Stories of a life, part two Ron Scollon first draft March 2008
This file continues the stories. ‘Part two’ doesn’t have any meaning except that it consists of stories 21 through 30.
What’s this?
One thing I got fairly good at was dropping out of school. I did it quite a few times – three times at Michigan alone, then also another bunch of universities too. Why did I keep going? Why did I keep leaving? It felt then like there was a kind of double and contradictory set of tides flowing. One was the predictable one that was pulling or pushing me into an academic life. I read a lot of books, tried my hand at writing, I was interesting in talking about ‘big’ stuff, ideas. So everybody sort of pushed me toward universities. That’s where such stuff happens.
But then I got into those universities and it was never happening there. There was never any time to read what I wanted to read, I had to write what somebody else told me to write, and nobody seemed to be interested in the substance of what was written in the books or being performed in the music or the art.
Once in my first year at Michigan – 1957/1958 – my roommate, Dave Wolter had some of his music school classmates in the room listening to things to get ready for a survey of music history class. Dave was putting on the records and playing the parts they’d been told to study. But then I remember he got all excited and said, ‘Do you want to hear something really neat? It’s over here in the next movement.’ And the answer was, ‘We don’t want to hear anything neat. We want to hear what’s going to be on the test.’
That was intellectual life in the universities as I found it. I ended up spending my time with the peripheral people in those places, the ones who were there because they were attached to someone in school, or the dropouts who just couldn’t find a way to leave town, or disaffected graduate students.
But I tried my best in the first year. Michigan had recognized that a lot of its ‘better’ students were drifting away out of touch. There was something going on across the country in the late 50’s. Now we read Lew Welch or Gary Snyder or Jack Kerouac and say, ‘Oh yeah, the beat movement.’ But there were a lot of us who were beat, we felt completely beat down by the expectations of the social tide that was flowing and just wanted to get away from it. And at that time most of us didn’t know each other. But Michigan decided the way to deal with it was to set up a sort of small, almost private college within that huge university. They called it their ‘Honors Program’. Robert Angell was the director and somehow they chose me in the Fall of 1957 to be one of the first 150 students to start the program. We had our own classes – very small ones – almost always with senior and important professors. They figured we were becoming disaffected because we weren’t getting the best. And yes, I was lucky to have ended up in some excellent classes because of that. So I tried my best and got through the first year fairly well.