Knew Surprisingly Few

 

As my college class prepares to commemorate our 50th commencement anniversary, an array of activities has been offered to us as we join UPenn's Old Guard.  While they know where I live, sending me the periodical Alumni magazine on schedule and asking me for money, I've not had success interfacing with the alumni office to receive the mailings of the upcoming events or to post my own profile for the curious.

My entering class had about 1800 students distributed over several divisions, Arts & Sciences, business school, engineering schools, nursing and a few others.  Some students matriculated in the Evening Division, older people already in the workforce.  We all graduated together, appearing on a unified Alumni roster on the 50th Reunion website. I do not know how many of those first arriving at freshman move-in day earned their intended degrees.  No doubt some dropped out, others transferred to other schools, some from elsewhere transferred in.  There were a lot of people at Commencement ceremonies, with the baccalaureates all seated together.  We stood as a group as somebody important, whether President or Provost or designee, announced that we had earned our degrees, a ceremony repeated some thirty years later for both of my children.  My Commencement filled The Civic Center, of blessed memory, while it's demise made Franklin Field the venue best able to accommodate my children's classes.

Unlike my high school class of 400 where I could at least recognize the majority by name, the University experience was much different.  Some introductory lecture courses would have 400 individual notes in a students taking individual notes in spiral notebooks with the UPenn seal on the cover, purchased a few at a time from the University Bookstore.  The few post introductory courses that freshmen sometimes take populate with upperclassmen.  Once past freshman year, the individual courses attract students across multiple years, in contrast to high school where we all moved forward as a single class.  As freshman, we nearly all lived in one of two places, a large men's Quadrangle or a women's dormitory whose architect thought it would be cute to fashion as a blend of fortress and prison.  The people I got to know either shared classes, lived nearby in the dorms, or came to the Kosher dining room for supper each evening.  Once past freshman year, the people mostly moved out of freshman housing, distributing among some new high rises, fraternity/sorority buildings, some private apartments within walking distance of campus, and a handful like me staying in the Quad.  Many had kitchens, so even the nightly dinner at the Hillel dining room became less of a gathering place.  I suppose part of the purpose of a large university is to have the students circulate among many diverse students, distributed among ethnicity, religions, academic interests, geographic origins, and year of graduation.  Casual encounters become plentiful.  Close friendships become few.  Sustainable friendships that endure fifty years past graduation measure in the single digits, unlike my much smaller high school class where they probably reach double digits.

Accomplishment and geography take its toll as well.  A mere handful of my college classmates became public figures, though many others achieved more limited public recognition in what became their areas of expertise.  Even the people that you knew from the dorm, lab, or dining room went their own ways once their diploma was issued.  People lived everywhere, worked for enterprises from the corporations of household names to solo professional practitioners.  That semi-cohesive collection of freshmen transformed to social entropy.  Again, this probably falls within the mission of the finest universities, which take justified pride when they gather promising young talent from innumerable origins and redistribute their newly educated graduates far and wide.

How few people I actually got to know from my class became too apparent when I reviewed the list of deceased members of my class.  This list, alphabetized, identified by their university division attended, and displayed in two columns, ran a considerable length, though I did not count the total.  Fifty years generates its actuarial mortality.  Not everyone reaches three score and ten, the approximate age of people who received their undergraduate degrees fifty years previously.  Undoubted others also passed away under the radar of the Alumni Office that tracks this.  

I scrolled through each column, encountering a lot of unfamiliar names before the name of somebody I knew, more often casually than well, registered in my mind as "yes, he/she lived upstairs from me" or I knew from a mutual activity.  For some, I had seen and remembered a previous death notice, usually from the University's Alumni Magazine which lists brief obituaries by class towards the end of each issue.  When this magazine arrives approximately each quarter, I go to the Class Notes first to reacquaint with people I once knew who achieved more than me.  Then I hit the obits, my class first, then earlier and later classes whose members would have overlapped with me on campus.  Finally, the Faculty Obits.  I make a mental note, one that apparently comes quickly out of mental storage when I see that name on a necrology list again, even years later.  Some on the Fiftieth Anniversary memorial list are new notifications for me.  

As I identified the familiar deceased classmates, I took advantage of what our World Wide Web makes so readily available.  Typing their names for Google more often than not guided me to a verbal snapshot of what they were in life, usually as an obituary, most often Legacy.com or the local newspaper from the city in which the graduate had settled.  Nobody I searched that way had their own Wikipedia entry, though many, particularly the physicians, had information about them from sites that bring information to patients about the doctors they might like to see.  These people all had careers of some type, Nearly all had descendants.  A UPenn undergraduate sheepskin, either the document or the acquisition of knowledge that generated it, moves its holders in countless productive paths.  Indeed, the Admissions staff, whose uncertainty created months of anxiety for many of us at age 18, had to project decades to assemble a class of 1800 whose promise will be fulfilled.  The cumulative lifetime accomplishments of our departed classmates confirms that promise.  It also exposes a measure of failure, the inability of most of us to connect with more people of talent during our short times on campus than we actually did.

Our landmark graduation approaches.  We enter UPenn's Old Guard.  It's a distinguished group, the majority still within the actuarial survival curves.  And while we got to know a fraction of the people that we could, for those of us who can return to campus, we can make our best effort to meet a few more.