Kokino urges the students to ask me questions. Here, she says, is a journalist doing a piece on them. So find out what it's like. Ask! All they want to find out is who famous had gone to Uni. Like I'd know. Then, or now. I don't remember any of us being so future-oriented, so career-sure. We didn't plan much, except to get away from home. Neither Randa nor I nor She Who Wouldn't Be Named thought of Uni as central in our lives, nor did our friends. There were other, more immediate concerns. Like not getting pregnant in those pre-condom distribution decades. We talked of alleged "cures": jumping on a trampoline; taking Humphrey's Pills, whatever they were; douches and quinine--the latter my parents' preferred choice the summer I graduated from Uni and thought I might be pregnant. Thankfully, I wasn't. I got my period the day I moved out of their apartment and into my own in San Francisco.
Both Sides Now
Three Decades After Graduating From Uni High, Karen Michel Returns to Find That Her Alma Mater Has Changed--and Stayed the Same. Students Still Bridle at Dress Codes, but Their Fears Are Different From Those of the '60s.
INSIDE STORY
Rather than expressing eagerness to leave home, Ebony and other girls at Uni fear that their parents will die on them. They worry about having a baby and finishing school and about AIDS. And there's a fear, big time, of not succeeding. The smell of it was nowhere more pungent than in Jane Koehler's honors English class. These are the bright kids: their disappointments may be in getting into Columbia instead of Harvard. They're among the academically and, often, economically privileged students at school. For now, literature may be as close as they'll get to the grit of life.
Standing between rows of wooden desks in Koehler's classroom, I'm struck that today's Uni students seem solely concerned about their own individual needs. Our concerns, or at least mine and, it seemed, many others', were about the outside world, about what was going down in Cuba and Vietnam and the Senate and in Mississippi. Ayelet Ruppin, 17, calls the difference apathy. She cites a lack of student activism, even to oppose unpopular edicts like the attendance policy or drug testing for student athletes. "People," she says, "they really don't care."
In the mostly white Uni of the early '60s, we marched for abstract civil rights; stuffed envelopes for SNCC; demonstrated for peace and against the bomb and HUAC, and made friends and lovers on the picket line. We were afraid in a way: of a war where boys our age were blowing each other to bits with M-16s, of a nuclear bomb falling on West Los Angeles--not that one of our peers might appear in the halls with handguns or pipe bombs. Action on such a petty scale would have seemed unthinkable to my generation. We were out to save the world.
