Berkeley 2015

As noted in a post last spring, the University of California had offered my great niece admission to its freshman class in the College of Natural Resources.  Maya accepted that offer, and began classes a couple of weeks ago.

On Sunday, while visiting with family in Sonoma, I traveled to Berkeley -- together with Maya's mother, step father, and younger sister -- to see how Maya was doing.  I can only assume that she's doing fine in her classes -- we didn't talk much about class work, so early in the term -- but it's amply apparent that she has fit in admirably with her classmates and dorm mates, and with the entire Berkeley zeitgeist.

I'd been on the Berkeley campus several times in the past, but each time while caught up in a great hysteria over an afternoon's football game.  I didn't see much farther than the stadium.   "Cal" was a word that formed nothing but half of the phrase "Beat Cal," so far as my undergraduate self was concerned.  And, perhaps, even some of my older selves.

But now, as an older, wiser human being, less prone to wild hormonal swings and with fewer pronounced tendencies to see all things -- including the merits of every college but my own -- in Manichean terms of black and white, evil and virtue, I'm happy to report that I found the Berkeley campus to be quite handsome, both in its natural beauty and in its monumental architecture.  And that -- even more surprising -- I found Cal students -- at least those members of the Cal student body I had the pleasure of meeting -- to be quite charming and seemingly highly intelligent.

Who'd a thunk it?

We visited Maya's floor of her dorm, a floor occupied by both men and women.  I knew all about, and was expecting, this bi-gender living arrangement, but it contrasted vividly with my own memories of women's dorms that served as closely guarded fortified castles -- castles that permitted male presence only under highly restrictive conditions and for severely limited periods of time, castles whose drawbridges were raised nightly at a relatively early hour -- preventing both entrance and egress.

Nowadays, guys and girls share communal rest rooms, brushing their teeth nightly, side by side:  An activity that would have been hard to envision, back in days when it would have been equally hard to
imagine women eating dinner -- or wanting to -- side by side with men in the same dining hall.  ("Dining halls" are now something of a misnomer; dorm residents today eat all over campus in pleasant buildings that look like public cafeterias, open from the street.)

Not only have the dorms changed, but so has the zeitgeist.  I went to school just as student unrest was becoming the defining characteristic of American universities -- and it was the Berkeley campus that was leading the charge.  Now?  Well, Maya and her classmates had a class assignment to organize a protest, and, apparently, to document their achievement.  They pounced on the crisis presented by California's current severe drought, and organized a (tiny) protest against the watering of lawns.  My family was drafted to swell the number of participants that were to appear in photographs of this somewhat smallish demonstration.

But I'm now proud to say that I did not go through life without participating in a Berkeley student protest.

I enjoyed the day's visit immensely, liked the campus, was happy to see Maya so happy.  And I was gratified to realize how smoothly I could make, for a day, the mental transition back to being an undergraduate -- assisted by the tactful willingness of Maya's friends to feign belief that we fell into an age grouping only a few years beyond graduation.

And the best part of our "return to campus" was of course this: When Maya finally told us that she really had to finish schoolwork for her next day's classes -- we simply hugged goodbye, jumped into our car, and returned to our adult lives, adult lives free of burning midnight oil and of nagging guilt over still unwritten essays..