Geoff Gladstone '05 has taken an unusual path to graduation.
"College is wasted on the young," the 31-year-old Resumed Undergraduate Education student said. "It was certainly wasted on me."
A Brooklyn, N.Y., native and and graduate of St. Ann's School, Gladstone entered Harvard University in the fall of 1992 because "you're 18, you're middle-class, that's what you're expected to do." But, he said, "I had no idea what I was dong there." Gladstone did poorly academically and spent only a year and a half at Harvard before leaving.
Through the rest of the 1990s Gladstone stayed in Boston - though he remained a steadfast Yankees fan - and worked a variety of jobs: a freelance production designer and actor and a disk jockey and music director for Harvard's radio station. Later he worked for a real estate development company.
Then one day in late 2000, he woke up to find his leg wouldn't work properly. After a few days, his boss noticed his limp and told Gladstone he should see a doctor, commenting that her sister had had the same problem and it had turned out to be multiple sclerosis, a chronic neurological disease affecting the central nervous system. Gladstone went to a doctor, "and MS it was," he said.
Gladstone said his diagnosis didn't really sink in until about a month later, when he went in for a steroid treatment and found he would have to miss lunch with his girlfriend. He called her, but as he was about to say "I'm in the hospital," he broke down.
MS has profoundly changed his life. Gladstone now walks with a cane, though his symptoms were not especially bad until last year. He notices the little changes most.
"I fall all the fricking time. I've learned - I'm really good now - I've learned to fall without hurting myself," he said. "I've learned to deal with it a lot more, and it's become just one more damn thing to do."
"Honestly, I feel lucky in that I can see (MS) as another damn thing to work around," he said, and he draws inspiration from other students more severely disabled than he. Though he said he is afraid of memory loss and other possible future symptoms, "every moment I spend worrying about that is a moment that it's happening, so I don't."
As he worked in real estate development, Gladstone became more and more interested in questions of how "space becomes place," how development can transform a space into something more. He wanted to study those issues and was attracted to Brown both by its undergraduate-level urban studies program and its RUE program, which reintegrates older students more than five years out of college back into an undergraduate environment.
Gladstone entered Brown in the fall of 2002. He helped found the Brown Disability Awareness Council and has served on the Campus Access Advisory Council and the Undergraduate Council of Students as RUE representative, as well as completing a concentration in Urban Studies.
"It's weird to be older and be Joe College," he said. "It takes guts to go back to school and to do it as an older person." But "most classmates, most teachers think we're pretty cool," he added, laughing.
Still, he said, though the University does provide support, "the administration always seems to have this ambivalent relationship with RUEs." The University does not provide financial aid to RUE students, and Gladstone has had to pay for his Brown education with loans.
He praised Disability Support Services for helping make accommodations for his locomotive difficulties, saying, "I certainly could not be here without the support of DSS."
His friends describe him as tenacious, with Jill Moniz '04 saying several RUEs have nicknamed his trademark two-fisted gesture of displeasure the "Gladstone double-bird."
"I think in many ways he typifies the Brown student: He's smart, hardworking, creative, determined. Whenever anything comes up, he finds a way to work it out," said Moniz, a former RUE student.
"Geoff came here and was so ... determined to get the most out of it. ... I think it would have been really easy for him to have folded along the way," she added.
"I think he's a great guy. I really admire his motivation. He's got an incredible drive and he knows what he wants," said Marian Conaty '06. "At heart ... he's still a rock 'n' roll kid," she said.
As for his post-graduation plans, Gladstone does not have a job, but he is considering starting his own company, inspired by his final project for EN 90: "Managerial Decision Making" last semester.
"I was quite struck by the unfilled market niche, the unfilled demand, for this: disability equipment that ... doesn't look like you borrowed it from a nursing home," Gladstone said. "Right now, there is some kid coming back from Iraq in a wheelchair, and there is some girl, some former goth girl, who just got in a car crash and lost her leg. These people aren't going to want to stop being whoever they were before, and yet most of the mobility equipment they face looks like your grandmother should be on it," he said.
"It's not urban-related, it's not what I wanted necessarily to be doing ... but then again, I never thought I'd need that cane," he said.
