Celebrating 150 Years  |  Alumni Memories

Jim McGrath '79
Stentor Editor 1977-1978

The assignment, at least I as remember it, was 500 words reflecting on our college days. Pick a seminal moment, the letter to us former Stentor editors went. Maybe something we remembered from, say, a bull session in the cafeteria.

Those chats in Szabo, as we called the dining room, after the outfit that ran it; in the Pub, in the library and in the dorms; had a common enough theme. What was missing here at Lake Forest? Or so we wondered, through all our early adulthood angst at a fine enough liberal arts college that wasn’t quite among the elite.

Three decades later, I’ve stumbled upon the rather obvious answer. What was missing in my day, and I hope is gloriously absent to this day, is pretense.

My class arrived in 1975. We didn’t feel especially entitled, I don’t think, and we didn’t conduct ourselves with much self-importance. What you saw among your fellow students was pretty much what you got – among the preppies and the financial aid kids, the jocks and the dweebs, the brains and the slackers. Otherwise impressive achievement came with very little illusion about what it meant in the world beyond the campus.

All this made such perfect sense to me last year when I read about a dust up involving a woman named Linda Greenhouse, from a school then known as Radcliffe and now as Harvard, and a newspaper known as the New York Times, She had been at a reunion not long before, when she felt compelled to confess how her generation -- of, I guess, the very late 60s or early 70s -- was supposed to be the one that would save the world. And -- gasp! -- they didn’t quite pull off a stunt of such magnitude. Not as easy as getting an “A” at one of those places that seemingly major in grade inflation. This bugged Greenhouse, to the point where she found herself weeping at a Simon and Garfunkel concert a year or so ago. “Hello darkness, my old friend” made for blubbering, not music.

Come now. Name one classmate capable of such a thing, and the beers are on me at the Lantern Homecoming weekend.

Then there was another Times guy, this time the boss – Arthur Sulzberger Jr., from a college known as Tufts. He was giving a graduation speech at one of the State University of New York campuses last year that disintegrated into a weird apologia for all that his generation -- he’s just a bit younger than Greenhouse -- hadn’t done. They had failed to stop the Iraq war, he lamented, and hadn’t done enough to promote abortion rights and gay marriage and to protect immigrants.

Again, fellow Foresters, much as we might side with the Times guy on such issues (and I’d do just that) would we really be inclined to turn some much younger kids’ graduation into a ritual of self-flagellation?

Here’s to our humility, then, or at least our self-restraint. Here’s to all that we aren’t. Here’s to all that we haven’t done, and for all that we’re not about to be so self-consciously sorry. Here’s to class after class after class of alumni who turned out just fine. Here’s to the lessons you don’t learn until much later – like perspective.

Now there would have been a chat in Szabo. Just  a long time coming, if a bit over the assigned word count and a bit off the assigned topic.