I mean, I was a student of computer science. Of all people, I should have been fully aware of the impossible odds of winning a sweepstakes. I should have known how futile the hope was. But I hoped nevertheless.
And then I did win.
Got home from the department late one evening to find my landlady waiting for me on her stoop, her teeth visibly chattering. Hopping about to keep warm in what they told me was Providence’s coldest winter in years, she was nearly beside herself with excitement. “You got a big carton in the mail!” she said, even before I could ask what she was doing outside. “Really big!”
The DeLorean arrived in a carton?
No, the Fuji arrived in a carton. Second prize in the Cutty Sark sweepstakes, a Fuji ten-speed bicycle.
I could hardly believe it. Not six months into my time in the States and I owned a handsome bike! Nearly for free (I had to take it to a store to have it assembled)! What a country!
After the first few minutes, I didn’t care that it wasn’t the car. Once I got on the Fuji, it was DeLorean enough for me. Every Sunday morning, I rode it in style—well, as much style as dropped handlebars allowed—down Thayer Street to get my ProJo.
Several months later, someone stole the front wheel, and only the front wheel. What a country. At the store, I learned that a replacement would set me back several times what I had paid to put the whole bike together. So my Fuji spent the rest of my grad experience resting (sans wheel) in the stairwell in the department. There were complaints and snide remarks, but there it stayed.
That swift machine gave me plenty of joy, yes. But when I couple that to its forlorn state in that stairwell, I know why—for me—the Fuji has always been a metaphor of sorts for my own time at Brown.
My first two semesters went astonishingly well. I threw myself into work like never before, actually enjoyed the courses and programming assignments, and met some of the warmest, keenest folks ever. My undergrad college was one of India’s best, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to my buddies from there when I say that some of these Brown kids—Alex, Jeremy, Janet, Matthew, Jeannette—were the sharpest I had ever known. How did so many congregate at Brown? And mostly because of them, I felt constantly stimulated, like I was learning every single day. Every single moment. Nothing in my twenty-plus years in India had prepared me for this heady mix of hard work and intellectual smorgasbord.
Until the wheels fell off, hard.
In my first year at Brown, I had earned six As and a B. In my second year, I registered for a total of eight courses; I actually finished just one, earning a C. I had a research assistantship in which I produced nothing; by the end, I was hunting desperately, every day, for excuses to avoid meeting my professor. What could I tell him when I had nothing to show him? I failed my PhD qualifiers. To tell the truth, I didn’t even try, because I had counted myself out before the start. I took to slinking in and out of my office, unable to face my colleagues. My best buddy in the department walked in one morning to berate me. “Do you know,” he said, “we just can’t understand what you’re doing with yourself!”
His words make me quail even now. I couldn’t understand it either. I was overwhelmed by a strange lassitude that, to this day, I cannot explain to myself. Through it all, the bike stayed in the stairwell, as forlorn as I had become.
Frantic to escape but unwilling to face what I had inexplicably become, I applied for a job halfway across the country. Somehow they made me an offer and I finally left the department. Finally moved the bike too. With my new salary in a distant city, I bought my Fuji a new wheel. Perhaps the surroundings where I didn’t know a soul helped; the lassitude slowly lifted and I felt functional again. Life was looking up.
Except for one little detail: I hadn’t actually finished my degree at Brown, and to this day, I cannot explain why I thought I might get away with that deliberate oversight. One morning, I got a call from a Brown official: “You had better return and finish, or we’ll have to revoke your immigration status.”
I flew back to Providence with minimal clothes, gritting my teeth in newfound resolve. I took along my Fuji. What followed was a brief throwback to my first year at Brown, with those pleasures and rewards I had nearly forgotten. It was three weeks of the hardest slogging I had ever done; it was how I renewed bonds with—and regained the respect of—my fellow students, because I was no longer slinking about. For three Sundays in a row, I set out on my old friend, the Flying Fuji, to collect the ProJo. To me, that bike felt like a DeLorean.
Oh yes, and I no longer needed to avoid my professor. When I was done, he shook my hand, smiled broadly, and whispered in my ear: “You did well!”
I blushed.
I had that Fuji for several years, riding it all over bike-friendly Austin, my new home. Those were good years: friends, satisfying work that I got recognized for, a handsome dog, lots of music in smoky blues bars. But something was always missing, and what started as gentle pangs grew over time into a yearning I could no longer ignore.
I had to return to India.
By the time I was ready to go, the Fuji was still serviceable, but only just. Rust had set in; the seat was falling apart. Nobody would buy it; there wasn’t much point in refurbishing it or lugging it halfway across the world, and it was too much of a family member to fling on a scrap heap. What was I to do with my bike?
Just days before I left, the decision was taken out of my hands. One morning, it disappeared. Stolen. I was despondent but also relieved. Altogether, a curiously bittersweet and wholly appropriate coda to its time in my life.
There are times, even now, especially when I’m struggling with some daunting assignment, that I remember my Fuji. I imagine the thief discovering my beat-up prize, liberating it from my garage, and, bent earnestly over the dropped handlebars, riding like the wind down a leafy Austin street.
Strangely, I wish him well.
