You might call it a story of blurred lines, perhaps, but the lines weren’t blurry to me. I was terrified that I would be kicked out of my graduate program because a professor wanted a sexual relationship with me and I turned him down.
Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a mere don
A. D. Godley, 1894
Kids Today Want Trophies For Everything
"The undergraduate who has made a speech at the Union, or a century for his college second eleven, wants a printed certificate of his glorious achievements."
Long-time readers will remember that both Nicole and self have a deep, abiding, uncritical love for Deep Springs College, the bonkers, hyper-isolated, working cattle ranch slash all-male two-year university in Eastern California.
I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past… --W.G. Sebald
Two years ago, I was halfway through earning a degree in history, learning about the kinds of stories people tell in their historical scholarship. I was learning how to write well, and how…
Any woman who goes back to school at the age of 68 for a degree that seems to be, on the face of it, entirely worthless is necessarily living by faith. When I returned to Columbia University’s School of the Arts to secure an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction, I know I sure was. Trusting that the universe would provide, that the usual impediments would simply melt away, I, the faithful one, plunged in, seeking a way…
October is almost over, which means we are now well in the midst of application season. If you are, like me, a school-loving, knowledge-hungry chump, you too might be in the process of trying to make your way along the tiers of Higher Education. I applied to grad school three years ago and whoa, boy was it 1) enlightening and 2) exhausting and 3) expensive. It felt like a feat just to have managed to…
The first time I was involved in a fight about racism at school, I was so young my mom was still gently introducing me to the concept as a permanent fixture in my life. It was sometime in my early elementary years when I came home from school singing “Jimmy Crack Corn” and my mom had to go in and let the school music teacher know that her Black daughter (the only Black kid in…
