The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  I asked what he wanted to do.

  “Don’t worry, man. I told them I don’t want to move.”

  I was surprised by how far this information about me had traveled. I wasn’t ready to come out to my family or my friends in California and I began to worry; if this news had reached Wisconsin, how long before it hit the West Coast?

  A few days later, two of the dorm’s residential advisors—I’ll call them Susie and Jeff—knocked on the door. Susie was one of those boarding school graduates who landed on campus with three dozen friends, a beat-up BMW, and the social ability to organize a coed touch football game any time of day or night. “Dave, can we talk?” she asked. “Ryan’s parents are really upset.”

  “They want him to move out,” Jeff added. I barely knew him but he gave the impression that he had filled out his RA application late one night with a pen in one hand and a bong in the other and was still a little stunned that he’d been accepted.

  Susie explained that Ryan’s parents had threatened to pull Ryan from Brown if they didn’t reassign him and “obviously no one wants that.”

  “Ryan doesn’t want to move but his parents keep insisting and the football team isn’t going to risk losing him,” Jeff explained, embarrassed about the whole thing.

  “It’s a big mess.” Susie sighed. “Everyone wants to figure out the right thing to do.”

  I was stunned by the invisible flurry of phone calls, meetings, and “discussions” about me that had apparently taken place. To use one of the campus’s favorite words of the era, I had become an issue.

  “No one wants to see Ryan leave,” Susie said. “We wish there was some other option.”

  That’s when I realized why they were there.

  “I’m not moving,” I said.

  Susie blinked. Jeff looked at his Top-Siders. I was about to cry but willed myself not to. I don’t remember what was said after this, but they soon left. I imagined Susie calling someone—who?—to report, “He won’t budge.”

  When I turned up at the LGBA, Kathy immediately sensed I was upset. I told her what had just happened and she said, “They can’t do that.” She picked up the phone to call the Office of Residential Life, but I told her not to. She set down the phone and warned me to be careful.

  When I returned to the room late that night, Ryan said, “Hey, Dave, it isn’t me. It’s my parents. I told them you’re cool.”

  I told him not to worry and went to bed, exhausted. I had begun to hope he would move. I had never shared a room before and, his parents aside, I didn’t really enjoy sharing one now. Ryan was neat and often out, but still he snored and occasionally invited friends over to listen to The Black Album. I imagined turning our double into a single where I could hang more Morrissey pictures and a few ethnic scarves. I imagined inviting my future, hypothetical boyfriend over to be alone.

  A couple of days later, Susie and Jeff returned.

  “Ryan’s moving out tomorrow,” Susie announced. “People are really upset.”

  “I thought he wanted to stay.”

  Susie told me that the football team had requested the university reassign Ryan. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that after almost a week of private conversations about me that I was excluded from, he was moving out. “People need to process what’s going on,” Susie said. There was to be a unit-wide meeting that night but everyone agreed, she told me, I shouldn’t be there. Apparently Susie, and quite a few others, blamed me.

  Behind her, Jeff made a face that said, Man, I so don’t want to be here.

  My first reaction wasn’t anger but relief. I would like to tell you that in this moment my personal convictions emboldened me and I spoke up for myself. I didn’t. I was just glad it was over and began to think about rearranging the furniture.

  Not long after, I got a call from a BDH reporter. “We’re doing a story about what’s going on with your roommate.”

  I hung up. Was I really going to come out to the world—like this? I was confused about all the people involved. Who were they? What were they saying? Even now I have no idea.

  I found Kathy in the LGBA office. Before I could finish explaining, she was on the phone with Residential Life. “Answer this: is it or isn’t it Brown’s policy to allow someone to move just because their roommate’s gay?” Followed by, “Then why is he moving?” Next she asked me what I wanted to do about the BDH. There’s never a really great time to come out—at least there wasn’t back in those days. No matter how awkward, this was my chance to leave the closet forever. I thought about it, then returned the door to its ajar position. “You sure?” Kathy asked one last time. I was. She called the BDH and convinced them to kill a story they didn’t have all the facts on.

  Looking back, my passivity frustrates me. Why didn’t I assert my rights? I should have let the BDH open the debate. But I was young and afraid; in some ways my old fears from my early teens had played out. I didn’t want to fight a public battle with rules and players I did not understand. More basically, I no longer wanted to live with Ryan. By then I was blaming him—he could’ve stopped everything by saying no. I wanted him out. And even more than justice, I wanted my single.

  I returned to my dorm soon after the meeting had ended. People were hanging out in the hall. No one spoke to me as I passed. In one room, a woman was sobbing while her friend consoled her. Her red face, her unreasonable tears, her friend squeezing her shoulder is what finally sent a rod through my backbone. “Get over it,” I snapped. Later, two women came by my room. “We just want you to know we don’t blame you.” They were reaching out with real empathy, but I was done. “Neither do I,” I said, and shut the door.

