How Old We Are

Brought Low by the List

By Tom McBride

Academics, of which I am one, are meant to be serious persons. Once known for their tweeds with patches and their dignified mien at marching ceremonies, they are now serious in other ways. Stanley Fish has commented on how Volvo boxcars are an expression of academic plain living and high thinking. A faculty member once told another that he disliked the Marx Brothers because they were “vulgar” and was shocked when his colleague replied that they were supposed to be. Today’s academics are concerned with child rearing, the ecology of foodstuffs, and constructions of social identities. They speak in long paragraphs.

At my college, nothing is more serious than preparing for the onslaught of new students. In the late 1990s, the day before new students were due, I was about to convene a meeting of seminar leaders who would be devoting their autumns and early winters to the transformation of recent high schoolers into profound scholars. Such terms as engaged learning and critical thinking hovered earnestly in the air. Just before I went into the meeting, our public relations director stopped me with a request: Would I distribute to my colleagues a List—called the Mindset List—of 50 items that purported to capture the attitudes, beliefs, and values of entering college students? He was about to release this List to the media and wanted to be truthful in saying that the faculty had already seen it. As the director of the first-year seminar program, I agreed grudgingly—not only because the meeting would be busy but also because it would be serious.

A glance at the Mindset List told me it was not serious. It contained such items as “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead,” and “They have probably never dialed a telephone,” and “Brake lights have always been in the rear view windows of automobiles.” The List stated with glee and whimsy all the cultural phenomena that had not always existed by any means, but that our narrow, uneducated first-year students believed had always existed by every means. I dutifully distributed this List to my colleagues, who perused it with a rapid indifference. Some, I swear, glowered as well.

Three days later our public relations director stepped into my office and told me the Today program, on the National Broadcasting Company in New York, wanted to interview me (first-year seminar director) day after tomorrow about this List. As one who had long ago given up television (except for PBS) for NPR, most of my memories of this program stemmed from childhood. I assumed that Dave Garroway (the genial and suicidal host) and Frank Blair (the ponderous newsreader) and the chimp J. Fred Muggs were no longer on the program, but I wondered about slightly glum Hugh Downs. Was he still on the show? Mostly, however, I wondered how and why this program would want to interview me, and what about this List had so pinched a nerve with a national television program. I told our P.R. director that going out to New York on such short notice would be impossible, as I had to take my daughter on that day to an important appointment with her orthodontist. A few hours later, when I was finally convinced to go, I called the orthodontist’s secretary to explain that I would be on a national television program and would be unable to make the appointment. She said she understood, that she believed me wholly, and did I know that she was really Barbara Walters.

By now readers will have warmed to my theme. My daughter’s appointment had little to do with my unwillingness. Anxiety about speaking to millions, if only for a few moments, had even less to do with my reluctance. No. It was that this program was doubtless trivial, superficial, obsessed with sound bites. This was a program in which a chimpanzee had once costarred. This was no place for a Serious Academic.

I told my wife that although I had done 30 years of serious teaching and scholarship I would now be recalled only for being on TV for five minutes about that List. She said that otherwise I would not be remembered at all. It was then that I decided to go.


• • • • •

Backstage with me were Senator John McCain and Professor Alan Dershowitz. The presence of the latter reassured me somehow. We briefly discussed the List, and Dershowitz opined that even top students today assume that Sacco and Vanzetti are baseball players. After McCain and Dershowitz left to go on the program, I spoke to an attractive woman whom I did not recognize but who told me she had played the role of a character named Mary Ann on the series Gilligan’s Island. Here I was at my most nerdy when I had to explain that I had not watched television in many years. She said she understood. She told me that the program was promoting her as a self-styled expert on “island psychology” on the eve of the first “reality” show, in which all but one “survivor” would be “kicked off the island.” Again, I wished I had not agreed to appear on this program. I saw my academic dignity about to be shredded. Could I ever again walk into a classroom and command the respect accorded to Those Who Are Supposed To Know?

The interview went about as I expected: not as bad as I had feared but nowhere near as well as I had hoped. I could not speak in paragraphs, and the host, who (unlike myself) knew television, politely but firmly interrupted my elaborate vocabulary. I tried but failed to say something about “horizontal” versus “vertical” influences on generations. I expressed anxiety about the “cultural illiteracy” of the young, but this was quickly shunted aside by a joke, from the List, that the older generation, no stranger themselves to cultural illiteracy, did not know what a “Trapper Keeper” was. The host then displayed this fancy and inefficient backpack, then all the rage with the young and the restless.

When I got to the airport right after the show, two people came up to me and offered compliments. By the time I got to O’Hare Field, no one recognized me. When I got home, no one but the cat was about. He was hungry.


• • • • •

Since that day our college public relations director has produced an entire generation of Mindset Lists. He and I have given many interviews about the annual List. We have traveled to give talks about it. We have been paid (not much). It is as though I am a jejune adolescent who, having one time walked into a billiards hall and beer joint, has now become addicted to both. Unlike Gore Vidal, I have failed to master the fine art of how to be an intellectual on TV. I am now in that postlapsarian world inhabited by undignified, soiled academics. I have exchanged seriousness for a modicum of fun.

Still I have, I protest, maintained a certain inner dignity and reflection. My experience with the media and the List has overlapped with my own experience of significant aging. As such, I have discovered that the List is doubly humbling: not only to me personally, as I have traded my paragraphs for sound bites, but also to many others who find the List an annual, masochistic—if gentle—reminder of the fact that they are getting old. American culture changes so rapidly that former students in their mid-thirties tell me the List makes even them feel out of it. My teaching of Shakespeare’s plays has become more and more informed by a sense that generational disaffection is at the center of his project. The erotically charged cruelty to the long-resented Lear, the phoniness (in Hamlet’s eyes) of the middle-aged Claudius and Gertrude, the Macbeths’ seething envy of that old sofa King Duncan, Shylock’s despite of the superficial, partying youngsters: All of these have come to strike me as brilliant renditions of the poignant complexities of being old amidst the young, or of being young amidst the old. Whether this side of Shakespeare would have struck me as much had I not endured countless interviews about how the List makes everyone over 40 feel ancient, I cannot say for sure, but I suspect the List has, in its own way, made me more aware this particular human factor in the work of the Bard.


• • • • •

And I look at my own students—they who seem younger to me by the minute—rather differently. I still encourage them, in the words of Housman, to be ready when trouble comes, and argue that the expansion of possibility inherent in great literature is one of the best ways to do so. The readiness is all. But now I find myself saying to them that in truth I hope they never have to understand, from personal experience, what Things Fall Apart and To the Lighthouse—illuminations of time’s brutal indifference to tradition and sanity alike—really mean.

I find myself feeling sorry for them as the aging victims of the humbling List just 20 years hence. Dignity is not the exclusive turf of academics. We just work harder at keeping it green. •