Congratulations to all the high school seniors who have just committed to the college they will attend this fall. Maybe it was your first choice, maybe it was your safety, or somewhere in between. Whichever it was, this is the opportunity to buy mom that coffee mug she so desires for Mother’s Day and dad his higher-education-branded belt come his day in June. Oh, and set your path for a lifetime. Or, end up on a path you can hardly conceive of now. It’s that latter possibility I urge you to keep an open mind to.
I remember the precise calculation and deep thinking that went in to choosing the college of my dreams. Yes, the cover of the Boston College admission booklet with iconic Gasson Hall framed by a pink flowering tree was all I needed to know — this was the place for me! So BC was the only college I applied to and I brazenly (read: stupidly) declared if I didn’t get in, I wasn’t going to college. Luckily it worked out in that less competitive time and got me to Boston and completely set me on a path to the life and the family I have now.
But with the wisdom of age, I know now it could have gone a different way; I could have not gotten in; I could have ended up elsewhere or not gone to college at all and guess what … everything would have been okay.
It’s one of those pieces of knowledge that you can’t pass on to someone who hasn’t experienced enough life yet.
Or this truth:
If you show up on campus in September and, after giving it a try, it doesn’t feel right, you don’t have to stay. Attending the college you first choose is not a prison sentence. You can transfer. You can take a year off. You can go tend bar in Bali (sorry parents!).
When I was 17, I thought there was only one path. Maybe because my career got derailed later in life I’m able to see through the chaos of uncertainty to this clarity — it will all work out.
My only other words of wisdom to offer are not mine at all, but of a once-young-man from Salem who went on to a storied journalism career.
David Shribman was Washington D.C. bureau chief for the Boston Globe in the mid-1990s where he won a Pulitzer. That’s when I first got to know him, and we’ve kept in sporadic touch over the years as he went on to serve at other papers including for 16 years as executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In researching this column, I came across an entry that he had decided to retire from that role right before the killings at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue. He stayed on and is responsible for the front page headline, in Hebrew and Aramaic, featuring the start of the Jewish prayer for mourning – a choice that reverberated around the world.
If that doesn’t tell you he’s a mensch — a man of deep goodness — please read, and urge your college-bound senior to read, Shribman’s latest piece in The Atlantic, entitled “The man who died for the liberal arts.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/philip-shribman-liberal-arts-wwii/677836/
It is a remarkable piece of writing. It is a story straight from the heart. It is a tour de force in defense of an idea that shouldn’t need defending — that an education devoted to exploring a broad sweep of subjects — music, arts, history, language, economics, philosophy – is worthy. More than worthy, essential.
In The Atlantic piece Shribman describes a letter that his Uncle Phil, who had enlisted in the Navy in World War II wrote onboard a ship in the Pacific to David’s then-18-year-old father Dick who was about to depart for college.
It’s hard to imagine in an era when having the ROTC on campus is controversial but Shribman describes how colleges and universities in the U.S. were shifting their curriculums to train students for the war effort.
“What you’ll learn in college won’t be worth a God-damned,” Phil wrote to Dick. “But you’ll learn a way of life perhaps—a way to get on with people—an appreciation perhaps for just one thing: music, art, a book—all of this is bound to be unconscious learning—it’s part of a liberal education in the broad sense of the term.”
He went on, “In a liberal school you know ‘nothing—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ when you get out. Yet you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for people & beauty that money won’t buy” and “learn that life has beauty & fineness.” Afterward, it’s all “struggle, war: economic if not actual—Don’t give up the idea; ideals of a liberal school— they’re too precious — too rare — too important.”
I remember even 40 years ago feeling like I had been foolish for not applying to BC’s school of business, where my roommates were immersed in practical learning, sure of their post-college career, with recruiters all over campus ready to hire them. I was, I thought, “fitted for nothing.” And in a world now where the price of college is absurdly high, and students are often lured by a lucrative post-college career to study finance or artificial intelligence or the like, Shribman’s uncle, not quite 22, was trying to convey something that ought to be supported now.
“Look around you—keep your eyes open—try to see what’s what—hold onto the things that you know to be right,” Phil Shribman wrote. “They’ll shake your faith in a lot of the things you now think are right—That’s good—& part of education—but look around & try to make up your own ideas on life & its values.”
I can’t truly do justice to the entirety of the story David Shribman tells. Phil Shribman was killed in action. As a father, a journalist and a lifelong learner, Shribman has explored and been guided by the wisdom of an uncle he never got the chance to know ever since.
And now he’s shared that wisdom with the rest of us. What a gift.
A member of the Marblehead Current’s Board of Directors, Virginia Buckingham is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”