  Ryan slept elsewhere that night. The next day when I returned from class there was no trace of him, except the two desks pushed back-to-back.

  How did this end? Not well for either of us. I never saw Ryan again. Our campus schedules were so different we never ran into each other. After winter break, he didn’t return to Brown. I heard he had flunked out. I don’t know if this is true. All I can say is he spent one semester at Brown and never returned. As for me, I’ve regretted this next part for twenty-five years.

  Late in the semester, Res Life notified me I would have a new roommate in January, an unidentified transfer student. I had settled into my extra-large single and didn’t want to share it. I enjoyed the freedom to write and study, to sleep when I wanted, to listen to Morrissey, and to invite over the new friends I was making, including my now-real boyfriend (a cute grad student from Houston). There was more: the experience with Ryan had so scalded me that I had vowed never to be so vulnerable again.

  The night before I left for winter break, my best friend and I hatched a plan to drive away my future roommate. We gayed up the room, decorating it with rainbows, pink triangles, and, most insultingly, pages ripped from beefcake magazines. It was a desperate, passive-aggressive move: I wasn’t going to let anyone reject me; instead I would reject him first, turning myself into a stereotype. At the time I didn’t think of it in those terms, but certainly that’s what I was doing. I’m still embarrassed by the scene: I imagine this hopeful transfer student entering the room and finding pictures of naked men next to the Morrissey posters. He fled to the housing office, which promptly assigned him another room. When I returned to campus the double was mine alone and Susie said something vague about my roommate deciding to live somewhere else. That transfer student I turned against could have been a friend; he could have been gay himself. After being so coldly unaccepted, I had turned around and done the same thing. A psych major would say that after being punished for being gay I used it as a weapon. It was worthy of disciplinary action and yet my own lewd behavior escaped punishment.

  I sometimes wonder about Ryan, about what really happened and why he never returned. No one comes to Brown thinking they’ll last only a semester. Certainly Ryan arrived in Providence with as many hopes as you and me. Yet something destroyed that version of Ryan’s future and I wonder how I fit into t
he narrative of that destruction. For a long time I resented my roommate experience and was ashamed of how I responded to it. Now I look back on it as a relic of another age. In our first weeks in college, Ryan and I found ourselves in opposite ends of a boat caught on tricky shoals. Instead of helping each other, we both bailed. And here’s what I really wonder: how is it that fate can bring two young men so close together that only a pair of desks separates their pillows, and then yank their paths so drastically apart that I cannot tell you if Ryan is now among the living or the dead?

  POLITICS

  On the morning of May 5th, awakening to the sound of a bullhorn on the street—“BROWN UNIVERSITY ON STRIKE!”—I pulled the pillow over my head. I think this would be the week I hung up on my gentle but still pro-Nixon father from one of those pay phones in the West Quad.

  I stayed in my room or at the library, writing a long paper on Romantic poetry that I didn’t really need to turn in. Everywhere else, at least for a while, the war protests thrived.

  —Thomas Mallon (’73)

  [At] Brown University, I was always someone who was a social activist, but I dabbled in experimental filmmaking classes. It became clear as I got into the real world that there was a way to combine these two interests.

  —Liz Garbus (’92)

  JEFF SHESOL

  Talking ’Bout My Generation

  IRA C. MAGAZINER

  In 1965, when I became a freshman at Brown University, black Americans in Southern states could not eat at white lunch counters. They had to ride in the backs of buses and use separate bathrooms. Black Americans in northern states could not move into middle-class neighborhoods and were paid less for the same jobs than their white coworkers. Women made up only 2 percent of the student bodies at medical and law schools. A woman was raped and beaten in Central Park in New York and the news accounts led with the commentary that “she was asking for it because she was wearing a short skirt.”

  Some of my eighteen-year-old friends who could not go to college would die in a war in Vietnam whose purpose few of us understood. Though they fought valiantly for their country, they were not allowed to vote in elections because the minimum voting age was twenty-one. Rivers caught fire because toxic chemicals were dumped in them, and on some days soot from factories and power plants was so thick that breathing without coughing was difficult. And despite two decades of economic growth in America, many Americans still lived in dire poverty.

  While America provided unparalleled freedom and opportunity for many people, many problems needed to be addressed.

  At most American universities, education consisted of fact-filled lectures followed by rote regurgitation of those facts on tests that left little room for creative thinking. Students were passive learners moving from one required course to another. Knowledge was divided into separate compartments, and students had little responsibility for their own education.

  There were only a handful of African-American students at leading US universities, and they represented less than 2 percent of the student body at Brown. Women made up only 20 percent of the total Brown/Pembroke student body. Students had no say in university governance. Men could not be in a woman’s dorm room unless the door was open, and visiting hours were limited.

  But in the space of six years, all of this would change—both nationally and at Brown—and students played a significant role in bringing about that change.

