Excerpt from A Life in Print, by James Gannon

"So You Are Off To College - It Was Easier For Your Dad" - The Des Moines Register, August 24, 1980

Dear Julie:

So you are going off to college. I did that once myself, and I survived the experience, so I am not worried about you. But there are a few times in life when a father thinks he is expected to give wise counsel to his offspring, and this is one of those occasions, so bear with me while I pay the dues of parenthood.

I remember my college days as if they were yesterday, though my experience is probably irrelevant to the 1980s. I went to college toward the end of the Medieval Era, when Eisenhower was president. Society was different then. There were You also will rules. The rules at my college sound hilarious today. The dorms were segregated -some all men, some all women. The only woman a guy could have in his room was his mother - once a year. You had to be in at 11 p.m. on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends. You couldn't have beer or liquor in your room and the only thing anybody even thought of smoking was tobacco.

No, I am not putting you on. That's the way it really was. We hated the rules, of course, and ridiculed them, but they provided a security network that kept us from having to decide whether to stay out all night, or keep a bottle or a bedmate in our rooms. All this made it easier to concentrate on Botany and Latin (yes, I know, it is entirely fitting that we actually studied an ancient, dead language).

College will be different for you. you'll come and go as you please, keep your own hours, set your own style, strike your own balance between work and pleasure, and decide what will constitute the latter. That's OK -you are an adult now and can plunge right in to adult decision-making, but I can't help thinking I was lucky in being able to postpone that for a while.

You'll meet all kinds of people. Not all of them will share your values. Some of them will have a radically different way of looking at life, and for the first time, you'll have a chance to compare what you believe with beliefs of others that challenge your own. This process is called education, and what it yields, ideally, is maturity. Don't be afraid of it. You'll never know whether you really believe all the things you think you believe until you hear some intelligent, articulate person rip your beliefs apart and hand you the pieces -to see if you can put them back together.

If you are lucky, you will encounter one or two personalities of towering stature and influence, who will enlarge your own horizons. I remember two at Marquette: a fugitive from the Irish Republican Army named Thomas Patrick Whelan, who made the writings of Shakespeare come alive for a generation of unlettered Midwestern sophomores, including me; and a giant of journalism education named Jeremiah L. O'Sulllvan, a man of great heart and understanding, who told his classes of would-be hard-nosed reporters that they should "write with compassion for your fellow human beings."

Unless human nature has changed, you also will encounter a professor with an identity problem -one who confuses himself with God. He is to be humored, and then avoided in signing up for the next semester's courses. He is not as dangerous, however, as the professor with the other identity problem -the one who thinks he's a peer and pal of the students, just a regular guy who wants to be "relevant" and "interactive." He is to be avoided like a three dollar bill.

Among your fellow students, you will meet some very weird individuals; I particularly remember one young fellow from Boston who ate nothing but peanut-butter sandwiches for a full semester, and then dropped out, malnourished; and another from New Jersey who stayed up all night and slept all day -except for times when he went from room to room stealing from students who went to class.

More important, however, you will meet people you like and you will make a few good friends that will last a lifetime. You cannot share four years of close, stimulating experiences -discovering new ideas, discussing your dreams until dawn, comforting a disturbed, failing fellow student -without learning much about them and about yourself. You'll find people you can rely on, and others who will need to rely on you, and you'll come away from it all sharing a bond that will wear very well through the years.

You'll learn new facts and new ideas, but if the process works the way it should, the most important thing you'll learn is to love learning. You'll acquire an appetite for books -books that you don't have to read -and an ability to discriminate between scholarship and sophistry.

What this all amounts to is a test of all you are and all you can possibly be -a challenge to the mind, the heart, and the will -that inevitably reshapes and refines those who rise to it. College is a mountain daring to be climbed, and the atmosphere at the peak is rarefied and somewhat out-of-this-world, sometimes prompting giddiness but also a clarity of vision that brings to view horizons yet unseen. You should come down from the mountaintop with a much better grasp of the shape of the world around you and the direction of the road that lies ahead.

I know you are anxious to get on with it, and to do well so that you can embark on a career in the "real world." But do not think too far ahead. The future will arrive soon enough, and for now you are best advised to wring everything you can from old professors and quiet walks on campus, essays on history and midnight discussions, football games and pub crawling.

Take it from a nostalgic, middle-aged man who has climbed that mountain: You'll probably not find another as fulfilling or as fun.

Lovingly,
Your Father
-P.S. Now that you are leaving, can I have my car back?