To School or Not to School

I was recently asked by novelist/photographer/teacher Cindy Bruchman (https://cindybruchman.com/ ) if I regretted not having gone to college I have been mulling over my answer to her for the better part of a week, and will try to set it down here, as the subject may be of general interest to some.

I have usually lived in the university districts of college towns  Although I was only officially enrolled at one college,   I spent many years auditing classes. My first critical encounters with movies occurred in the film studies programs with Richard T Jameson and Kathleen Murphy at the University of Washington.  My presence in their classes was no  pleasure for them, but I am forever grateful for what I learned in their classrooms. Sone years l later, I enjoyed several lectures by Noam Chomsky at MIT, where I worked as a  librarian at the library of Geophysics.  I had also filled in for a professor at the Harvard School of Business while he was off doing research in Japan (not teaching his classes, merely answering his mail and telephone calls), had facilitated a move of the Harvard Law library, and acted for David Wheeler’s directing class at Harvard. At Boston Univerity,  I was hired by Nobel Prize–winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott to direct African playwrite Nabie Swarays Worl Do For Fraid.  After seeing my production of Hamlet at Suffolk University, poet Richard Moore engaged me to give a lecture on the play  to his students at the New England Conservatory of Music.  After seeing my adaption of Wuthering Heights, Bostpn University professor Lin Haire Sargeant, author of H, a sequel to Wuthering Heights, produced a revival of my production for her own theatre company.

So  I am no stranger to the Academia.  I treasure my many memories of the people I have met and/or worked with inside those halls, including Sam Fuller, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Geraldine Ferraro, Barack Obama, David Mamet, Philip Glass, and Linda Hunt,as well as the three people I hated more than any other  creatures encountered on planet Earth=== Madalyn O Hare, Bernard Law, and BF Skinner. 

My only regret in not having graduated from one of these institutions is that I  have lived a life below the poverty line in spite of accomplishing much more in the fields than hired graduates of those programs. For example, graduates in the school of Journalism earned five times what i did as proof readers of the copy I wrote for the Seattle Post Intelligencer that would not hire me on their staff because of my lack of a diploma, although they did print over a half million of my words.  Imagine how  many master theses that number of words would have earned in a graduate  school.  I also worked with a comedian who was making a transition from comedy clubs to the Broadway stage.  Together, we developed a show that was so successful that it propelled him into a much higher tax bracket.  But when the show that I directed opend in new York, it had another director attached to it.  He got the money and the fame without  doing anything but overseeing two technical rehearsals. Why?  Because I wasnt qualified to direct the show that I had directed because I didnt have the proper papers.   And the list goes on throughout a lifetime of working for peanuts while people who did much less demanding work were pulling down big salaries.  So this would be my only regret in not graduating from college, but what I have gained from the intellectual and artistic freedom I have enjoyed  has been well worth the economic suffering.

Although I would have gladly given everything to have been a student of Harold B;oom at Yale, most college students settle for much less from their professors.  A friend who studied at the University of Washington spent an average of 2-3 days each on authors such as Homer, Virgil, and Dante in his World Literature course.  He didnt come out learning too much, and upon receiving his Maters decided it would be more lucrative to start a landscaping business to pursue a teaching career. I remember playing Trivial Pursuit with a woman who had a similar Masters Degree.  The clue was the family name of a fictional group of Russian brothers.  When I suggested Karamazov, she laughed, thinking I had made up a funny sounding fake Russian name.   Then there was the psychiatrist who confused Jung with Freud.    So no..I do not regret having been deprived of such educations.

We are so lucky to live in a time and place in which all human knowledge is at our fingertips.  I grew up in the Seattle Library, reading everything.  Not everybody can go to college, but there is no stopping anybody from filling their heads with the whole history of human thought.  Its all out there in the open,  available to all.

On my first day of college, in English class, the professor asked the students to raise their hands if they knew the difference between a noun and a verb.  Nobody raised their hand.  I learned the definition of a noun when I was seven years old, and was re taught it every year until graduation.  And every year the kids didnt seem to get it.  And now, in college, it was the same thing.  Halfwits trying to figure out the difference between a noun and a verb.  After calling on a few students to offer their definitions, the professor closed the grammar book and recited the lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone, telling us it was more than a song lyric, it was a poem.  I had never been so embarrassed. Outside the classroom window, students had boycotted classes to protest the war in Vietnam.  I put aside my books aside and joined them