Cultural Legacies

My father outside his alma mater in Iowa City.

There are a million things wrong with higher education in contemporary society: the cost of tuition, the inaccessibility of information about the geographic layout of campuses, the seeming incapability of either high schools or freshman year courses to prepare incoming students for what they will face as they work toward bachelor's degrees, and an ongoing issue of elitism in some faculty and/or administrative ranks All of these factors seem to contribute to a high rate of attrition among college enrollees, perpetuating a system of social and economic inequality that underlies American society. These criticisms aside, I found myself feeling immensely grateful for the cultural legacy that some college and university campuses have managed to establish as I spent the past few days in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids touring campuses that my parents in the early 1960s attended.

Back story: My father was a teacher in Bhiwani, a town north of New Delhi, when he and my mother married. An opportunity arose for him in 1961 to pursue a master's degree and a doctorate in the United States, and my parents decided to seize it. They arrived in Cedar Falls, Iowa, around Labor Day after traveling by train from Delhi to Bombay, by ship to London, by plane to New York City, and then bus to first Chicago and then Cedar Falls, losing a blue vinyl suitcase en route. (The suitcase is a different story, told and re-told in a variety of ways.) They both studied at what was then the State College of Iowa from 1961-62, and lived in a rooming house at 22nd and College Street, about a block's walk from the campus. They moved to Iowa City in 1962, a few months before I was born, and my father began his doctorate at the College of Education at the University of Iowa. He completed his PhD in 1965, when I was about two and a half years old, and we moved first to Cleveland, Ohio, and a year later to Muncie, Indiana, where my parents still live today. We returned as a family to Iowa City once in 1973 and I participated in the Iowa Summer Writers Festival there in 2003, but beyond these visits, both Cedar Falls and Iowa City existed largely as products of our memory-crafted imaginaries.

Our imaginaries received an update this summer when my father decided he wanted to combine a trip to Chicago for my cousin Shikha's wedding with a "reunion trip" to Cedar Falls and Iowa City. My mother was initially tentative about the idea, worrying that driving some 1,000 miles total would be too hard on her and would overly tire my mother. I, however, inflicted a rather infectious enthusiasm into my father's quiet desire when I insisted that the trip was important, not too difficult, and that I would go along to help out with the driving and anything else that my parents (who are 77 and 81) might need. And when the trip almost got canceled because of my mother's fears, I inflicted a heavy dose of guilt to make it happen, noting that I had taken two weeks out of a busy writing and harvesting schedule to travel the Midwest with them.

So, off we went. At first, it felt like a mistake. Four days of family wedding festivities had tired us out, and the prospect of returning to visit a place we had virtually no contemporary relationship with seemed, well, alienating and difficult, at best.

We pulled into Iowa City at about 4 p.m. on Labor Day. I was excited, but my parents felt bewildered. The city had changed. The hotel where we had booked a room was located on what had evolved into a suburban-esque commercial strip with fast food restaurants, car dealerships, and other hotels lining a four-lane highway. The University of Iowa campus also had grown into a sort of mega-university with what seemed for two individuals who are healthy for their ages but unable to walk more than a quarter-mile without getting tired limited access. New construction had replaced old buildings and landmarks. Nothing -- including the extremely spacious College of Education that had been named after E.F. Lindquist, my father's mentor in his doctoral program -- looked familiar at all.

The same sense of isolation permeated the University of Northern Iowa, which had become the name of the State College of Iowa in 1967. My parents recognized a "campanile" (or clock tower) and a commons building but little else. It seemed perhaps that they had forgotten -- as all of us are prone to do -- that places, like people, do not remain frozen in time. They grow, undergo reconstructions, and change.

What had not changed was the ethic of the people. We were in Iowa for a little more than 24 hours, and during that time, met the hotel front desk attendant, a man who lived across the street from their former home at 420 Davenport in Iowa City, a waitress at an Olive Garden restaurant, a gas station attendant in Cedar Falls, an information desk helper at the University of Northern Iowa, and the deans and associate deans of the Colleges of Education at both institutions that my parents attended in the early 1960s. They had no idea who my parents were, but when they learned why we were in Iowa, they immediately became part of my parent's story. They helped us with maps, driving directions, stories, and memories of the universities of their own.

I served as unofficial chauffeur to my parents, dropping them off at buildings they wanted to visit and then driving to guest parking areas located as much as a half-mile away. I would then rush over to where I had dropped them and find them chatting with the present-day deans of the colleges my father attended, telling stories about the past and the present. Several individuals at the University of Iowa remembered work that my father had done under the tutelage of Dr. Lindquist (who retired from teaching two years after my father completed his doctorate and passed away in the 1970s), and noted that some of his contemporaries were continuing to work in the department in emeritus roles. I felt especially touched because no one knew that we were coming, but everyone was willing to drop whatever they were doing to welcome us back "home" and to spend some time conversing with us. We left with e-mail addresses, photographs, business cards, and coffee mugs.

I would have liked to have stayed in Iowa City longer, and already am plotting schemes to spend a few weeks again with the Iowa Summer Writers Festival. But, as we pulled out of Iowa City, I felt a sense of deep gratitude that this was the place where my parents had landed in America 51 years ago. Behind the bewildering array of strip malls, state-of-the-art buildings, and hard-to-find on-campus parking spots lay traces of the imaginary of Iowa that my parents have constructed over the decades: farmers and friends who hadn't perhaps traveled outside of Iowa but welcomed and helped them along. There were no stares at our odd, still somewhat foreign appearance. There was no rudeness or unwillingness to help, no traces of veiled racism that I could discern. There was simply a desire to welcome, to answer questions, to help, and to talk story. In that warmth was embedded a sense that we all had some sort of a shared history that had marked our present. I felt like perhaps the colleges that my father attended had something to do with this. They created a sense of place that one could revisit, and find a sense of the past even as it appeared lost to the present.

After we stopped for the night in Peoria, Illinois, en route to Muncie, I did a Google search on Dr. Lindquist, using the name by which my father and the colleagues who remembered him at the University of Iowa had referred to him, which was Reese. Nothing came up, until I discovered that he was known officially as E.F. Lindquist. A little more searching revealed that E.F. Lindquist was not his birth name, either. Born in 1901 to parents of German Jewish immigrants, he was known originally as Ezra Felvel Levinsky. He ended up Americanizing his name (Everett Franklin Lindquist) when he joined the University of Iowa as a research assistant in 1925, a time when Nativist hostilities and Ku Klux Klan activities made life extremely difficult for those who were regarded as non-white and/or non-Christian. Changing a name was one way that some people coped during those violent times.

It dawned on me that we spend a lot of our working lives going in and out of buildings that are named after people who made some sort of mark on someone's history, or did something significant. Most of the time we don't have a clue who the person was or the mark they made. But when we do have an opportunity to get to know the name behind the building our perspectives change. Perhaps that is one way that some of the millions of lost histories of people and places continue to live. And perhaps it is the spirit of those people who define the ethics and values of those who walk the campuses and building corridors named after them that live on today.