Graham Seibert Autobiography draft Jan 15, 2013 Page
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Reed CollegeMany times in life I find myself doing what other people want. And usually not terribly successfully. I tend to stop, look around, and reassess the situation. In IBM my boss asked me to write some sort of an assessment of what I was going to be doing over the next couple years. I had no idea what he meant, and it never got written. I got marked down in my next periodic evaluation for that oversight. A wife will give me some tasks to do, offering me no way by which I can refuse it, something that doesn’t make sense. One such thing might be taking a child who is obviously not sick to the pediatrician. Another might be going to a swim meet to watch a kid who is not interested and who is doing nothing which is beneficial in the first place, just diving off the board, because his mother wants him to. In general, my attitude shows, and it doesn’t work out terribly well. I was kind of the way with college. Everybody thought to going to college was a good idea, except me. I went along with the business because everybody else was going to college. However, I had no idea what I was doing there, why I should be there, what came next. I’m a kid with large existential questions, such as the ones I noted above that I asked my father when I was four and five years old. I found myself in college not really knowing how or why I was there, challenged to find something interesting in doing what I was doing. The first semester at Reed was pretty interesting. I took physics, which was well taught and interesting. I took a humanities course which was likewise well thought out. The humanities course was one of the college’s pride and joys. They have been teaching it kind of the same way for almost 100 years. It is well structured and very interesting, an introduction to true scholarship. The third course I took was probably mathematics. I don’t remember. This mathematics was unlike any I had seen before – it was proofs and logic and stuff like that. My second semester went somewhat downhill. It involved chemistry, which it never interested me as much, and I did not do as well. Moreover, at the same time I was getting involved in intellectual discussions on campus. I was involved in playing cards, especially poker. I have found an abandoned bicycle on campus and was bicycling around Portland. I was doing quite a bit of drinking, exploring my new social freedom. My major when I entered the college was physics. I changed that my second year to sociology, because I enjoyed a sociology course taught by John Pock. I didn’t do as well in my other courses. I forget what they were. And I was more and more involved in the discussions that went on with the rest of the people on campus. I was rather the odd man out. The dominant culture of Reed college was this was set by the big-city Jews. Al Birholtz from Chicago, Jim Kahan from Los Angeles, Jay Rosenberg from somewhere back East, Lennie Ross, who had won the $64,000 question at the age of 12 through his expertise on the stock market. Although we talked a great deal, I do not remember the conversations as overtly political, except in a few instances. I supported Richard Nixon because my family had always been Republicans. I found that I was in a very small minority. I don’t even recall that there was a great deal of enlightenment in our arguments. We listened to the Nixon - Kennedy debates on TV. I thought Nixon made good points. Everybody else lambasted, belittled, and ridiculed him. I could accept being wrong, but not if I could not see why I was wrong. It was culture, not logic. Another thing that sticks in my mind is that I talked about the problems of welfare and supporting people who would be unable to make a contribution to society. They called me a social Darwinist. It seems that everybody else had thought these issues out, and more particularly, they had ready labels for people like me who were not of the right mindset. I’m not uncomfortable being wrong, and I’m not uncomfortable being corrected when I’m wrong. But I am very hard nosed about being steamrolled when somebody else doesn’t seem to have a coherent argument but said that wants to push me over by force of personality. That seemed to be what happens quite a bit. They had a lot of logistical support on their side. We sang Woodie Guthrie songs, the Communist Internationale, and all manner of songs which represented a mindset different than mine. I looked at it as curious, and didn’t see that there was a large and coherent pattern behind all this dogma to which I was exposed, and to which I found myself increasingly opposed. It represented I suppose what they called those unamerican activities which the US House of Representatives had a committee to investigate. Of course Reed College was vehemently opposed to the House Unamerican Activities Committee, McCarthy, and everything associated with them. I wasn’t convinced one way or the other, but as I say, I was damned if I would be steamrolled. Among the other things that one does in college is to learn about life and love and sex. After my sophomore year I stayed in Portland and experienced a few almost-seductions with some of the young women who were staying the summer. And that fall I lost my virginity to a strumpet – there’s no other word – who was tolerant enough to put up with the fact that I was too drunk to pull it off in the evening and went home with me so we could make it in the morning. Within a month I had another girlfriend, the first serious love of my life, and by the end of the semester I had been become so involved with things other than academics that I decided to drop out. I had no clue why I was in college, and the other things I was doing were more interesting. Throughout my Reed college days I always felt quite poor. I was aware of the