First Person

Reunion Blues

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By Thomas H. Benton

A few weeks ago I decided to attend the annual reunion of the Ivy League graduate school where I had received my doctorate. Even though I would need to fly and spend four nights (to get the cheapest airfare), I thought it would be a good chance to touch base with a group of people with similar experiences and to talk about developments in research and teaching in the humanities.

I got up early and was one of the first to arrive on the day of the reunion. I put on my nametag and sat in a student desk in the middle of a vast lecture hall, eating a bagel with cream cheese. Echoes from my china coffee cup and saucer disappeared in the corners of a ceiling that seemed a quarter mile away.

The lecture hall had once been an undergraduate dining room. Portraits spanning generations of major donors covered the walls; some wore 18th-century wigs, others were Gilded Age industrialist types. Layers of new technology were bolted on the original Georgian architecture: ornate, cast-iron radiators from the Victorian era, a Spartan sprinkler system from the 1940s, and a brand new digital projection system hanging from the ceiling. The projector, I thought, probably cost more than I had made in the last two years as an assistant professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college.

The other attendees began arriving in small groups that have no collective name in English. Most were over 70; a few seemed to push the outer limits of academic geezerdom. They wore the uniforms of establishment decrepitude: blue blazers with special brass buttons and bow ties on the men; tweed suits with elaborate silk scarves and jaunty hats for the women. I realized I was underdressed in my department-store sport coat. I looked like I should be operating the projector. There was something about their smiles of recognition that recalled newsreels of Woodrow Wilson: a wince followed by the click of dentures. When they met, there were restrained nods, fumblings with hearing aids, and gesticulations with shiny wooden canes.

A member of the host committee, herself about 50, asked one of the guests in a loud, enthusiastic voice: "HOW OLD ARE YOU, SIR."

"WHAT'S THAT?" he said.

"HOW OLD ARE YOU!" she said, as everyone turned.

"NINETY-SEVEN," he said, and he shook his cane.

A smattering of applause flickered through the hall. He was not yet dead. A significant percentage of the guests were not impressed.

Not everyone looked like the stereotypical academic donor. There were a few bohemian types. A Gertrude Stein look-alike scanned the room, scowling; one man reminded me of Lytton Strachey, wisp-bearded with flowing gray hair and long fingers that flexed against each other like two spiders. I considered breaking into their circles of conversation, but there was something about their mien that kept me at a distance -- an aloofness that could only be provoked into gracious condescension. No one is ever overtly rude at such events, but there is an unconscious awareness of the gulf between classes. One will be asked, "Where are you from originally?" And one simply cannot answer such a question without the details revealing everything worth knowing about one's origins.

If it were not for all the meals I had scheduled with former advisers, colleagues, and nonacademic friends, I would have felt like this trip was a mistake -- the sort that some scholarship student makes every few years. Someone who is so outside the loop that they don't even know that these events are fund raisers. I considered leaving until I realized that none of this really mattered. I was on the guest list, and I didn't need to network. I existed in a different world from these people. I could study them like a cultural historian, and I could take in the luxuries unobserved.

The food was excellent, and I ate more than my share. Fresh bagels, Danishes, jams made that morning by an assistant chef, and coffee in silver urns with brass plates. The napkins were cloth and embroidered with the university seal. The quality and opulence, the attention to detail -- the best that too much money can buy. These things are so seductive when one doesn't experience them regularly. Liveried servants, invisible until that instant, topped off my coffee precisely when I needed them to. One replaced my wrinkled napkin with a gesture of deference. I looked to them for recognition ("I'm one of you. I sneaked in the back door!"), but they were on autopilot, completing their tasks with courteous detachment.

I confess that I enjoyed these luxuries, including the attention of servants. But I wonder what their presence does to people who take them for granted. I realized how hard it would be to conduct socially responsible academic work in such an institutional context -- like riding a camel through the eye of a needle.

At the appointed hour, the president of the university glided into the room surrounded by his entourage of deans, photographers, videographers, and microphone wranglers. After a series of introductions by people who owed him their jobs, the president gave a stunning extemporaneous speech on the virtues of free markets and private property. His conclusion: "No one ever puts premium gas in a rented car." Flashbulbs exploded, creating a stop-motion, strobe-light effect as he departed amid applause and rapping canes.

I decided that I would go to the prearranged luncheon at the Faculty Club. Arriving a few minutes late, I found an empty seat at the corner of a table, planning to hover on the edge of other peoples' conversations.

After some excellent wine, meteorological observations gave way to conversations about genealogy and recent marriages between old business dynasties and the surviving noveau riche of the new economy. Men discussed how their holdings escaped the recent economic downturn (advance information, of course). Women talked about couture in Paris and New York and what kind of food was served at so-and-so's party on the Vineyard. Both discussed the recent goings on at Christie's and Sotheby's. I found not the slightest conversational handhold. Not even any academic shoptalk on Sanskrit and Chaos Theory.

In fact, none of the people there seemed to be practicing academics. Most were retired, and many had never used their degrees professionally. Those who worked in the profession -- often at the school where they had received their degree in the 60s -- were the holders of sinecures with inscrutable titles such as "Master Prefect of the Inner Quad." Others appeared to have drifted in and out of jobs, never publishing anything, but sustained by personal connections and inherited financial security. A few seemed to regard graduate education the way I thought of a course in basket weaving: "It gives one something to stave off boredom."

Was I in a Henry James novel? This had to be another era in the academy!

At the cocktail party at the end of the day, I finally met another graduate who had, in fact, shared some of my impressions of the reunion and found it difficult to talk with the other attendees. A 50-year-old mail carrier with a Ph.D. Working-class, Polish, Roman Catholic, first-generation college educated, a striver as a young man; he had drifted around in the academy but could never find a full-time, tenure-track job, despite having published two books before the age of 30. (I had actually read one of them!)

After his first child was born (three more would follow), he took a temporary job with the post office, which eventually became full-time with benefits. For many years he thought about returning to teaching, but the steady income and benefits provided by a government job enabled him to support his family in a way that seemed impossible in the academy for someone like him, despite his Ivy League education. He was interested in my current projects and offered some good insights that reflected a continuing knowledge of his field. He seemed to have overcome the resentment I felt on his behalf. He was proud that his oldest daughters were studying literature in the same graduate school, even though I felt private anxiety for their fate. They were doing what they loved, right? That's what mattered to him, he said.

I realized how lucky I was to have a tenure-track job at all, but I didn't doubt for a minute that he had made the right choice -- one I might have had to make if my search had fallen short. For all the academy's declarations of inclusiveness, some parts -- the economic substrata, in particular -- have not changed all that much.

I gave him my business card; and he wrote his information for me on a napkin. He was the only contact I made that day.