Donald Trump hates Harvard. Pete Buttigieg graduated from Harvard. It figures. Trump didn’t get in. I did. Here’s my story:
I was a first-year English teacher in a blue collar Chicago suburb. I really liked it. I liked the kids — some of the boys were bigger than me — and it was very hard work.
On a Friday when the younger single teachers went out for beer, someone handed me information about a Harvard/U.S. Military program that was recruiting English teachers to work with U.S. military officers all over the world on improving their writing and speaking skills. The program would also include research and could be folded into a master’s degree. I applied and was accepted.
I had good instructors in my undergrad work at the University of Illinois. At Harvard, I was star-struck. We had two main areas of study. One was to improve our own writing. It was taught by the head of the very competitive Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa (acceptance rate, generally between 2.7% and 3.7%). Over the years I had gotten into the habit of laziness on footnotes and bibliography form when I wrote a paper. He called me in and lowered one of my grades for an inaccurate footnote! Who knew anyone checked?
The other course was about government, taught by an Undersecretary of State who flew up from D.C. a few times a week. For our government project, another young woman and I interviewed the notorious head of the Boston schools, Louise Day Hicks, who headed Boston’s School Committee and City Council. She went on to serve in Congress. She became notorious for fighting court-ordered busing.
She hated Harvard. She accused us of being Communists, and that was just for starters. I knew there were racists in my own family, but I had never heard someone so vocal. I was actually afraid of her.
My roommate was Black, a few years older than I was. She taught kindergarten in a Chicago school. (While we were there, she was offered the principalship of her school. The Harvard effect?) She and I met another young Black woman, a student at Spelman College, whose education was being funded by the Rockefellers. We three started having our meals together and became friends. Every meal was an education for me, and many, many laughs.
Some afternoons, I walked across the street from the campus to a large yellow house, once the home of the poet Longfellow. I sat in the garden and read, occasionally pinching myself and thought about telling my next semester’s students, if we read something by Longfellow, where I had been.
On other weekdays I drove up to one of the beaches on Cape Cod to study (and contract subsequent middle-age skin cancers), but I can’t remember which one. Occasionally I stopped for an ice cream cone at a shop that I had heard was frequented by Kennedys.
Once I was sitting on a ledge outside the Widener Library at Harvard, when a group of men in suits walked up the stairs. They seemed to be in a formation; in the center was President John F. Kennedy. I swear, he had red hair! So did I!
He would be murdered four months later.
I did not return to Harvard the following summer; I was planning my wedding. The summer after that, married, my husband did not want me to return to Harvard, even though they offered me a full scholarship. The marriage lasted 20 years.
I wish we could make a trade where the Church would get Trump and we would get the new Pope. Those crafty bishops could short-circuit Trump and we could smile again with President Bob.