Vol. 56: What makes a university great?

How Penn changed my life

“No one will push you at Penn,” my father told me when I entered the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1960. “You’ll be on your own. If you want to get a good education there, you can. And if you want to goof off for four years, you can do that, too.”

My father, loyal alumnus though he was, labored under no illusions about Penn’s academic standing in those days. At that time, Penn rarely ranked higher than sixth academically among the eight Ivy schools. Yet by 2019, the Wall Street Journal ranked Penn fourth in the nation. Of course, such rankings are not only fallible but probably pointless as well: Choosing America’s best universities makes no more sense than, say, choosing the best restaurants or the best spouses or the best friends. Ultimately what matters is what works for the individual student. Today, as my Penn classmates prepare for our 60^th reunion, it occurs to me that most of the good things in my life can be traced to Penn.

My Penn blessings included some terrific professors, a few of whom took a personal interest in me; an ideal major for a potential journalist (American Civilization, which taught me to judge other cultures by their values rather than my own); and two valuable extracurricular activities (the Daily Pennsylvanian, which landed me my first newspaper job, and the football team, which taught me to cope with adversity and to push myself beyond my perceived limits). Most important, at Penn I met and married my wife, whose emotional and pragmatic support has enabled me to function independently as a journalistic gadfly for more than half a century.

Moby Dick’s question

But what strikes me especially at this moment is the way certain pearls of wisdom from my Penn mentors subsequently weaved themselves into the tapestry of my life. For example:

E. Digby Baltzell, sociology: "Look at the big shots on campus. Twenty years from now, they'll be nobodies, and the nobodies will be the big shots." This was one variation of a larger Baltzell mantra: College is not at all like high school. And life is not at all like college. That probably applies to you and certainly applied to me, in several respects: Through high school and into college, I dated literally dozens of girls but avoided any romantic commitment; then at Penn I met Barbara, got married, and stayed married (at least so far — it’s still a work in progress). I was one of the worst players on my high school football team, but I was the only member of that team to play football in college. On my high school and college newspapers, I never held any position higher than sports editor, yet less than two years after graduating from Penn, I was chief editor of a real daily newspaper in Indiana.

Joel Sayre, journalism: "The only thing you'll get from graduate school that you don't have already is a degree." Sayre— former war correspondent, satiric novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and bosom buddy of the great and near-great, from William Faulkner to the pro football tackle Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb— took a personal interest in me because I was one of the few journalism students who actually aspired to a career in journalism. My senior year, under pressure to attend graduate school, I turned to Sayre for advice. His response (above) was right on the money: I learned far more in the real world— in my case, four years in a small Indiana town— than in any classroom.

Jim Castle, assistant football coach: "You're worried because I'm yelling at you? Let me tell you something: The day you should really worry is the day I stop yelling at you, because that'll mean I've given up on you." Castle’s message came in handy later when I dealt with writers who bristled at my criticism. In effect I told them what Castle told me: Criticism is a compliment. If I didn’t think you were worth criticizing, I wouldn’t waste my time.

Nancy Leach (later Sweeten), 19th-Century American literature: "Moby Dick asks the question: Do people become what they want to become or what they have to become? Remember, Ishmael has three boats to choose from. He selects the Pequod by himself. I often wonder what characteristic makes one person succeed beyond all the others in his group.”

To sit on the grass

Which brings me back to the single most important benefit I derived from Penn: my marriage.

As I walked across College Hall lawn the first week of my sophomore year, I nodded a perfunctory hello to a classmate I barely knew. She was a commuter student who had entered Penn in the middle of our freshman year, and consequently she knew hardly a soul on campus. We’d been introduced as freshmen by a mutual friend, but nothing much came of the relationship: I ran into her on campus a few times, said, “Hi, how are you?” and each time we continued on our separate ways.

But here it was a hot Indian summer day, with dozens of students sunbathing on the grass, and this time she said to me, "It's so lovely out. I'd like to sit out there like everyone else, but I don't know anyone to sit with, and I don't want to sit alone. Would you sit down with me for a few minutes?" So I sat down on the grass with her.

Ten minutes or so later, my classmate Michael Collart sauntered along and mentioned that he and his girlfriend planned to drive to the Jersey shore that weekend; would I like to join them? I turned to Barbara and asked if she’d like to go to the shore. She said yes, and that was our first date. Last month we celebrated 60 years of marriage (many of them happy!).

A lesson from La La Land

I’ve told this story often over the years, always with the belief that I played only a passive role in this turning point in my life: Barbara asked me to sit on the grass and I said OK; Mike Collart asked if I’d like to go to the shore and I said OK.

But this narrative assumed a whole new slant a few years ago when we saw Damien Chazelle’s musical romance movie, La La Land (2016). Like Barbara and me, the star-crossed lovers in that film, Sebastian and Mia, keep crossing each other’s paths without really connecting. In one scene, Sebastian loses his job as a restaurant pianist because the owner doesn’t like his music; as Sebastian angrily stomps out, Mia— who happens to be dining there— approaches to tell Sebastian his tunes are the most beautiful music she’s ever heard. But he’s so preoccupied with his career troubles that he angrily brushes past her. Toward the end of the film, writer/director Chazelle offers viewers an alternative scenario: How would their lives have turned out if, instead of brushing past Mia, Sebastian had taken her in his arms?

At that point, sitting in the theater, I burst into tears, realizing for the first time that I had not been a passive player at all on that day on College Hall green. I was never one to stroll anywhere idly (then or now); I must have been going somewhere for some specific purpose. Yet I made a conscious decision to sit down on the grass with this classmate. Like Ishmael choosing the Pequod, I chose Barbara— with a more gratifying result, to put it mildly.

Hardboiled coach

But that begs a larger question: What was a born- and -bred New Yorker like me doing at Penn in the first place?

My father had attended Penn only because, when he graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn in January of 1933, Penn had been the only college on the East Coast that would accept him in the middle of the school year. Although he made no effort to steer me toward his alma mater, he took me to Penn football and basketball games as a kid, and I learned by osmosis to hate Hitler and Princeton at roughly the same time. I still remember, as a boy, desperately trying to fish my cap out of my coat sleeve in time to wave it during the singing of “The Red and the Blue.”

So when my time came to choose a college, I was damned if I would squander my college years on some perfectly respectable place like Oberlin or Johns Hopkins or Kenyon, to which I felt no emotional attachment.

As for my encounter with the hardboiled football coach, Jim Castle— years later, I learned (from Castle’s widow) that Castle had often used that “yelling at you” line because, when he had first tried out for the Penn team, one of the coaches had used it on him. That coach, I recently discovered, was Bill Talarico, who played halfback for George Munger, the legendary coach of Penn’s nationally ranked football teams that had first aroused my childish devotion. In some indescribable manner, Munger’s humanistic approach to football in the ’30s had trickled down to Bill Talarico in the ’40s and Jim Castle in the ’50s and finally to a fourth-stringer named Dan Rottenberg in the ’60s.

Master of my fate?

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. “The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product,” Havelock Ellis observed. I went to Penn for an education and got a family. I was the beneficiary of a chain of events and relationships, set in motion long before I was born and somehow nurtured by an institution that will survive long after I’m gone.

Nancy Leach asked her Penn students: Do people become what they want to become or what they have to become? So, was I the master of my fate, or was I guided by some invisible hand?

 “No one will push you at Penn,” my father had said when I first left home. “You’ll be on your own.” In the narrow sense, he was right; in a broader sense, he was mistaken. In some inexplicable manner, Penn was looking over my shoulder on the day I arrived there, and it continues to do so, however subliminally, today.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com