sending me to Reed was a financial strain for my parents, despite the scholarship. After my first year I stopped living in the dormitories. Living off campus gave me more freedom, and cost less. I enjoyed doing my own cooking. I signed up for Multnomah County Food Relief, which gave me most of my groceries at no cost. I did work to make money. I use my typing skills to prepare papers for other students. I guess I did a pretty good job. I made money playing poker. In the fall all the new kids came. They continued to lose money first semester, although by February or March all of the easy money was out of the game, and I found myself pitted against people who are better than me. I was wise enough to drop out at that point, so I remained ahead in the game. The other kids played for fun. I needed the money. I worked in the cafeteria the first year in order to earn my food. In my second and third years I used to go into the cafeteria and beg food from people. I smoked to at this time, and I also begged cigarettes from people, and smoked butts that I found in the ashtrays. This is not the very proud experience. I can say that I was uncomfortable. I had less money than everybody else, and yet I had a more conservative philosophy than the people who seem to have money to spend. I was a fish out of water. As I look back on these college friendships, only a couple seemed to endure. The hard leftists of my youth have not mellowed whatsoever. They are impossible to talk to anymore. They simply regard me as irredeemably, irrevocably wrong in my views and refused to discuss issues. They consider the argument settled when they call me an anti-Semite, as if that fully explained a difference in politics. I had a hint of that at the time. They did not want to really discuss the issues that they held so dear, but they wanted to sway me to their opinion. This purpose is transparently clear after 50 years. They have not changed an iota, and I have changed quite a bit. Their life’s experience hasn’t changed them much, my life’s experience has mellowed me and molded me, and I feel free enough within my own skin to say so. Though I reconnecting with the Reed College group at our 40th reunion, in 2004, I today have a few remaining dialogues. There is simply nothing in common, and no reason that I should continue the discussion. I used to give $100 now and then to the Reed College annual fund. When somebody from their Major Gifts department would contact me, I would ask to speak to someone from the Minor Gifts group. I’m not even doing that anymore. I do not believe in what they are doing, and I really do not believe that they are developing open-minded young scholars. No, the educational establishment of the United States, and Reed College in particular, is perpetuating a kind of academic leftism under the rubric of open inquiry and academic freedom. I don’t want to support it. I am going to homeschool my son Edward, and my prayer is that there will be an open schooling, homeschooling alternative to university education by the time he’s old enough for that to be an issue. I mentioned that I enjoyed exploring when I was in high school. This adventuresome nature continued while I was in college. I had a bicycle, an old racing-style bicycle with ram’s horn handlebars, one of which was rusted off at the bend, with only one speed, which I rode all over town. I rode it over across the river to the farmers market where I bought horsemeat. It was cheap nutritious. I rode it to pick up my grocery allotment from Multnomah County Food Relief. Nobody else went with me; it was a solitary exercise. I rode the bicycle back and forth to my various houses. I can remember living in small rooms here and there, even a basement with a bare matress for which I paid almost no rent. These experiences set me apart from everybody else who had worked established, stable living arrangements. I was also somewhat apart from the fads that swept through the campus. Scientology was a big fad. I looked at it, listened to it, went to some other meetings, and absolutely did not get it. It struck me as a con. People were greatly taken by some books. Stranger in a Strange Land captured everybody’s imagination. I read the book and could not see what the fuss was about. Somehow it did not relate to my existence. The third source of inspiration to everybody else was the JRR Tolkien series, Lord of the Rings. I didn’t see the point. I suppose that I am outside of the loop on most things, although in high school, when everybody was reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, I kind of admired John Galt. I would not get political, would not get up in arms about it, but I do remember feeling a bit of inspiration when reading Rand, Vance Packard and others. On the other hand, the stuff that people were reading in college did not inspire me at all. Speaking of reading, I should mention my first career at the University of California. I was at Cal as a high school student from the spring of 1959 through the spring of 1960. I took total of seven courses, as I recall: differential and integral calculus, two semesters of philosophy, and one semester of German. I had access to the Cal library. This I really loved. I can remember checking out books by Nietzsche, HL Mencken, and my favorite of all, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. I read prodigiously in my last couple of years of high school. This is a habit that has stayed with me for a lifetime. I have not reread The Origin of the Species, but I remember it better than anybody should after 50 years, especially given that it is written in prose which is relatively inaccessible to a 21st-century reader. Reed’s library was just not as interesting, though also I didn’t leave myself as much time to spend reading. Download 412.6 Kb. Share with your friends:
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