My alma mater, New College, in Sarasota, Florida, has been in the news lately. A casualty of the Culture Wars, it seems. This sort of thing tends to provoke a retrospective glance.
You can see my dorm room in the pic.
I grew up in a small town which anybody would call conservative, but it was a different sense of the word from Birchers and radio guys like Joe Pyne and such. I first encountered the latter social formation in 1963 when I went to visit my uncle in SoCal (Orange County, specifically). Quite another thing from the conservatism I was used to; a relatively recent development.
But then I went to oddball New College.
As I recall Sarasota from my time there ('67-'70), there were:
1) Snowbird and retiree liberals from the Northeast -- often secular-Jewish, and arty, and interested in Kulchur, to steal an Ezra Pound joke. This group played quite a role, I think, in ginning up New College. Also, things like the Asolo Theater. The symphony, etc.
2) Old-fashioned Deep South peckerwoods, whose fathers were in the Klan in the 1920s and 30s. Probably a good many of the then-present ones were in the Klan too, though that organization was a shadow of its former self by the 1960s. Kind of a mean-spirited nostalgia lodge. Sarasota cops, and Florida state police, were to a man recruited from this class.
In my part of the Upper South, where I grew up, we didn't see so many of this type, but we saw enough that I recognized 'em when I encountered them in Sarasota, where they were a great deal more numerous. In Florida, they were the cultural substratum on which the Flagler-era development took place.
3) New-style "conservatives": Angry suburbanites, who frequently came from somewhere else, and were often quite well off but felt deeply endangered and precarious, for some reason. The psychology of this type has always been a puzzle for me. But I recognized them, based on my time in SoCal, as the same novel phenomenon I encountered there. And clearly, this is the crowd running Florida now.
So drop into this turbulent social stew, in the 1960s, a bunch of incipient hippies -- stir well -- back off and watch the results. Amazing it lasted as long as it did.
But dear old New College is now, as I write these words, under attack by the rather peculiar-looking Governor of Florida. The pretext is all Culture Wars, but I have a lingering suspicion that real estate, as so often, is at the bottom of it, though people better-informed than I am pooh-pooh this theory. Still, the college occupies some valuable beachfront property, and the formerly-nice, since-ruined, Pei dorms sit on land leased from the airport.
I personally don't have much interest in the Culture Wars, and I'm afraid that Florida is not a good battlefield to fight them on. Most of Florida will be underwater in a generation or two, anyway, and no great loss. The sort of improvised hoyden charm it had when I was there has been obliterated by "development" -- though I admit during a couple of previous reunions I could still catch a whiff of that sexy floral fragrant over-pollinated Florida air, and damn, it took me right back.
I declined to attend the most recent (and perhaps last) reunion of my cohort. Partly, of course, it was that a former great girlfriend, since gone to join the Majority, wouldn’t be there, and her absence would have been intensely painful. But partly, too, it was all the old grouches on the alumni email list, bitching about the culture wars governor, and talking about protest T-shirts or armbands to wear, and whether we should accept a lunch laid on by the school – would that be “endorsing” the new regime? As if anybody cared about our endorsement, or lack of it; and I’ll always take a free lunch.
I simply didn’t want to be part of this sad-sack liberal-schmiberal alterkaker grumpfest. Laudatores temporis acti – though I’ve been called that too, so glass houses.
But who cares, after all, about some damn college? I have zero loyalty to institutions. Places and people, and even buildings, yes, and revisiting the place, and seeing the people again, and wandering through the girlfriend-haunted buildings, during the reunions I did attend, was… evocative. To understate the case.
But if we want education to be a means of human enlargement and emancipation and pleasure, we have to look elsewhere than the colleges and universities, for the foreseeable future.
So dear old New College – I’m grateful to you, and all the odd ducks I met under your transient roof, and I would cast a fond fistful of earth on your coffin. But RIP.
So where DO we turn??