How Brown Turned Me into a Right-Wing Religious Conservative
DAVID KLINGHOFFER
Here’s a confession you are unlikely to hear at your next class reunion. Brown turned me into the right-wing religious fundamentalist I am today. That’s not the way I would describe myself, but it is how, very likely, many Brown alums would describe me. In brief, I’m an Orthodox Jew who has argued for seeing political conservatism as a reflection of the blueprint of moral reality found in the Bible. And this happened to me at Brown, notwithstanding its reputation for secular liberalism.
After graduating in 1987, I went straight to work at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. By now I’m a seasoned professional conservative. I’ve been the literary editor of NR and now serve as a senior fellow at Discovery Institute, which, thanks to its advocacy of intelligent design, is probably the country’s most hated think tank. Among my six books, this title stands out, if nothing else, for its forthrightness: How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. I’ve mellowed out a bit since writing that one, but you get the idea.
No parents, I assume, ever sent their child to Brown in the hope of inspiring a radical political and religious turn to the right. That would include my own liberal and secular Jewish parents, who were startled to realize the effect college was having on me. In high school, I wasn’t content to be just a liberal. In the very Republican suburb of Los Angeles where I grew up, I wore hippie attire and a long beard, though I got rid of the facial hair in time for orientation week at Brown. By that time, I considered myself a socialist and was present, in Birkenstocks, for the school year’s first meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, held in a room in Hope College. Over my bed in Emery-Woolley hung a poster of Karl Marx. My freshman roommate, a lacrosse player from Long Island, seemed to think I was a pretty asinine seventeen-year-old. He was probably right.
By the summer of 1984, still asinine, I found my politics had been transformed. I was a youth delegate to the Republican National Convention in Dallas, which nominated Ronald Reagan for a second term. A noteworthy incident at the convention w
as the burning of a US flag outside Reunion Arena by a Communist Youth Brigade member. He was arrested (with my hearty approval) and took his case to the US Supreme Court, which ruled, in Texas v. Johnson, that anti-flag-burning statutes were unconstitutional.
What had happened to cause this political conversion? When I was a sophomore, a junior on whom I had a mad crush had a theory on this question: “You’re just a contrarian,” she said. “You’re an anti-chameleon. Whatever other people around you say, you’ll say the exact opposite.” I laughed and half agreed.
We’ll call her Tamara. Back then she was a semiotics concentrator who despised Republicans, took offense at being called a “girl” instead of a “woman,” smoked cigarettes over cups of greasy coffee at Louis’s, and consumed books by such French theorists as Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault. By Tamara’s own measure, these habits would make her a regular conformist at Brown in 1984, at least among students in the humanities.
For Brown at that time was pervaded by a delightful atmosphere of addled liberalism. I loved it even as I opposed it, and still look back with fondness and nostalgia. I wouldn’t rule out sending my own kids to such a college. That may seem paradoxical coming from someone who today is a very conservatively inclined father of five, but as I hope this essay will show, an atmosphere of provocation and challenge does not necessarily lead to one political or religious end.
For a lot of students back then, Brown in 1984 was the platform for sticking it to everything that is traditional in our “patriarchal” culture, as they called it. If you think of a father as a symbol—or a “signifier,” as the semiotics crowd liked to say—then knocking him on his back was exactly what lefty campus activism boiled down to.
When I arrived on campus in 1983, for example, the boiling controversy was over whether to invite the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps back to campus, almost twenty years after it had been abolished there. In 1984, students voted to demand that Health Services stock suicide pills in case of nuclear war—a theoretical measure since everyone knew Brown officials would never terrify our parents by going along with the plan. But again, upsetting Dad was the point of the whole episode.
Nor was the revolt against the paternal limited to politics. The theme of the most fashionable humanities scholarship was to indict the patriarchy by accusing the great fathers of literature—the classic authors—of racism, sexism, and homophobia. This may sound like a cartoon, but at Brown in the mid-1980s, it was commonplace. Yes, I delighted in all this craziness. What I most value in it now is that it provoked me, arousing my suspicion. If so many people were so intent on decrying the patriarchy, on insisting that every traditional idea transmitted by Western tradition was arbitrary and meaningless, then maybe the precise opposite was true. The more I was told that there was no singular Truth to be obtained from the great tradition that went before us, the more I was inspired to seek out the forbidden.
This is, I think, an overlooked aspect of a good education that conservatives, not least the religiously conservative, often forget. Education is not indoctrination. The purpose of college isn’t to program students with accepted doctrines, turning them into clones of their teachers and parents, but to provoke them to think for themselves. Brown, true to its best tradition, did this for me.
Beginning with my sophomore year, everything that happened confirmed my new direction. I became the lone and reviled conservative columnist for the Brown Daily Herald. In my inaugural column, I wrote about an experience I’d had at the Third World Center. One afternoon, Tamara and I had wandered in and discovered that President Howard Swearer was in the building, about to have a meeting with students. We ambled down the hall to the entrance of the room where the meeting would take place, only to be stopped by a young woman. She looked us up and down. “Sorry, you can’t come in,” she said, adding that because Tamara and I were not “third world” students, we were not welcome. We were barred from entering a university facility because we were white.
