ASU - Freshman Adviser

I started college at the height of the Vietnam War. By 1970, my high school graduation year, I had concluded, based on the Army’s own reports, that the war in Vietnam was not only not winnable, it was a mistake. We were on the wrong side. 

Army Magazine, is a semi-official organ of the U.S. Army that reports on what’s happening in that world and what developments (new technology and tactics) are on the horizon. I had been reading this magazine from cover to cover for years getting the Army’s perspective on the war.

This pushed me into the War Resistance world of marches and protests and draft counseling, but even more fundamentally for me, it eliminated forestry as a viable career path. As a war resistor, my plan to attend forestry school and become a federal forest ranger no longer made sense.

I would later return my Selective Service (draft) card to the government in a highly publicized media event that included my being interviewed on TV. In theory, I could have been arrested at any time (for most of my life) and sent to Federal prison.

So, after being accepted at a variety of forestry schools, including in Alaska where I had really wanted to go, I fell back on attending ASU’s Liberal Arts college. Because my mother worked at the university, my education was practically free aside from the books. I chose Philosophy as a major since that's what had always interested me the most.

Though my parents found this idea perplexing, my high school teachers and adviser thought it made perfect sense. I had expected to have to fight for my major with university experts who would argue that this was not the route to a good paying future, but to my surprise, disappointment, and finally dismay, I discovered that ASU took no interest at all in the matter and was in fact grateful that I was able to decide on any sort of major. 

Years later a friend of mine had the dreaded job of counseling "undeclared" students and I remember being concerned this otherwise sweet woman might one day take a gun to her wishy-washy charges.

As an incoming freshman, a Philosophy department adviser was assigned to me by a computer or dart board or malevolent demon from hell. Dr. R____ was the Harvard educated expert on Eastern Philosophy and a walking stereotype of the absent minded Philosophy professor. 

Dr. R____ had, apparently, never advised an undergraduate student before so after a brief conversation that was, I believe, mutually confusing and disturbing, he hit on the strange notion of browsing the catalog of classes and signing me up for anything that might have interested him if he weren't so busy teaching. 

Characteristically, the department lacked the sort of iron bound rules governing what classes a student needed to take and in what order the student ought to take them. I needed to take a fairly modest percentage of hours in the department but beyond that I was at my own and my adviser's mercy. At Dr. R____'s suggestion I signed myself up for a series of 400 level pro-seminars.

Here's how a 400 level pro-seminar works: A professor, a handful of grad. students, maybe a couple undergraduates who have previously taken 100, 200, and 300 level classes (and have found the subject so rewarding that they feel they must tackle it again now that they have the momentum of the prior classes), and one confused freshman gather in a small room around a conference table to talk about some esoteric aspect of Immanual Kant's take on Transcendental Phenomenology. I have two recollections from that first semester in college. First, trying to convince someone at the school to find out and tell me what my IQ was as I had become convinced that I was a moron. Second, giving up intoxicants of any kind as I found it hard enough to get my mind around, "That than which no greater can be conceived," (Part of St Anselm's proof for the existence of God, as I recall) while sober.

Besides being Clean and Sober for the remainder of my time at university, this disaster had one other beneficial side effect once I withdrew from the 400 level classes and sneaked into more appropriate 100 level classes. For the remainder of my time at ASU the grad. students assumed that I, too, was a grad. student and so I was invited to join the Philosophy Club and was generally treated as a grad. student in the department.