeples! They're the best kind of profs, you know. If more people met more steeples, more steeples everywhere, there'd be a lot more people to worry about, and a lot less people who cared."

Simultaneous with the change in the student makeup was a political shift; late-sixties Macalester was considerably left-of-center, even after you allow for the national and local political landscapes. This was an engagement politics: One fifth of the student body was active in the 1968 election (I know this because I helped coordinate that effort), and I'm one of scores who remained active in the Democratic Party.

There's some evidence that the college overhaul was built on a risky financial foundation.

The Financial Crisis

The campus changes evidently didn't sit well with our benefactor, as Mr. Wallace severely reduced his commitment to the school around 1970. This reduction nearly undid the college, as the school's relationship with Wallace approached dependency. After a couple difficult years, the trustees appointed a new president and reached an accommodation with the Wallace family. A decade of retrenchment followed, during which maintenance was neglected, school fundraising was diversified, and (according to student memory) the college wandered from its educational mission.

Recovery

DeWitt Wallace's will created several foundations, one of which became the basis for securing the Macalester endowment. This gift made the college Famously Rich, and permitted the school to recover its educational mission. While there've been a few setbacks along the way, the school remains well-to-do.

Except that tuition and board have gotten ridiculously expensive, the school prospers. We all look forward to Good Things.

Remember the headline, atop this discourse: An oversimplified history. This little essay's largely factual, but it's a myth.

Courtesy of A Capella News

A couple years back, I bought the DWS recording of Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb.  I'd sung the piece in high school; Tom Kasdorf is partial to Britten, and our choir was up to the technical challenge.  In TK's first rehearsal he introduced us to Christopher Smart's  Cat Jeoffry, who's been following me around ever since. 

When the Warland Singers recording arrived, I picked it up at the post office on my way to work and popped the CD into the player on my desk.  Suddenly, a bit over a minute into the performance, a vision of Dale, in a rehearsal on Macalester's stage, dancing and chattering the complex rhythms of Britten's second movement:

Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter....

It was probably our second rehearsal.  We'd stumbled badly on a run-through, and Warland was isolating the technical problems.  We worked on the rhythms for a time, added the words when he was confident we'd mastered the counts, and finally fit the music to the section.  I'd forgotten I'd sung this at Mac.  But I'd not forgotten Dale's teaching methods.

Best wishes, Dale.  Hope the new career goes as well as the Singers.

While the music's very much to my taste, the prices are a little steep; at these rates, I can't imagine taking in more than one or two concerts.  And I'll be out of town for Leo Kottke's appearance, which would be my first choice.

Amazing what you can find on the web:

Macalester College had a student-run coffee house, No Exit, which lived behind the college grill in the Student Union's basement in the late '60s. It was a cozy, black-painted place with good entertainment, good sound, and decent food.  Leo, who struck me as a young white man impersonating an old drunken blues singer, played there regularly when I was a freshman and a sophomore.  (The music redeemed the act.)  I was almost certainly there the night these recordings were made by No Exit's soundman, Alan Peterman.

A few days later I dropped out, which led pretty directly to my army career.

Addition, 11/1/07: Nosing around Peterman's site, I find he's also posted a couple complete Dean Carr performances at No Exit (and others, from other Twin Cities places). I expect I heard the No Exit performances live. Worth a listen....

For a long time, the "most magical" headset recording I knew was the Robert Shaw Chorale's recording of the Bach B-Minor Mass, a rendition I first encountered in a college Music Appreciation class (it's actual name was Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky--but that's probably another day's tale). One evening's listening assignment included the last few movements of the Mass--Sanctus, and the several Osanna movements--and the only word was heavenly. The Dona Nobis at the end, in particular, builds from every side to a glorious climax of chorus and trumpets and kettle drums. Every time I hear the music it takes me back to a little room in the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center....

This little reminiscence courtesy of my Mac, which doubles as a music box. Every night I feed a few CDs to the machine, then (circumstances permitting) I don a headset at work the next day and listen mostly to randomly-ordered "new" musicks. So far I've stored about 5,000 "songs" in iTunes, and it looks like I'll reach 6K before I run out of compact disks.

One of last night's imports was the Eurythmic's Sweet Dreams album, and the title song came up a few minutes ago. There's really nothing like it; this song was clearly engineered in a headset. I'm not much of an Annie Lennox fan, but I really like this one song. Hard to believe, though, that I've been listening to it for twenty-some years.