People who earned their bachelor’s degree from an Ivy tend to let you know, even decades after graduating. It’s in their author bio, or on their X handle. My degree from U.C. Berkeley never seemed like a detail worth mentioning, unless someone explicitly asks me where I went to college, in which case my instinct is to explain that it was easier to get in when I attended.
That I share this alma mater with, say, Joan Didion, never seemed to raise me up. In 1953, when she began her studies, as in 1985, when I began mine, a Californian with good grades matriculated to Berkeley the way you’d “decide” to use a public utility: there weren’t any competitors of Berkeley’s caliber offering a virtually free in-state college education (my first-year tuition was about $500 a semester; I wrote my own check for it from a summer job in retail). But when I was asked to return for the occasion of giving a commencement speech this May, a new kind of pride came whooshing in.
The invitation was proof of having become someone in the 35 years since graduating. That I was asked by Rhetoric, the most intellectual of literature departments at Cal, seemed especially perfect, and perfectly ironic. As a freshman, I’d enrolled in a standard English class and gotten a B and never took another. Rhetoric was English classes for sophisticates, literature within a rigorous context of classics, theory, theology and law.
I had chosen as my major political economy, in no small part because its interdisciplinary coursework in history, political science and economics required only that I absorb and synthesize information, which I was good at, and did not require maturity or insight, which, as a 16-year-old freshman, I apparently lacked. I had remained mute while my older peers spoke confidently in that English class where I earned my B.
Rhetoric would be sharing its graduation with Film and Media Studies. For many years now, I’ve been telling others and myself that the most consequential class I took at Berkeley was Seymour Chatman’s seminar on Michelangelo Antonioni, whose movies have given me continual sustenance. I still go back to them, write about them and teach them. I lucked into this Antonioni class, an inessential elective, and have no idea what grade I got.
In my required classes, I remember that I got A’s and almost nothing else, except that the historian Stephen Ambrose chain-smoked at every lecture, and you had to be at Economics 100A early if you wanted a seat, since enrollment was double the capacity of the auditorium in Wheeler Hall, which holds only 700 people. An academic theory I did manage to pick up, from a political science class taught by Harold Wilensky, was that a lack of involvement in labor unions, churches and volunteer associations has broad social implications. What Wilensky referred to as “atomization” still produces in my mind an image not from his textbook, but of the little boy playing quietly with his toy robot in Antonioni’s “Red Desert,” in which the denizens of a company town where chemicals are manufactured are each alone with their dreams and disaffection.
It is only later that we are able to see what will have mattered from our time in college, I planned to tell the Berkeley grads in Zellerbach, the same auditorium where in 1990 I had fallen asleep at my own graduation as the commencement speaker droned on in a German accent about the triumph of reunification and the victory of capitalism.
In preparing my speech, I had taken stock of the historical era of my Berkeley tenure and charted its consequential beats: the student movement that forced the U.C. regents to divest from South Africa in the fall of my sophomore year; that same fall, Ronald Reagan’s squalid Iran-contra affair, to which I’d paid special attention, as someone whose focus as a political economy major was U.S. foreign policy in Nicaragua; the 1989 closing of Barrington Hall, an infamous student housing co-op where I’d seen many bands play and where, after a violent showdown between occupants and the police, a 20-year-old kid I knew named Juan Mendoza fell to his death from the roof, under circumstances that have never been explained.
In my final year, the excitement and momentum of activism that had helped to dismantle South African apartheid was focused entirely on People’s Park, which had begun to seem to me like a ratty quadrant of drinking and fistfights, and not a place of political ideals. George H. W. Bush was threatening to, and imminently would, invade Iraq. Our economy was slipping into recession. I had no plans, and even worse, I didn’t want plans.
Grad school was for those eager to specialize. I had no specialty. No internship, no fellowship, no ship at all. After graduation, I got a job making sandwiches at a brewery in San Francisco and hung out with my high school friends, most of whom had not gone to college. It was not until four or five years after graduating that I came to a nascent idea that I might use all of myself in my vocation, which is what writers do.
My intention was to give the graduates an honest account of my indirect path, in case among them were some who had no practical plan for what to do, who felt less than eager to become employees and for whom the world might seem bleak and turbulent and full of hypocrisy. I had advice for them, taken only from the bedrock of what I practice. My speech seemed to promise for me, for my own life résumé, a new harmony, as if the “wasted years” of my post-college bohemianism were no longer in question, having finally yielded their own value as components of the trajectory that brought me back to Berkeley for this occasion.
And yet the moment I stepped foot on the campus, under a deep blue sky, in my navy pinstriped suit, the kind of outfit only a grown woman who thinks rather highly of her accomplishments would opt to wear, what I felt wasn’t glory, but something much more raw and painful. It is one thing to prepare a narrative to present for an audience and quite another to re-experience the narrative.
