When our daughter was still a little kid, my husband and I regularly visited my sister’s family in northwestern Connecticut. (A city kid, our daughter was deprived of garden snakes and tree frogs, and she always loved to visit her country cousins.) We’d drive north from New York, up Route 22, and pass right by the New York State Harlem-Wingdale Residential Psychiatric Center — a sprawling campus consisting of several red brick buildings whose fenestration was defined by ominous-looking iron grates. (Eventually, the institution shut its doors and was sold to a private real estate developer.)

For whatever reason, at some point we started to refer to it jokingly as “Fendrich University.” I’d point to the stately building right near the entry gates and say, “That’ll be my administration building,” and my husband would choose the faraway architectural behemoth, high up the hill, and make plans for converting it into F.U.’s Athletic Center. Soon, we began to have long, drawn-out discussions about the school’s curriculum, which would quickly put our bored daughter to sleep for the duration of the ride.

My husband and I agreed that we’d never find a multibillionaire capricious enough to endow a real Fendrich U., but that didn’t stop us from conversationally designing its curriculum. Since modeling it on a traditional school such as Williams or Kenyon or Mount Holyoke was tediously predictable, and since I rejected out of hand my husband’s insistent proposal for an anti-St. John’s college based on his “One Hundred Crap Books” program, we agreed that Fendrich U. would be a liberal arts college — with a twist.

The school would combine the ideas of my cynically rational, somewhat hard-hearted husband, with the lofty ideals I hold about what makes a human being “educated” and what makes knowledge worth pursuing. My husband and I agreed that every college graduate should know enough about numbers to understand a Wall Street Journal discussion about subprime mortgages (and to negotiate with a lender); enough about writing to produce an essay using correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, paragraph development, and rational argumentation; and possess enough reading comprehension to read an essay tackling important ideas and containing big words.

To all of this I added the requirement that our graduates should live with a sense of obligation — if not zeal — to contribute to what is best and most beautiful in the world. In fact, Fendrich University’s “mission statement” (were it to be forced to come up with one by an accrediting organization) would begin, “Fendrich University aims to educate students to become literate, numerate, and thoughtful citizens.”

Fendrich University would be based on semesters consisting of 4 four-credit courses, culminating in a 128-credit B.A. degree. There would be no majors. Grades would consist of A through F, with no minuses or pluses (any mention of the dreaded grade of “B minus” while on campus would be grounds for immediate dismissal from the college — and this edict would include faculty).

There’d be about 400 students per class. “For those of you who graduated from Brown,” as Michael Thomas used to like to say when he wrote regularly for The Observer and wanted to stick it to graduates of elite colleges who had studied nothing but semiotics, that’s a total student body of 1600 students.

1. A letter of recommendation from a friend (it would consist of lies, obviously, but at least we’d learn what kind of person the applicant hung out with during high school)

2. A high school transcript (they still tell an awful lot about an applicant)

3. A 5-paragraph essay explaining why the applicant wants to come to Fendrich University (we get to see the baseline writing of our applicant)

4. A signed agreement to not leave campus whenever classes are in session (students have to become full citizens of the Fendrich community, and not flee to the big city or a Vermont ski resort every other weekend)

Graduation requirements would be:

1. 128 academic credits, following the general education requirements laid out by the administration (consisting of the president — me — and her snarky secretary).

2. Completion of two freshman orientation weeks of lectures, workshops, and films.

3. Completion of two required exercise courses on a P/F basis (pass means you show up).

4. An overall average of C or better (“average” is not shameful at Fendrich U.; “excellence” is valued, although publicly honored only at graduation).

5. Achievement of fluency in a modern language other than the student’s native language. (Note: “fluent” doesn’t mean the ability to discuss Heidegger in another language; it simply means the ability to read a newspaper and have a dinner-table conversation in that language.)

6. Achieve the level of competence in pre-calculus in mathematics (determined by an examination).

7. Pass an English rhetoric and composition examination (determined by a test that consists of reading comprehension and writing essays, administered in the middle of the sophomore year).

The great fun of Fendrich U. — or any Your-Name-Here University—is that you, the president and CEO, determine everything. There’s no board of trustees, no money worries, and except for you and your secretary, no administration. Moreover, since there’s no prestige or job training to be gained by attending your school, its students really, really want to be there. In my next post, I’ll lay out the particulars of F.U.’s four-year curriculum.