Lancaster, Pennsylvania College Days: Then and Now

“Hi. My name is Jessica, and I’m from Havertown, Pa. I like softball, and I play the saxophone, the flute and the piano. I also have a tattoo.” The small dormitory room erupts in whistles and whoops. “Where? Where?” Jessica draws out the answer for effect: “On my shoulder blade.”

Getting noticed is the name of the game for a college freshman, and Jessica knows she has just scored a touchdown. I am nearly as fortunate. Like Jessica and the rest of the 20 new Franklin & Marshall students on my hall, I am attending a getting-to-know-you session called by my resident adviser — a lanky upperclassman named Dan — to introduce myself and make an attention- grabbing statement. I think I have a winner: I am 39 years old and I am going through freshman orientation on assignment for TIME. I needn’t have wasted my breath. One look at my adult face and khaki shorts — so dull compared with the colorful ersatz boxers in vogue among the young — and they know I am not one of them.

It would be hard for someone who started college in 1969 to be an undercover freshman. My speech would betray me as surely as my graying hair. Awesome is a word I would use to describe the Grand Canyon — not the latest Jon Bon Jovi album, which is, like, totally awesome to my young classmates. Still, some – collegespeak can be surprisingly descriptive. “Yeah, it was great,” one student says of his summer vacation in Paris. “Except I felt like a total Piltdown when I tried to order food.” I know exactly what he means.

When I was a freshman at Duke University, orientation consisted of posture tests in a drafty gym and an awkward mixer in the chapel parking lot. We received a reading list before our arrival that included such books as Black Rage and Living with Sex: The Student’s Dilemma, but no one bothered to discuss them with us. Adrift in the temporary calm between Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the shootings at Kent State, we struggled to survive the transition from high school to college with as much grace as we could muster. Being a freshman was a necessary stage of growth, like the chrysalis before the butterfly. But it was not fun.

How times have changed, I say to myself as I help build a human pyramid on the F&M quad — one of the many organized games meant to break the ice among the 500 students in the class of 1994. “This is ridiculous,” scoffs an athletically built freshman standing to one side of the mayhem. “My parents are spending $20,000 a year for this?” Moments later, he is engrossed in a finger-painting version of charades, his haughty disdain replaced by keen concentration as he tries to make his teammates guess what he is drawing.

For a freshman, acting cool is all important. “I’m from Rumson, N.J.,” Jonathan, a dark-haired freshman, announces to two female companions while waiting to be filmed for the class of 1994 video — another inhibition dissolver. “Do you know who lives there?” The women shake their heads. “Bruce Springsteen.” He pauses to let the statement sink in. The girls’ eyes widen approvingly. “And Cher,” he adds. They move slightly closer. “Oh, yeah,” he goes on, with the confident air of a man who knows he has made an impression. “In fact, I live right next door to Bruce.” The come-on seems irresistible.

Relations between men and women were much more artificial in my undergraduate years. For most of us, sex was unfamiliar territory — both tantalizing and terrifying. Like other freshman women, I had a curfew (regularly flouted) and lived in a fortress so thoroughly female that I could pad to the basement cafeteria each morning in a bathrobe and slippers.

F&M freshmen live in coed dorms and come and go as they please. Posters in the bathrooms describe birth-control methods and the dangers of sexually . transmitted diseases. Several of the women on my hall chatter excitedly about having their hometown boyfriends come for a visit. There is no doubt about where they will sleep. “We know many of you are already sexually active,” an administrator tells us during a freshman-week assembly on the freedoms and responsibilities of college life. “Talk to your lover about protection.”

Twenty years ago, “coeds,” as women were then called, had few adult role models. Most of our mothers were members of the Donna Reed generation. Our teachers were overwhelmingly male. When I realized, as a college senior, that I had never had a female professor, I set out to find one and had to scour the course catalog for hours.

My new classmates don’t have that problem: 29% of the F&M faculty is female. No one here would even understand the old line about women going to college to get an M.R.S. degree. To the women on my hall, the future holds the promise of successful careers as well as husbands and families. Even race relations, so turbulent during the Black Power era, seem more relaxed on this campus close to the cornfields of the Amish countryside. “We have a much more intermingled society now,” says F&M president Richard Kneedler, who graduated from the school in 1965.

One thing’s for sure: these kids are less angry than we were. They’re more optimistic, more cheerful; they have a better sense of humor. What did we have to laugh about in 1969? Vietnam? Civil rights? Those were sober causes, even though they had a cosmic majesty about them that seems to be lacking today. Watching these students sort out bottles and cans for their dormitory recycling bins, I wonder if they will ever feel the electric thrill that I experienced during my first march on Washington, in 1970. “I wish I’d gone to school in the ’60s,” Tom, a cello-voiced freshman from London, tells me wistfully as we trudge back to our dorm. “That seems like a great time to have been a student.”

For an instant, I wonder if a spark of ’60s-style liberalism may still be flickering on campus. Not so. These kids were in third grade when Ronald Reagan became President. Some 18-year-olds may feel that he “was not the greatest influence to be growing up under,” as Elizabeth, a student from Long Island, N.Y., put it over the din of rap music at the freshman picnic. But Reagan’s values have seeped into their generation as deeply as John F. Kennedy’s values affected mine. “It shouldn’t be the duty of the whole country to help the less well-off,” Bob, a freshman from Doylestown, Pa., tells me over breakfast, as if quoting a speech by the Great Communicator himself. “They shouldn’t use tax money for it. It should be voluntary.”

Were we ever this young, this sure, this innocent? There is a bittersweet melancholy about seeing someone on the brink of adulthood, all elbows and knees and untested conviction. Four years. It goes so quickly, but who can tell them? On my last day, I steal out early, trying not to disturb my two roommates. Danielle sleeps clutching her black-and-white teddy bear. Jennie has left a note on her desk. Underneath her name she has drawn a smile face.