  The student idealism of the late 1960s has been caricatured for its extremes—the “yippies” and the “hippies” and the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” (I will not comment on the sex and drugs, but the rock and roll was and remains something special.) But there was a lot more to student life than this. The movements that students helped initiate and support transformed America in positive ways. And America, and Brown University, would never be the same.

  Two events at Brown stand out: the commitment to affirmative action forged when black students walked out of the university in protest in 1968, and the adoption of the New Curriculum in 1969. In both cases, students conceived of the changes that were needed and organized political movements that forced those transformations. They were aided by a university administration that was willing to listen and engage and that had the courage to change.

  My first attempt at student activism at Brown was born of necessity and self-interest. At that time, students were required to eat at Brown’s main dining hall, popularly called “the Ratty.” The food was awful and I usually bought my dinner from a truck called Pizza Pete that parked near my dorm. Pete eventually became the official caterer of the education movement at Brown.

  One of my main projects as freshman class president was to organize a petition and hold rallies to eliminate the requirement to eat at the Ratty. Needless to say, it was a popular cause. I got the Brown student government to endorse the movement.

  We thought we were making progress when another student and I were invited to meet then-president Barnaby Keeney. We showed up at University Hall ready to negotiate. His secretary ushered us into his office. He was sitting at his desk, which seemed to be elevated a good five feet off the floor. He never acknowledged us. Instead, he began dictating into a microphone. His dictation was a letter expelling us from Brown. We sat in amazement. When he finished, he turned to us as if surprised to see us and then said his only words: “You can go now.” His secretary, who had been waiting in the back of the office, escorted us out.

  We decided we had nothing to lose so we kept agitating, fully expecting the campus police to serve us with an eviction notice. But they never came. We did not win that battle that year, but eventually the mandatory contracts were ended and the food got better.

  In the spring of my sophomore year, my peers and I became frustrated by the education we were receiving at Brown and we decided to act. Already accustomed to joining civil rights marches and demonstrations against the Vietnam War and against environmental pollution, we felt that we could have the greatest impact by reforming our own institution. We could help establish at Brown an education system that would encourage more creative and responsible leadership, and we could try to address racial and sexual injustices within our own community.

  In the summer after my sophomore year, I drafted a four-hundred-page report that was then edited, in the fall, by a group of twenty students led by Elliot Maxwell. The report made recommendations on how to improve Brown’s education system.

  There were a few fundamental principles guiding our recommendations:

  • Students should be actively responsible for their education, choosing what to study, aided by a strong counseling system, rather than being subjected to requirements that encouraged passive learning. They should have the choice to develop independent concentrations with a faculty advisor rather than having to fit a predetermined design of a concentration.

  • The teaching of facts was less important than teaching students how different disciplines approached knowledge and learning. If a student knew how to learn, then he or she could engage in a lifetime of learning, including acquiring factual knowledge.

  • Instead of large lecture courses in early years and then seminars in later years, students could benefit better from small classes in their early years and then more independent and group independent work in their later years.

  • Interdisciplinary activities should be encouraged, going beyond the traditional compartmentalization of knowledge in departments.

  • Letter or number grades were not particularly valuable methods of evaluation. Written performance evaluations that actually helped students understand in some detail what they could do better were more meaningful.

  • Encouraging students to be more responsible for their learning—removing the props of requirements, letter grades, and spoon-fed course selections—would encourage better, more creative learning and a more meaningful form of rigor.

  This philosophy of education was designed to produce leaders who would be entrepreneurs, who would question authority and have
the skills to create new paradigms in government, business, and science.

  The substance of our proposed reforms was important, but the grassroots process that we implemented was also crucial to the success and sustainability of the reforms. We had looked at other schools where small groups of students engaged in violent demonstrations or occupied buildings while the majority of students merely observed from across the street. We didn’t think this was the best way to bring long-lasting change. Instead, we set out to mobilize the whole student body. If we had large numbers, we could achieve greater results with moderate tactics.

  In September 1968, I pulled together a group of twenty students to mobilize the student body and to lobby faculty. Our aim was to get the faculty to pass fundamental reforms by the end of the school year.

  What made us think we could pull this off? In part, our confidence came from the successful Spring Weekend I had spearheaded the year before. In my sophomore year, I had decided to organize concerts on campus on a scale that had never been attempted before. We brought in the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Doors, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and thousands of students attended the concerts. This culminated—in my junior year—in the first large-scale Spring Weekend ever attempted in New England.

  We had James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Procol Harum, the Yardbirds, and Dizzy Gillespie; for the poetry crowd we had Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. We had classical musician Lorin Hollander, the comedian Jean Shepherd, and folk musicians Ian and Sylvia. We also set up a seventy-two-hour classic movie marathon. Allen Ginsberg and some other performers were so impressed by the lineup that they stayed for the whole weekend.