Resident fellows collect memories, wreathe them in bemusement and bring them out at parties. Endearing, achingly adolescent, troubling—these stories of undergraduate beginnings speak to sensible adults of the heartstopping foolishness of some very smart young people, and remind us of our own times of heady innocence.
But one of these stories has never quite suited the hearty grown-up laughter with which it’s greeted. Not quite uproarious, not necessarily arresting, it’s a small tale that refuses to dissolve into the accumulated mix of my student stories. It’s become for me a niggling joke imperfectly understood. And after years of telling this story, perhaps it’s time for me to chip away at the layers of laughter and look at it more squarely. Even in their silliest moments, Stanford students are rarely trivial. They overcome the pedestrian with such grace—and with such frequency!—that those of us who live with them can forget to marvel.
In 1986, I moved into Donner House, a 95-person, all-frosh residence, with what I now see as breathtaking confidence. I was prepared to do what Stanford asks of the 59 faculty and senior staff members and their partners who serve as resident fellows: to shape the intellectual spirit of the house, to advise and mentor, to model thoughtful, intelligent living. In short, I was ready to represent the best parts of the adult world to a gang of smart and charming skeptics. I just wasn’t ready to do it in the middle of the night.
It must have been 3 a.m. I was struggling to prepare a class and wondering where my orderly, early-to-bed life had gone. And someone was knocking at my door. There’s nothing quite like a purposeful early-morning rap at the door to awaken the apprehensions, along with—in this case—a warm flush of anticipated usefulness. Surely there’s a problem in the house. The police are at the door. The lounge is on fire. The basement is flooded. At any rate, something extraordinary—and in need of wisdom and guidance—is afoot.
I opened the door. And there stood not tragedy, but eagerness and intensity. Brian was clutching a paperback. “Linda,” he said, “I really need to talk about Proust.”
I’m certain my jaw dropped; I know my vision of my residentially significant self evaporated in an instant. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” I spoke, I’m shamefaced to recall, from a lofty understanding of unassailable ordering principles. Like manners. And expectations. And time. I said something huffy about not needing to do so myself just at the moment, and smiled what I hoped was amusement rather than annoyance. He apologized; I said sure, perhaps tomorrow. And I closed the door.
But as I withdrew into my apartment, I wasn’t so much amused as troubled. Even a bit deflated. I remember the quick, almost physical sensation of having failed, of having misunderstood something that was less mediocre than I’d just proved myself to be. I was restless for a few hours, but by morning I had myself a tidy anecdote about passionate students for whom time—“adult” time—carried no meaning.
The picture of Brian I conjured was entertaining, predictable: a bright student caught and plunged into enthusiastic confusion by fascinating ideas, beautiful language, a comprehensive yet deeply personal worldview. So complete was his engagement, I thought, that time simply occupied no place in his mind. How charming. How definitive of the freshman year. How wonderfully sprung from parental authority. The undergraduate clock had taken over, and no one—not even a sleepy RF—could escape its hold.
Fair enough. I’ve become used to this nocturnal activity over the years. It no longer strikes me as exactly weird, just a little profligate. Even students who arrive proclaiming themselves early-to-bed and early-to-rise types—this information usually confided in the presence of a parent on the first day of Orientation—swiftly become citizens of this nighttime community. But perhaps the profligacy is not theirs. Perhaps I had been the one to throw away something precious.
Students of course do inhabit an alternate universe, and the inconsequence of conventional waking and sleeping times is one of its most enchantingly odd trademarks—as well as one of its most obvious challenges to traditional order. In the first pages of Swann’s Way, Proust’s Marcel questions the hegemony of chronological time and embarks on an experiment: the search through memory for a new ordering principle and a more finely understood, honestly recorded experience. In the first days of their first year, Stanford’s freshmen also jettison the authority of conventional time and embark on a similar, if less elegantly framed, experiment: the search for the unconventional self and for the language to give it authentic voice.
For Proust, the subject was art itself; for a Stanford freshman, the subject ranges artlessly from faith to computer games to baseball to music to ecological practice to hair gel—the stuff, it must be admitted, of life itself. Proust, with self-conscious artistry, searches for language and the perspective from which to understand what has happened. First-year students stumble naturally into new territory, seeking not only to understand the past but to prepare themselves for the future. They are my heroes.
By day, freshmen manage the ins and outs of academic and residential life; they are dedicated students, loyal friends, committed musicians, gifted athletes, devoted community volunteers. But an RF soon learns that this everyday world is to some extent a concession on their part: they’re generally very nice people and bear us no particular grudges. They’ll play our detail- and schedule-laden game if that’s what we really want. But when the adult world puts on its bathrobe and gets ready to turn in, another reality bubbles up in the hallways and lounges.
