Crazy U by Andrew Ferguson

Author:Andrew Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The three college nights we’d been too had each showcased three schools.

“Nine,” I said. We could have ticked off the talking points in our sleep (literally, as it happened). Vast libraries, vigorous athletics, enlightening study abroad; hundreds of clubs, heaps of organic food, dorms that were cozy in winter and airy with the fragrant breath of spring. Why, here at———, professors practically compelled students to share in their Nobel-winning research. With a one-to-one faculty ratio, average class size was infinitesimal; indeed, so small that sometimes a student might find himself in a classroom all alone! Slide shows clicked through images of leafy quads and packed stadiums, male dancers on tiptoe and women in lab coats and goggles. Hadn’t we seen these same pictures at the Penn college night? And then Stanford’s? Every private college in America had hired the same photo agency.

After the Ivies were done, the dean from BSU rose to speak, looking a little overwhelmed.

“If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be up here on the stage with Harvard and Princeton …” He let his voice trail off. He had trouble matching the Ivies boast for boast. Where they had bragged of their campuses abroad—Tuscany, if I remember, and Kensington Gardens—he mentioned the possibility of a semester on the Chesapeake Bay, not far from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Harvard and Princeton each said they had four hundred student clubs and organizations; BSU had three hundred. Instead of the financial aid that only an Ivy endowment makes possible—the deans said they’d cut tuition drastically for families earning up to $200,000 a year—he pointed out that BSU’s state-subsidized tuition price made it competitive even without grants, which he couldn’t offer anyway. As for class size, well, “Eighty-five percent of our classes are under fifty students.”

Food and dorm life? a parent asked.

“We’re a state school,” he said, “it’s not the Ritz.” He looked at his feet. “The food—it’s school food. And your dorm room, probably it’ll just be four concrete walls and a roommate.”

I elbowed my son to share amazement at the dean’s candor, but he didn’t respond. He was asleep.

But it somehow seemed more than mere sleep. It was a cataleptic kind of sleep, a total withdrawal of sentience—head rolling, comatose, adenoid exposing. We were close enough to the stage that I felt a knot in my stomach, a hint of panic. He was still upright but barely. I glanced backward, across the rows of young, upturned faces. They were watchful, alert. No one else was asleep. The parents directly in front of us were hunched over, squinting into the bright screens of their BlackBerries, so my son stuck up like a radio tower. I poked him again and got no response. I poked him again. “What?” he said, too loudly. The BSU dean had retaken his seat. “What?” my son said again. Onstage the dean swiveled his head toward us and stared, and I imagined him as one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, fingering the last human on the planet with a goggle-eyed look of horror.

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