That’s the way you do the Varsity Drag

by David Benjamin

“You gotta do the Black Botton/ Gotta do the Shag/ And the Charleston/ And the Varsity Drag/ Oh, how I love the ladies/ Wear collegiate, collegiate clothes/ We’re so collegiate/ Rather be a ladies/ Rather be a ladies man…” —Good News

MADISON, Wis.—When I was sixteen, I added about two pounds to my “academic load,” the stuff I carried around between classes in high school. The extra weight consisted of a book slightly smaller than the Chicago telephone directory, called Cass and Birnbaum’s Guide to American Colleges. I was studying it in hopes of a higher education that I wasn’t sure was within my reach.

I needed James Cass and Max Birnbaum’s guidance because it wasn’t elsewhere available. My dad had graduated from high school, but Mom had dropped out after tenth grade. None of my grandparents, nor any of my numerous aunts and uncles had ever applied to a college. My big sister Peg was taking a path of little resistance by applying to a state university and had no counsel to offer. Besides, my fate—as Peg frequently made clear—was none of her business.

Nor could count on one of my main sources of knowledge—TV and movies. On my first day in high school, for example, it dawned on me that this was going to be nothing like “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” Scanning the seventy freshman assigned to Mrs. Twombly’s Civics class, I saw no sign of Tuesday Weld or Warren Beatty—or even Bob Denver. The pedagogic potential in movies was even less. The only “college film” I’d seen on the late show was Good News with June Allyson and Peter Lawford. The musical numbers were great, but the campus of Tait College was entirely populated by prodigies who could harmonize, tunefully, with Mel Tormé and execute six straight grand jetés without breaking a sweat.

I sensed that this was not realistic.

So, back to Cass & Birnbaum, which—when I look back—was a sort of Sears catalog for the college-bound. Each school had an entry as long as a thousand words, with data on location and history, enrollment, majors, tuition costs, room and board, financial aid, graduation rates, a faculty profile, geography and “campus life.” Each entry also included a brief description of the “student body.”

These brief but revealing “student body” thumbnails served, more than any other item, to focus my quest for a small school full of students who were different from me and from one another. I learned that the better schools took pride in having a “national” student profile. They trumpeted their percentages of kids from “out-of-state.” They swelled with pride over the numbers of “international” students. They made note of their “minority” representation and their efforts to enlarge that share of the student body.

I couldn’t help recalling my search for a compatible college when the president undertook his campaign to purge with extreme prejudice all vestiges—or even the casual mention—of “diversity” on America’s campuses.

Naive though I might have been, Cass & Birnbaum convinced me that the whole point of going to college was to immerse myself in diversity. I read about all the Ivy League schools, which I knew were out of my league. But every one—from Harvard to Penn—touted its diversity, as did the Midwestern colleges on which I focused my search, places like Kenyon, Berea, Carleton, Grinnell. I actually got accepted at my top choice, a hippy haven in Ohio called Antioch College. Beneath the photo in my high-school yearbook, I’m misprintedlly bound to “Antloch College.” But I didn’t go. Antioch couldn’t cover my financial aid.

The school that could afford me was Rockford College, in Illinois, with fewer than 500 students and a president so fiercely right-wing that he refused to tap the windfall of federal subsidies available to colleges in those days.

Notwithstanding its leader’s conservatism, Rockford College in the Sixties was festering with a diversity that had been fostered by the school’s admissions office. In my Rockford days, I came to know these people and to appreciate their taste for human variety. They were resigned to the fact that the majority of their students would hail from northern Illinois and the white Chicago suburbs, but they were not content. True to their Cass & Birnbaum blurb, the Rockford admissions team harbored a dread of homogeneity and parochialism.

They got a kick out of throwing together a lot of different kids—suburban and urban, black and white, national and international—then standing back to watch the osmosis. My best friends at Rockford were a sample. Mackie was from Oregon, Jody from New Jersey, Stephen from New York. I was from Wisconsin and D.P. Dagnes had arrived on campus from the U.S. Army and the killing fields of Vietnam. We came to call ourselves the Chapultepec Social Club (CSC).

One evening late in my freshman year, the admissions gang hosted a soirée for a bunch of high-school seniors interested in attending Rockford. Dagnes, the informal chairman of our informal group, declared the reception an “official” CSC event. If asked, President Howard might have discouraged the college’s five most notorious hippies from crashing the party.

But we did. Beforehand, we bathed and combed our flowing locks. We dressed presentably in freshly-laundered denim and Army-surplus khaki. Mackie had polished his huaraches. Our one uniform item, decreed by Dagnes, were shades, so that we wouldn’t be confused with all those old guys in suits.

Aware of our plans, the admissions gang welcomed us. They offered hors d’oeuvres. They encouraged us to mingle because, after all, we were the diversity they wanted to convey to the high-school kids. Moreso than any of the tweedy professors and cordial administrators, we conveyed the message that, when you get to college, things will be different. Some of the people you meet won’t be like anyone you know back home. The world you enter, from which you can never turn back, will be bigger, smarter, stranger, funnier and harder to figure out that any world you’ve encountered up to now. You might be scared but you will be more free, like these weirdos wearing Goodwill castoffs. You can let your hair grow. You can go to class barefoot. You can wear sunglasses after dark.

The admissions officers were glad to have us mingling among their prospects because they were all, at heart, teachers. They knew—better than the members of the Chapultepec Social Club—that the most educational force in higher education is the discovery of, and adaptation to, the vastness and richness of human variety.

I don’t think the admissions offices in most colleges have changed that much. But beyond the campus, there has built up a reactionary anger—promoted by right-wing demagogues and validated by conservative judges—against the mixing and mingling that has long been the enlightening force of American higher education.

Besides reminding me of Cass & Birnbaum, Donald Trump’s reign of terror against higher education took me back also to Good News. The movie’s campus, Tait College, is ridiculously idyllic. The male students are all frat boys who play football. They rarely study. The girls are only in college to find a mate and get married. One of the musical numbers, although splendidly choreographed, is a racist anthem sung and danced by a bunch of white kids obliviously mocking the language and heritage of Native American tribes. Manifest Destiny and Wounded Knee are not included in Tait’s history curriculum.

The movie is silly and hopelessly out of date. I shouldn’t even bring it up. Better I should just shrug off Good News as an artifact of senescent Hollywood and consign it to the growing ash heap of cultural anachronism. Trouble is, bigotry is not an anachronism. The White House is trying to turn our best universities into Tait College, where all the boys are football stars or song-and-dance hoofers, all the coeds are pathologically altar-bound, and everyone is white.

Somewhere, Cass & Birnbaum are rolling over in their graves.