Late at night, when the everyday has lost its grip, convention, habit and expectation fall away in a general liberation from the demands of the clock. There is no etiquette for pajamaed encounters over Proust, MP3s, the Buddha, the Band. There are no courtesies between two students with toothbrushes in hand and something on their minds. During these clockless nights, students begin to find and educate themselves. The conversations are not always tony ones on religion or philosophy; students also mix it up on the design of the dorm T-shirt, the no-car policy for frosh, the virtues of Willy Wonka, the difference between “mankind” and “humanity.” And these discussions take place in the nontraditional space of no perceptible time at all.
The late-night community students seem to create automatically is an important, perhaps even vital, rite of passage from the world of inherited ideas to the world of real thought. In this nocturnal place of chaotic challenge and revelation, new worlds can be contemplated, along with the latest crush. And it was an invitation to this conversation that I refused when I reminded Brian of the time.
Except in the classroom, most of us at the University have little to do with undergraduate life. When we do become involved, we are often representing the University’s authority to its most insistent—and sometimes troublesome—students. As a resident fellow, I’ve had my share of difficult discussions. It falls to the RF, for instance, to tell a student that, delightful person that he is, he’s an ugly drunk. Or, as the caretaker of the whole community, an RF will have the unpleasant task of letting a few students know that their particular brand of hilarity—sexist, homophobic, or just plain loud or smelly—is a pain in the collective tush. I remember once having to remind a group of young men that when our facilities supervisor (a wonderful woman who took virtually every other thing about dorm life in stride) was in the men’s bathroom, they needed to refrain from using the urinals. And I remember rather twitchily seeing the students out, carefully shutting my door and collapsing in laughter—at the sheer ridiculousness of having to remind smart young people of such a normal courtesy; at the very real importance of it; and finally, at the fact that no one had ever told me I’d have such a conversation in my own home.
But I’ve also known, and sometimes even been a part of, moments of unscripted undergraduate joy. And that extraordinary privilege goes beyond the anecdotes, right to the heart of why an otherwise sane adult would choose to live with 90-odd new students every year. To watch them dance; to watch them teach one another to dance—I love to watch a group of frosh move beyond the intimidation of the first day and find one another. I love to watch them not just recognize the remarkable strengths of their fellows—a nationally ranked athlete here, a concert pianist there—but begin to give quiet consequence to their own extraordinary selves. I believe in freshman energy and irreverence, and I am happy to know that these youthful virtues are honored and cultivated in the house.
Such attitudes, though, are hardly lessons that can be taught. Where, then, does this leave a “residential educator”? RFs can have a significant effect on student life in our houses. But let’s be clear: we preside over the daytime realm. Students drop by throughout the day. They need to borrow a hammer or a saucepan. They need to pet the cat. They need to have a cup of tea and a chat. They need to sit in a non-University-issue chair. Students check in with RFs as they steer their daily course through some pretty unfamiliar waters. Yet the kindest thing any of us can do is to unsettle them, to make them uncomfortable with their assumptions and to suggest the possibility of examining them. If we cannot seriously recommend irreverence, we can at least provide daytime provocation for the nighttime conversations in which we will have no part. I failed Brian—and I failed to understand the delicate process of “residential education”—when I countered his ardor with an easy platitude.
To be an educator, residential or otherwise, is to recognize that the rich speculation one covertly hopes for won’t take place in predictable time. It’s difficult—if liberating—to learn that I’ll only rarely know that a student has been listening, has wrestled with discomfort, has conquered a demon, has created a new plan. I was moved and comforted a few years ago by the report of a former student’s appearance on a talk show, where he spoke from the audience—coast-to-coast—as an advocate for acceptance of a practice he had articulately condemned as a frosh. There he was, I hear, leaning toward Phil Donahue’s microphone. And there he was, speaking with evenhanded humor in defense of cross-dressing. I wish I’d seen the show. I wish I knew how such change takes place and how such confidence is born. Perhaps it’s enough that it happens.
When Brian knocked on my door, I—silly, dutiful, habituated grown-up that I am—didn’t recognize the moment for what it was: an offer to enter the world of free youthful speculation. I honestly don’t know if I would have been up to it then, having in the classroom grown suspicious of the wild twists and turns of the 18-year-old mind. But my retreat into humor and stiff-necked maturity embarrasses and disappoints me now. To be thoughtlessly adult, when vibrant and irrepressible curiosity is beckoning—well, what ingratitude. What profligacy.
I missed something when I turned down Brian’s invitation. Not a conversation about Proust; that can happen in a classroom. But something far more uncommon: we could for a moment have known a version of the Proustian experiment as, late at night in unclocked time, we cut through chronology and generation, and wove a new tapestry of shared memories and perceptions. My regrets and apologies to Brian, and to his expansiveness, which embraced even me.
Linda Paulson is the associate dean and director of the master of liberal arts program, and a lecturer in English.