I had instantaneously stepped into the past, onto the staging ground of my youthful confusion, what a student of rhetoric might refer to as “structures of feeling,” invoking Raymond Williams’s theory that affect is shaped by era. A dormant version of me as a lost and very lonely young person lurked in the shadows next to the creek that meanders through campus. “Does anyone know what they are doing when they go to college? When they graduate?” I wondered, with tears running down my face. My stern superego answered: “They mostly do. It’s you who didn’t.”
Having arrived early for the ceremony, I lingered near Sather Gate, with its ornate patinated metalwork, and then headed toward Doe Library, where I used to not study and stared at people instead. Everything glowed with a kind of institutional grandeur. My superego scolded me further: “Look where you were! The best public university in the world, only to squander your luck!” The beauty of the campus, which I had no memory of appreciating, seemed almost crushing in its majesty.
“What was wrong with us?” I asked my brother, who also went to Berkeley — we overlapped there, and our two paths in retrospect almost constitute a single stereoscopic college experience. We were the children of educated parents, but graduates of a large public high school of no distinction. We each had various part-time jobs, me as a cocktail waitress at the Til Two Lounge on Shattuck, my brother as a hasher at Alpha Chi Omega, supplementing his Pell Grant with cartons of eggs and pounds of butter that he pilfered from that sorority house.
I had wanted to “go away to college” and remember feeling disappointed that my grand departure involved borrowing my dad’s funky old Peugeot and making the 20-minute trip across the Bay Bridge to move myself into a dorm, but Berkeley was what we could afford. I do remember knowing I was lucky to have a dorm, because housing, when I matriculated, was not guaranteed.
“You were busy surviving,” my brother answered. He didn’t mean financially, exactly, even if that part wasn’t simple. The primary challenges at Berkeley were the immensity of the place — the feeling of being reduced to a registrar number, the difficulty of making friends when your lecture classes were massive — and the vulnerability of the campus to the dark energies of the world. The street characters — Rick Starr, singing “Mr. Astrologer” into an unplugged microphone; Rare, who rampaged through campus shirtless, screaming “Rare!” and doing sets of impromptu push-ups — are vivid to me still. I recall drifting through Sproul Plaza one spring day and being persuaded by a kind young woman to spend the summer building housing alongside her and others in Nicaragua. I was ready to book my flight when I realized I was being sucked into a covert program run by the Moonies.
Berkeley is so storied and epic, I told the graduating students, that our greatest living documentarian, Frederick Wiseman, even made it the subject of one of his films. “Wiseman,” I continued, “made a film about the New York Public Library, about the Paris Opera Ballet and about Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. If he aimed to celebrate public investment in grand civic infrastructure at the library, to portray virtuosity and resilience at the ballet, if he were seeking to witness dramatic and frightening departures from consensual reality at the mental institution, he could have skipped those places and captured all of it right here at Berkeley.”
The audience laughed knowingly. Berkeley has more Nobel Prizes than Stanford, and its purpose — to educate the people of California — is nobler than Stanford’s. But it is still Berkeley. It’s got the problems from my era and others. It’s much more expensive now, as its state funding has been whittled down. And like all of higher education, it’s under threat.
But students still have their own lives, their personal paths, inside of an era, and within a structure of feeling, just as they have their relatives there in the audience. Their joy in graduating might be quickly overshadowed by the dicey passage from college to “real” life.
Antonioni was the thread of the speech I’d written, connecting my student years to my life as a writer and my influences. I chose Chatman’s ideas, and his class, and not the reverse: I never once interacted with him. But in returning to campus, I understood that my deeper education was scruffier and more oblique, and derived from sitting on the steps of Sproul, sitting on a bench outside Wurster Hall. I did this for hours and hours and hours, on weekdays, and on weekends, when the crowd was sparse, mostly me and Rare. (“Rare!”)
This might be why I like Frederick Wiseman’s movies so much: They make me feel I’m not alone in my absorption into things that don’t involve me. My highly impressionable nature is part of why I found glorious Berkeley somehow traumatic. At the same time, it’s this very orientation that I have parlayed into a life.
For the bewildered young, like I once was, I would like to say, with the double reflection of having already delivered my speech: Concrete career plans require focus, and focus involves certain kinds of blinders. If this is not you, if you instead choose art, a creative life, it can prove a powerful escape route from your own alienation, but understand that it might take a while.
In the meantime, pay attention. Look at everything. Even, and especially, when the prevailing attitude is to look away.
Ms. Kushner is the author of, most recently, the novel “Creation Lake.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Where I Learned the Power of Looking at Everything appeared first on New York Times.
