It would probably come as no surprise to anyone who knew me that I’m a college graduate; I’m fairly well spoken, fairly well read, use multi-syllabic words and have a subtle air of pretension that precedes me into any room. It may come as a surprise, however, to know that not once in the thirty years (!) since I graduated has it made any difference that I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree. In fact, no potential employer, potential business partner, potential casting director, potential arresting officer or potential date has ever even asked if I even attended college. It was all, it seems, entirely solipsistic. (Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll try to behave. Solipsism is a theory that the self is the only reality, so a solipsistic experience is one that only matters to the person who experienced it. But you knew that. And it doesn’t matter.)
This is not about that, however. It’s about my experience getting my degree at a small, private, liberal arts Catholic girls’ school. Okay, so it was no longer a girls’ school when I attended, they had started letting boys in a few years before. They also closed down a few years after I graduated. They’d been having financial trouble for years, a circumstance that I assume contributed to both milestones.
Fort Wright College was run by the Sisters of the Holy Names and was housed on what at one time had been the base and barracks of the famous Indian killer, Colonel George Wright, on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I first became aware of it the summer out of high school while performing a very small role in a play at a local civic theater in Spokane called Spokane Civic Theatre. The two leads in the play were the couple who ran the drama department at the Fort and I fell instantly enamored of them. They seemed to know things about acting and theater in general that I had never imagined.
I applied, and with government grants, work study and a job at the campus cafeteria in hand, entered academia. The school was very progressive; most classes were “pass/no pass” with evaluative comments that went on your permanent record. You could request actual grades, of course, at the beginning of each term, which most of the math and science students did and few of the art, music or drama students did. The Sisters of the Holy Names were a fairly liberal order, few of them wore habits, those that did either very old or very Korean. In fact my English professor, Sister Jean Concannon, often said she feared sounding too “nunny”. She needn’t have worried, of course. She taught Dylan, both Thomas and Bob, and Joyce, both James and Carol Oates, who have all been accused of everything from sensualism to obscenity. One professor, who taught math, had been kicked out of several African countries for agitating. I liked it there.
There was a subtle tension between the nuns and the lay faculty (I wonder if they’re called that because they’re allowed to get laid. I digress) and all but one teacher in the drama department was lay, so it was natural that there was tension between our department and the rest of the school. (That one non-lay teacher moved to the English department after only a year with us, poor thing.) The year before I got there, they were preparing to mount a production of The Marat/Sade, a play in which, among many other questionable activities, the inmates of an insane asylum attack and rape a bunch of nuns. The college didn’t demand they not do the play, but made their life so miserable they closed down the production and instead did the “happy and likable” James Thurber comedy, The Male Animal. The nuns were quite pleased, saying that it was a grand show and exactly what should be being done. They entirely missed, it seems, the theme of the play, which was a plea for academic freedom and against censorship.
I was one of perhaps three people in the drama department, students and teachers alike, who didn’t smoke. I was one of very few students who didn’t also smoke pot, drop acid and sleep around. (It was, after all, the Seventies.) I was the only one, as far as I can tell, who didn’t drink. I was naive. (Least you think me unnecessarily pure, I assure you I made up for lost time in the Eighties.) Even so, my four years at the Fort were a happy blur. I fell tragically in love with one of my roommates, a big, burly straight man who always smelled slightly of marijuana, spent hours upon hours every day in the ramshackle theater building that always smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke, successfully straddled the divide between “us” and “them”, making lasting friendships in and out of the department, acted in four or five plays a year, started classes most days at ten and finished rehearsal most days at midnight, learned so much about so much and graduated never having had to write a single term paper.
I say I’m a college graduate, but I barely remember our actual graduation. It was in the Commons building, I remember, where the cafeteria was, one of the very few “new” buildings on campus. I also remember one of my classmates, that same burly roommate, getting angry upon hearing someone say “now we enter the real world.” “No,” he insisted. “This is the real world. This is as much the real world as any place you will ever find.” I also remember the party afterwards, at the house of Chris and Heather Welch, a couple who had actually been married, where we all helped to prepare and bake a huge tray of “Nachos Especial”, everyone ate and everyone else drank and we never thought to say good bye to the Fort.
In the thirty (!) years since then I’ve moved to Los Angeles, owned several businesses, had several careers, grown slightly less neurotic, loved and lost, written and published, loved and gained, made up for lost time and, now, on an almost daily basis, get email come-ons to get my degree on-line. I would consider it, of course, but no one would care.
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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend
Spy Magazine
, that wonderful satirical magazine that slowly started losing subscribers as it slowly devolved into a bitch fest, had a great feature called “Logrolling In Our Time” which presented two members of American intelligentsia giving favorable, often glowing critiques of each other on their respective pulpits. It was surprising how many pairs of mutual admirers they could find to keep the feature fed for as many issues as they did. This is a different kind of logrolling, more in line with 
