The Graduate, Then and Now

I attended a women’s college—Douglass, part of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey—in the 1960s. We had our own separate campus and a highly regarded, brilliant faculty, with a majority proportion of female professors. We were especially proud of the school policy prohibiting sororities, deemed shallow and silly at best, exclusionary at worst.

I sought out Douglass for the excellent liberal arts education at low cost as an in-state resident, but there was a high ratio of math and science majors too. We considered ourselves on a par academically with the “Seven Sisters” private colleges, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, and Radcliffe.

But on the weekends, the girls filled the crosstown buses in droves to attend the frat parties at Rutgers. Many a classmate got “pinned” and engagement rings followed. My freshman roommate disappeared on the weekends, leading a social and sex life I couldn’t imagine. My sophomore roommate was a conscientious student like me, eventually going on to medical school. I lasted only half a year with my junior roommate. She needed the entire room to herself as her laundry piled up throughout the semester.

I had no interest in the fraternity boys. The sex and drinking scene was nothing I could relate to. I preferred my study carrel in the library. Weren’t studying, research, writing papers, and passing exams the true purpose of school?

My class of ‘66 experienced the terrifying close call of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement and I Have a Dream speech, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, anti-Vietnam war protests, birth of the women’s liberation movement, the Watts Riots, the Beatles coming to America, the stirrings of the sexual revolution, the psychedelic drug culture.

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, spoke at our chapel to an overflowing audience. We were the precise demographic she addressed in her writing, on the verge of breaking out of the rigid social and economic roles that trapped our mothers.

On the day President Kennedy was shot, I walked into the courtyard in front of the Science Building after botany lab to see my classmates standing in small groups, speaking in hushed tones, not moving on to the next class across campus scheduled in fifteen minutes. I became one of them, a traumatized young person, listening in shock, not learning until later that the president was dead.

I quickly walked back to my dorm to the television set in the basement communal room, and it was there that we remained in front of the screen for days as events unfolded. Then Mrs. Kennedy and their children at the funeral, our tears shed at the moment they knelt and touched the flag draped over the casket. It was no use trying to call home from the payphone—the Bell Telephone system was jammed for days.

When we rushed to visit our daughter on campus on the afternoon of 9/11, it occurred to me that the world changed suddenly for her generation just as it had changed for mine in November of 1963. College became the “real world” way before it was meant to be.

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I had signed up for work-study as wait staff in the dining hall. In the course of my college education, I learned how to carry seven full dinner plates on my arm from the kitchen to the table, a feat I did not think humanly possible. I never dropped a one, but there was always a disastrous crash to the floor at least once a year.

The next year, I received the coveted assignment of working in the post office in the student center. I had a boyfriend back home at the time and just grabbed his letters from the mailbag. Mail was a very big deal back then. I remember the parade of students checking their PO boxes after morning classes, and the disappointment that ruined the rest of the day if all they received was a lone school flyer.

In Phys Ed, we were required to learn to dive along with the basic repertoire of swim strokes. Speech 101, also a requirement, prepared us to express ourselves clearly and confidently. The instructor, Cecelia Drewry, an elegant African American woman, enunciated with a voice touched by nectar from the gods. I’m still convinced that the ulterior motive of this class was to sanitize our New Jersey accents, stripping “cup of caw-fee” forever from our vocabulary.

Looking back, I recognize elements of the classic “finishing school” imbedded in my college education. We were not far enough past mid-century to break free from those traditional elements of a well-rounded education for young women. I had the best of both worlds.

I stayed in New Brunswick for another year after graduation, a somewhat anti-climactic end to my college experience and the promise it held. I had hoped to attend grad school in New York City but my plans were derailed by a devastating breakup with my hometown boyfriend and the puzzling indifference of a prof from whom I needed a recommendation for an art history program.

Instead, I accepted a desk job with the Veterans Administration in Newark and became a daily commuter, not at all the future I had anticipated. It started out as a lonely year for me, with my Douglass classmates dispersing to their summer weddings, jobs, graduate schools, and the Peace Corps.

I met a Rutgers grad who lived in a houseboat in disrepair on the Raritan River. Jack was an adventurer, radical in mind and spirit, planning to travel to the Far East as soon as he could sell his boat. Our relationship added needed spice to my otherwise dead-in-the-water year in transition. A highlight—we walked in the New York City Peace March in April 1967. Soon after, Jack left for China. In the fall, I requested a transfer to parts unknown for me—Boston.

Leaving New Jersey behind surely meant my life would take flight into adulthood. And I was ready for it.

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Now, due to economic stresses, societal change, and academic politics, Douglass College no longer exists except as a residential campus for some Rutgers women who prefer a quieter, bucolic setting across town from the enormous university campus.

At my 50th reunion in 2016, I spent two overnights in my old dormitory, closing my eyes tightly after lights out to keep out the ghosts of the New Jersey girls whose presence I felt — including my own, the girl evolving into a young woman from 1962 to 1966.

The Douglass dorms had not changed since I lived there, the concrete block walls painted over countless times, like old prison cells. The carpets are badly worn, the bathroom fixtures never modernized, the same pink tiles eerily familiar. The one telephone booth in each wing had been torn out long ago.

My reunion class lamented the loss of the identity and heart of our school. But we renewed friendships and shared memories of our vibrant social and intellectual formative years when all that mattered was the excitement of learning and stepping fearlessly into our futures.

Many are doing exactly that this month across the country, crossing over into the “real world” that waits for them, just as a new world awaited me.