"When some loud braggart tries to put me down," sang Mike Love in 1963, "and says his school is great, I tell him right away, ‘Now what's the matter, buddy, ain't you heard of my school? It's number one in the state.' " The Beach Boys' "Be True to Your School" no doubt meant more to teenagers in their native California than it should to the upstanding young citizens of College Hill today — not least because their competition for the state's top slot was a little fiercer than a few drunk cookery students and some hipster artists staggering under the weight of their ironically-oversized spectacles.
For most of us, however, pride in one's "alma mater" remains a curiously enduring anachronism, like patriotism, Sarah Palin and Crocs: It ought not to have any place in our grown-up world, and yet it still produces an instantaneous gut reaction.
I detest Oxford University, for example. I'm fully aware that it has a rich history of picturesque architecture, heretic-burning and even some modest scholarly achievement. At the time of writing, Oxford alumni hold 11 places in Her Majesty's Government. (Three of them also possess chins.) Oxford even churned out the two men most responsible for the reputation of my native Britain, particularly in the U.S., as a land of charmingly befuddled and deeply sincere characters who never know when to capture your heart (step forward, Hugh Grant) or bomb your house (turn around and walk away, Tony Blair).
Not even its tremendous comedic potential can endear Oxford to me, however, because I went to the University of Cambridge, the Single Greatest Institution in the History of the Universe.
See? I didn't even mean to write that. It just came out. The fact is that the mere mention of the old place gets my blood pumping. Not only does it bring back all manner of memories (or at least it would, if I'd had less of a good time while I was there) but it makes me feel in an absurd way that I'm connected to centuries of traditions and achievements, none of which involve Hugh Grant.
This is patently ridiculous: I had no more to do with the discovery of the double helix or the formation of Monty Python than you did, unless you're considerably older than you look. Yet the simple fact of having run around the place between my eighteenth and twenty-second birthdays (and having been born there, although I'll be the first to admit that I didn't get a lot done around that time) makes it assume great significance to my development as a semi-certified human being.
As "consumers" (yuck) of the "product" of higher education these days, we face an absurd amount of choice about where to pretend to study. There are, at a conservative estimate, something in the region of 1,386,000 universities in the U.S. alone. A tiny twist of fate — the prejudices of a family member, say — could have sent you off to California or New York or, heaven forbid, Dartmouth. No doubt you'd be just as gung-ho about your new place in life as you were upon skipping through the Van Wickle gates.
As one stumbles along the graduate-professional path, however, a slightly more logical set of imperatives becomes clear. One wants to go to a graduate school with resources or a reputation that caters to one's particular interests, for example. One of the peculiarities of grad school is that in many cases, one spends more time there than at one's undergrad institution, and yet seldom does one come to identify as strongly with the latter place of study.
This state of affairs is particularly in evidence at Brown, which is overwhelmingly geared towards undergrad education in enrollment, culture and resources. Ask one of the mole-like creatures you see emerging blinking from the GCB at five p.m. how strongly connected they feel to Brown and the answers won't vary hugely, I suspect: it's our place of work, and we probably won't be boring our grandchildren with proud stories about it in the future. And not just because half a decade on a diet of cheap beer and tinned carbohydrates will render many of us incapable of, or too unattractive to hope for, procreation.
None of this is to say that grad students are completely disconnected from the rest of University life. Even as I shuffle between the key appointments in my schedule — writing my dissertation in the library and writing my dissertation on my sofa — I ponder occasionally some things about Brown that I like mentally to associate myself with. Brown's liberal reputation; the colonial architecture, so much more enjoyable than the Ikea-gothic fakes of the last place I studied, Yale; the impressive work of the Slavery and Justice Commission; the fact that this is where John Krasinski developed his laconic shrugging technique: none of these have anything to do with me, yet I still enjoy an intangible association with them.
Not as much, though, as I enjoy hating Oxford.
Stephen Wicken GS, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the History department, has a rich history of picturesque architecture, heretic-burning and even some modest scholarly achievement. He can be reached at stephen_wicken@brown.edu.
