reflections on a university campus

I went on the campus of the University of Nebraska – Lincoln yesterday. It is a major campus, 20,000+ students and it was an ant bed of activity. School had just started again and everybody was going everywhere.

UNL – The Cornhuskers. I suppose that is to evoke an image of a big rawboned farm boy, strong as an ox, and a little on the mean side when provoked. Beware of me: I husk corn. In my mind, it just brings up a picture of a bunch of people taking the husks off corn. Not particularly athletic or exciting.

Anyway, it was fun to see all the kids going about their business. There were a few things that really struck me.

First was how incredibly healthy, I mean robustly so, young people are. They looked absolutely beautiful, both men and women. BTW, FYI, they are no longer college kids. They are college men and women. I made the mistake of calling them kids back in the 80’s when I went back to college for my second degree. No, no, no. It is not the boys’ dorm or the girls’ dorm. It is the men’s dorm and the women’s dorm.

So, the men and women were incredibly healthy.

I noticed, too that not only were they healthy, they were large. Not fat, necessarily, although I saw entirely too many overweight kids, like I do everywhere these days. But they were big. I remember when I was one of the tallest people I knew in normal society. At 6’3” tall, I was one of the tallest in high school. Now it is not uncommon to see kids taller. I think sometimes we are moving into a race of giants.

I have always wondered what the little Oriental people who make our clothing think of them. Do they secretly suspect that we use them as tents? After all, a 6X shirt in a culture where the average person is 5 foot tall and small boned would be weird.

Another thing was the eagerness to answer my questions. I asked a young man where the Student Union was and he volunteered to take me to where I could see it. Back to the healthy side, he walked really fast. I forgot how I have begun to amble places. The more Ella has trouble, the slower I tend to walk to keep with her. One does not walk fast beside a WalMart scooter.

As we walked, I asked him where he was from. Omaha. Oh, why didn’t you go to school at UN Omaha? This is a better school, he said, and he liked Lincoln and besides (here was the crux) UNO was too close to home.

Ah, yes. That would have been my first comment when I was his age and if I had had the opportunity to choose.

I saw a building and asked a girl at random what was in there. It startled her because she was probably thinking of something else. Maybe calculus, or Occam’s Razor, or maybe the nature of being in Pascal. Or what Snooki was up to in Jersey Shore. I don’t know. But she was somewhere else, for sure. But she recovered abd told me and smiled and I thanked her and we went on. She went back to meditating on the many names of God, I suppose.

I did ask a girl in the Student Center if room 200 was down here or down there. She looked really perplexed and said, I don’t know. I think the rooms go up in number down there. She had a certain Valley Girl quality to her speech (out-of-date, I know, but I don’t care. I like the term and it is my blog) and appeared suddenly confused. I remembered that it doesn’t always take intelligence to get through college, just the ability to remember something for a little while.

Other things: the stores were huge. Although the ceilings were low, the bookstore looked as big as a smaller WalMart, and there was a Laptop Checkout Station over on one corner. Everybody had one. And – this was different – you could rent textbooks. That means that when they graduate, their old textbooks will not masquerading as real books in their professional libraries.
A lot of fast-food places, too. That could account for the reason they were so large.

I am going back next week. I look forward to it. Maybe I will see my friend from Omaha again.