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Back then gas stations rather than parking lots ringed the campus. The Hotel Oaks loomed on Second Street, but there were no highrise dorms, no PAC or BMU or Butte Hall, and the student store resembled a backstreet boutique. Nor had the library achieved its present grandiose dimensions and spaceport demeanor. Students were addressed as “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss,” and male instructors wore coats and ties (other things too), though I would daringly remove my jacket, turn back my cuffs and pull my necktie slack–let the heavens fall! All this changed abruptly between 1968 and 1970, when I was on leave and returned with Rip Van Winkle amazement to find the campus expanding, buildings springing up and my male colleagues now bushyfaced and rigged out like migrant workers or Hells Angels. Students were barefoot and pointedly slovenly and defied anyone to instruct them. It was not a happy time. That too changed, of course, and it would be pleasant to go on marking such alterations, especially the sartorial surprises, right down to the present day of bloomers, baggy T-shirts and baseball caps worn backwards to produce the ever popular cretinous look. Or it might be profitable to reverse direction and return to the original Chico Normal School with its sobering disciplinary code requiring cheerfulness and advising against keeping the company of the opposite sex. To me, however, the truly extraordinary change is the most obvious and least noticed–the runaway specialization, a kind of “adaptive radiation,” so that thinking about CSU, Chico today, you realize that instead of one university there are several–maybe many–existing close together yet mostly invisible to each other. To describe them all might take a book, but let me mention two. For thirty years I have been reading student plays, poems, stories and occasional novels. For a long time I rarely saw much reflection of “college” life in these works. Students wrote about many things but almost never about the actual day to day existence in a university. This reticence began to disappear, probably in the late seventies, and I have since read countless pieces about life in fraternities, sororities, “dorms” and other “living groups.” Depictions of classrooms, lecture halls or the library are still rare, but now I experience vicariously student life, and marvel at how self-sustaining and autonomous it is–a culture not so much “sub” as simply there, with its own values, mores, drama and economic system, existing as though on some other planet and worthy of serious anthropological study. Less interesting but similarly undetected is the world of academic scholarship. Here, though, invisibility is inevitable. College teaching and research are solitary occupations for the most part. The great mass of the work is accomplished by people on their own, and the incurably gregarious drift into administration or cling to committees. Thus, the enormous expenditure of energy exists unseen, as I discovered some years ago, more or less by accident. At that time, not wanting to disturb my family on weekend mornings, I would go down to my office about 7 or 7:30 a.m. On winter Saturdays and Sundays the building wasn’t heated, and despite a 32-ounce L. L. Bean shirt, I could last only an hour and a half before fleeing to Helen’s Donut Nook while hardier types labored on. In fact, all up and down the corridor from behind closed doors came the chatter of typewriters and the wheezing and clucking of word processors, as my shivering comrades (one caught pneumonia) pounded away like so many trolls in a mine, each with a project but no one aware of what anyone else was doing. Some of this compulsiveness found its way into print, usually in journals so esoteric that only a small body of initiates had heard of them. At times, then, it seems that the real life of the university–and maybe any institution–is, if not exactly subversive, hidden and self-directing, or rather a collection of such lives moving in parallel lines. I still think with astonished fondness of a long ago class cancelled because of the instructor’s illness yet continuing to meet without teacher, credit or official existence until uncovered near the semester’s end. Things do go their own dark way. Which raises the question whether it is really possible to direct and guide so various a thing as a modern university, or whether education determines its own shape and presence as blindly and inexorably as geological phenomena. For Annie Bidwell the area here was the “Wilderness,” which she meant to tame, and Chico Normal was a part of that domestication, “Path to a clear-purposed goal,/Path of advance!”, as Mathew Arnold wrote only twenty years before the normal school appeared. How much simpler things must have seemed back then. Today we are told (by the President and others) that “everyone” should go to college, and since there are supposed to be three hundred million of us by the year 2010, that could mean a lot of bluebooks. It may be that merely receiving such an army is a challenge so daunting there will be no room for any other “clear-purposed goal.” Personally, I expect CSU, Chico, like most universities, to assert a will of its own, countering and qualifying “master” and other plans, just as it countered the master plan of that young self-confident instructor who meant to stay a single year.
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Clark Brown in the 1960's (top) and in 1997 (bottom). |
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