LITMIR.BIZ

      ith the help of a Presbyterian church alumni scholarship specifically designed for golden children like myself, I attended a very fine university. Occidental College was as Ivy League as you could get on the West Coast; they used to call it ‘the Princeton of the West’. Barack Obama would study there a few (oh, alright then, twenty . . . ) years later – which may or not be a recommendation, depending on your point of view. Either way, with only 1,200 students it was a lot smaller than my high school, and the campus in Eagle Rock – just forty-five minutes away from Panorama City, but there was no reason to go home except during the holidays – was a beautiful place to be.

      It’s a testament to what a great job Occidental did for me that I arrived a ferociously well-motivated, high-achieving eighteen-year-old, on what was technically a missionary scholarship, and left four years later as a directionless ne’er-do-well with an academic record of stunning mediocrity. I’m not being remotely sarcastic when I say that, because the opportunities I was given to broaden my understanding of the world and experiment with different ways of looking at it are still standing me in good stead to this day. It saddens me greatly that so many twenty-first-century students are too hemmed in by career worries and pressures of debt to enjoy the kind of liberating academic experience that my time at college brought me.

      There was an amazing sense of freedom involved in escaping from everything I’d known before and throwing myself into a totally new environment. What I’d initially thought I was hoping to get out of Occidental was a career that would give me a legitimate reason to see the world while feeling fairly confident that I was doing something to make it a better place. Becoming a missionary was one possibility, as I’d arrived at Oxy with the full weight of the church behind me, but diplomat would have done me just as well – I wasn’t talking to Jesus every day, so it wouldn’t be essential for me to work for him directly.

      What I ended up leaving with was something much more valuable: the ability to question some – if not all – of the assumptions I’d grown up with, and to carry on questioning them if I didn’t like the look of the answers I was getting. If this sounds like a process of disillusionment, that’s not quite right. It felt more like an expansion of possibilities, and one that was historically aligned with a broader opening out within American society.

      In the more restrictive atmosphere of the 1950s, all the most powerful forces around you – family, science, design, the church – seemed to be ushering you in the same direction as far as the future was concerned. But at some point in the next decade, all the signposts suddenly seemed to be pointing to different destinations, and for me, college was the start of a feeling – not so much of alarm, more of excitement – that I was going down a new road, which my education up to that point hadn’t really prepared me for.

      This mood of flux initially expressed itself in a series of rapid shifts in my educational focus. I arrived at Occidental as a physics major, maths and science being the kinds of things we studied in America after the war. It was all about building the technology of the future, and patriots had to step up to the plate as escaped Nazis couldn’t run our space programme on their own for ever. But within a couple of months I’d realised that college-level physics was a different animal to the one I was used to. It was just too abstract and difficult for a simple creature like me, so I switched horses to fine art in midstream. (I always preferred the practical and physical, yet have never stopped being seduced by ideas and ideals that are utterly abstract; ideas like freedom, democracy, truth, God; ideas that people are willing to do the most physical of activities to defend – namely killing those who disagree with them – so it’s lucky I’ve not been the man of action I once wanted to believe I was.)

      It wasn’t too long before I was on the move again. I loved the painting, drawing and sculpture classes, and the main professor – Robert Hansen – was a brilliant artist. He’d been to India and was what you might call an enlightened human being – there were certainly, I wouldn’t say religious, but definitely spiritual qualities to his work. He always liked what I did, but I could tell he felt I was spending too much time cartooning for quick laughs – ‘Showtime . . . Ta-dah!’ – when I was capable of doing something deeper. The art history teacher on the other hand was boring as shit. And I must’ve abandoned his course just in time, because now I’m very interested in art history.

      In the end – and benefiting from a large measure of tolerance on the part of both scholarship and college authorities – I found myself majoring in political science, which was useful, because there were only four required courses, and you could basically design your own liberal education by choosing elective subjects like drama, oriental philosophy and even Russian (if the commies 2 really were taking over, I’d better at least learn to say ‘tovarisch’). The head of department, Raymond McKelvey, was one of those great educators who are full of ideas and energy but can still appreciate a fool – someone who maybe doesn’t have time to study for an exam, but will fake it with panache, even if that means describing ‘hegemony’ as ‘a hedge made out of money’, which was leaping years into the future, as nobody even knew about hedge funds yet.