The day I turned seventeen was my first day at the University of South Florida: Freshman Orientation. I had a brand new car, a '64 VW, and although I was still living at home, I felt very grown up. USF was a new school, it graduated its first class the year I started, and was growing quickly, construction was going on all over the place and everything was so new the campus grass hadn't been planted yet, an ocean of white sugar sand separated an archipelago of architecturally striking buildings -- and got into everything as well. My student number was 15853, they were awarded sequentially to each new student; today, there are some twenty or thirty thousand students there at any one time. My college education was to be financed by my remaining Social Security benefit from my father, and since it was due to expire in a year, Mother was already making arrangements to apply for my father's unused GI educational benefits to carry me the rest of the way through. USF was a state school and tuition was very reasonable for Florida residents, about a hundred dollars a trimester. My own GI Bill benefits financed my last three years of school (I temporarily dropped out in my Junior year to fulfill my military obligation). Without this fortunate intersection of circumstances it is highly unlikely I would have become the first person in my family to earn a college degree.

My freshman orientation was remarkably successful, one of the activities was an assembly held in the theater for the new students, and we were treated to a recital of Beat poetry by the English faculty, backed up by a very hip jazz quartet. I knew right off I was going to like this place. My suspicions about the correlation between cars and girls proved to be right on the mark, I met two pretty girls during orientation and was soon dating both of them. This was paradise. There were women, there was culture, and to my surprise, I even found my classes fascinating. I had expected that college would just be an extension of the misery of high school, but soon learned that it was every cliché about intellectual adventure I had dismissed as propaganda. USF's philosophy was to provide a solid liberal arts education as well as training in an academic discipline, and it delivered. There was a solid program of extracurricular activities, lectures, recitals, debates, plays, concerts, dances, clubs and student organizations. Best of all, there was NO FOOTBALL! The university administration early on made the decision to not allow varsity sports, although there was an active intramural program for those who wished to get involved. There were fraternities and sororities, but again, the administration outlawed national Greek organizations and all the foolishness that goes with that elitist claptrap. I also found that the older students did not systematically haze or shun the freshmen, this was a place where you were judged on the basis of what you thought, not what your age was, or what you wore. Even the graduate students, and USF had more than its share because it was a commuter school, pretty much ignored your student status when forming friendships or acquaintances.

The university had a core curriculum of what it called Basic Studies that every student had to complete prior to graduation. This consisted of a review of the basic divisions of human knowledge: science, mathematics, social and behavioral sciences, literature, composition, languages and the humanities. It was an almost medieval concept, the fundamental liberal arts grand tour that connected us all to the community of scholarship founded in the Middle Ages, one of the great cultural achievements of Western Man. Students were allowed to bypass those survey courses which related to one's major, for example, I skipped math and science, but I eagerly plunged into the others, it was like my old days at the neighborhood library. USF took this program seriously, it was taught by the best scholars on the faculty, and it was emphasized as a major part of our education, not just a preliminary to be gotten through prior to starting on our majors. Each course lasted two trimesters, so it was possible to go into the material in some depth. The middle sixties was the calm before the storm, the intellectual seed of what was to explode on the world by the end of the decade, and we were systematically prepared for what was coming without either us or our teachers realizing it. We learned that there were always reasons why things happened, but we also learned that they were not always immediately obvious. As a generation, we learned that the events of our time were not conspiracies of the present, but the result of cultural and social forces that had roots in the past, and that failure to realize this was in itself a major moving force behind those events. We read Mead and Harrington, McLuhan and Weiner, Keynes and Fanon, Jung and Skinner, Horney and Heilbroner. It was a heady mix and an excellent education for survivors of the Florida secondary school system, and the music of the Beatles and the bands of the British Invasion was everywhere.

Epilogue--

I'm sure the University has changed much, above and beyond the expected growth since when I was in attendance. There is football and basketball now, and the fraternity/sorority system is very well established. The Astronomy Department, my old home, is gone now, off to U of F in Gainesville. A few years ago I met and had a drink with an old classmate who is now an official with the University Employee's Union. When Governor Bush abolished the State Board of Regents and replaced it with a newly reorganized local Board of Trustees, he was invited in his official capacity to attend the opening ceremonies of the investiture of the new governing body. My friend was not there to participate, only observe, but he got a good look at where things were going. The new Board had few or no academics or professional educators, it was composed primarily of "local leaders", mostly members of the business community. My friend recalled vividly the speech made by one of these gentlemen during the ceremony, the phrase which really stuck in his mind went something like this (I paraphrase, of course) : "...it is time for us to recognize that it is not the University's role to teach our youth how to think, but to teach them what they need to know."

And I'm never going back to my old school.