With a barely concealed glee at having discovered liberals in the act of discriminating on the basis of skin color, I wrote an inflamed column denouncing this antiwhite racism. I invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and the ideal of race-blindness. Warming to the subject, I pointed out that there was something wrong with Brown’s—and many other universities’—approval of exclusively black fraternities and sororities. I lamented that at mealtime in the Ratty, you would see students of different races sitting at separate tables.
Why couldn’t we all be friends? Why did no one protest politically correct racial separatism?
After the article appeared in the Herald, I returned to my room in Andrews Hall to find obscene graffiti on my door: F**K YOUR RACIST A**. Students poured forth enraged letters to the editor, almost every one condemning me. Because I was a resident counselor for a group of freshmen living in the basement of Andrews, the dean in charge of first-year students called me into her office to chastise me. As I understood it, I stood accused of racism for protesting racism. Subsequently, the dean appointed a student committee to oversee my counseling. The last name of the undergraduate who headed the committee was Kafka, proof that God, or possibly the dean of first-year students, had a wicked sense of humor.
I was shunned. I was a pariah. And I thoroughly enjoyed almost every minute of it.
Political conservatism often leads to religious tradition. We live today in a world stripped of what was, in the premodern era, an instinctive awareness of the sacred. Thanks to Darwin and other influences, from the mid-nineteenth century on, the truth of religion could no longer universally be taken for granted. My own emerging conservatism at Brown drove me to reexamine my inherited faith. I took my search to the Brown Hillel. At this Jewish gathering place, which was then housed in a barnlike white building on Brown Street, students of various denominations would gather. It was a sweet, humble, welcoming place without pretensions. Its emphasis was less on religion than on culture. I was brought there at first by, of all people, the object of my unrequited infatuation: Tamara.
Most people whose college experience changed their lives will tell you that their fellow students had the profoundest effect on them. That’s what happened to me. Raised secular Jewish in Texas, Tamara had as a high school student lived for a year in England, where she’d fallen in love with a boy who was an Orthodox Jew. This led to a wild crush on both him and on traditional Judaism. As a result, she’d become an Orthodox Jew and exchanged her English name for the Hebrew Tamara.
To me there was something irresistibly exotic about Tamara. Here was a girl who addressed groups as “y’all” and scorned the liberal Judaism we had both grown up in. Yet politically she was left-wing, and she enjoyed shocking me with her opinions. Bisexuality was a favorite theme of hers. In this, she had been influenced by her study of “theory,” which made a big fuss of romanticizing unconventional sexual practices. I remember once pointing out to her over lunch at Hillel that in the book of Leviticus, homosexuality is prohibited as an abomination. She was so offended by this that she rushed out of the building in tears.
I was charmed by the contradictions she encompassed, no less than by her adorable freckles. We would be sitting in Louis’s, the surrounding air thickened by fumes of stuff frying in lard, with her latest incomprehensible semiotics paper about some dead Frenchman between us. While I joked about how impossible I found it to understand the jargon-heavy writing that was considered the norm in her classes, she would delightedly sneer at the nonkosher food in front of me. “Even the coffee here is trefe [nonkosher],” she would say.
It was partly my envy of her commitment and partly a simple desire to have an excuse to spend time with her that motivated me to try out Orthodox Judaism. I started attending religious services at Hillel. There, I perceived that the Orthodox prayer group, or minyan, had something in its loud-spirited worship that I hadn’t come across before. A friend of mine who is an art critic once told me that he first came to appreciate the most austere abstract painting when he was visit
ing a gallery that had some highly praised but in fact mediocre specimens on the wall. By chance in his pocket he had a postcard with a Jackson Pollock painting on the front. He held the postcard up beside the painting on the wall, and the difference immediately struck him. The Pollock had a “buzz” to it, he said, a buzz of crackling energy and life.
Orthodox prayer buzzed. When Tamara and her friends sang the sixteenth-century mystical hymn “L’chah dodi” (“Come, My Beloved”), welcoming the Sabbath on Friday night, the urgency of their singing was that of the bridegroom running to meet his bride, which is exactly the symbolism that the hymn was written to evoke. This was nothing like the staid, dutiful singing at the Reform temple where I had grown up, which recalled not the excitement of the bridegroom but the boredom of grade-school kids reciting a multiplication table. Tamara and her friends stirred something in me spiritually that previously had lain asleep.
My attraction to Tamara led me to take first halting steps toward rethinking my assumptions about what makes for religion that lives, or buzzes, and religion that seems already dead. The Bible, I’ve since realized, has a precedent for everything that’s really interesting in life and this is no exception. My discovery of my Jewish religious roots, however, raised disturbing questions about my personal identity, questions that would drive me to further rethink basic questions about faith, questions that Tamara, true to form, didn’t hesitate to boldly, even rudely, articulate.
“You’re not even Jewish,” she sneered at me in her arch, teasing way. And she was right, strictly speaking. Though I had been raised in an ethnically Jewish home, I had been adopted as an infant, and my birth parents were non-Jews. Tamara advised me to visit a local Orthodox rabbi for advice on the question of my converting formally to Judaism.
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