The Freshman 40 (Years, That Is)

Sooner or later I was bound to feel the need to comment on something that might actually be considered "newsworthy." Sure enough, Fox News has come to the rescue. For it was today during a masochistic perusal of that network's afternoon offerings that I first encountered the story of Roger "Rusty" Martin, the 61-year-old president of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. It seems that he has enrolled as a freshman at St. John's College in Anapolis, Maryland, ostensibly to find out what it is like to be a college student in this day and age.

First, allow me to get all of the cards out on the table. I have recently graduated from college, and the first sensation I encountered upon entering the so-called "real world" was that I will never--never--be able to return to the college life, no matter how comforting, intriguing, or stimulating it might seem to me, say 40 years down the line. I say this despite the fact that my alma mater is heavy on the reunions gambit and there is an annual opportunity to return to the campus for a weekend of escapist amusement and nostalgia.

However, it remains brutally clear to me that no matter how much I might like to return to college, such an eventuality simply is not possible. Even to return for a graduate degree in the immediate future would likely only serve to underscore this fact. College is many things to many people, but once you are out you are an adult, for better or for worse.

Try telling that to Tom Wolfe, whose new book, I Am Charlotte Simmons, seems already to have become a sensation. In researching the current condition of the American campus, Wolfe traveled to a number of schools, including my own. In a recent interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Wolfe, aged 74, mentioned with a certain prurient interest that he had met young women who kept details of their sexual encouters in a rolodex. Such entries were annotated with "A"s and "O"s, he claimed, though he also claimed to be at a loss for what such encryptions might mean. Right.

The motives for Rusty's collegiate sojourn, on the other hand, are more elusive. He is a cancer survivor, for one thing, so I am hard pressed to question his intent. It is clear, however, that like virtually every college alumnus you will ever meet, he had a hard time adjusting to college life during his freshman year, at Denison University in Ohio--so much so, in fact, that he ended up transferring to Drew University.

But the Fox interviewer, whose name escapes me, seemed especially interested to hear what awkward moments might have arisen in the dorms by virtue of having a 61-year-old man potentially in the midst of scantily clad 20-year-olds. Rusty was clearly made somewhat uncomfortable by this question, and said when pressed that he had done all he could to avoid such situations, keeping his research into the "freshman experience" purely academic in nature.

This brings me, finally, to my point. Even at a school like St. John's (not to be confused with Ron Artest's alma mater in Queens), the freshman experience cannot possibly be understood by attending seminars alone. In fact, not even Tom Wolfe's probing research could have been sufficient. It is my belief that the stuff of the college experience takes place mostly in precisely the places that neither Rusty nor Tom were able to go--in the dorms, at watering holes, behind closed doors. Whatever their motives, attempting to understand what life is like for a college freshman is something that neither a 61-year-old nor a 74-year-old could ever achieve, at least not without endangering their health by taking them well beyond the seminar rooms and the sexual rolodexes of sorority girls.

I could go on at some length about this, but mostly I would be repeating what I have already said. The main point is this: if Roger "Rusty" Martin had a bad time as a freshman 40 years ago, nothing he does now will undo that or validate his earlier experience. At the same time, no research done by Tom Wolfe could ever succeed in truly exposing the depths of depravity one encounters on college campuses these days, and even if it could, I wouldn't trust Wolfe to write about it, especially from the perspective of a female.

I'll admit that I have only read exerpts of Charlotte Simmons, but what I've read confirmed this opinion. I've been out of college for all of six months, and even I would be unable to do literary justice to the things I saw, learned, and experienced in those four years. If sexagenarian intellectuals believe that they will learn something by returning to college to have a look around, I suppose there is no harm in that. But when we begin looking to the observations of such tourists to find out about a life to which we cannot return, we are truly kidding ourselves.

Besides, as far as I'm concerned, Will Ferrell has a much better bead on things.