On a routine call with my parents in February Daddy asks, “Baby, how’d it go fall quarter?” I begin to cry, and spill the truth, and relief washes over me. It’s the volume of reading, I tell them—so many texts to get through really quickly—and papers longer than I’d ever had to write at Middleton High. Daddy and Mom hold on to me over the phone. Tell me they love me. Tell me I can do it. Tell me I have what it takes to succeed. Urge me to go get help.
I get help—ironically, from the very academic advising office I would manage twenty-five years later as dean—from an advisor who asks me about my habits, then tells me that I have what it takes intellectually but my study skills and time management need a lot of help. And she strongly urges me not to choose classes based on what “everyone” is taking and instead to take classes that sound interesting to me. When spring quarter starts in late March, I flip through the course catalog and find a class that sounds right up my alley.
It is a political science class that will survey the history of the doctrines of civil rights and civil liberties in America. The texts look engaging and rigorous. The format is going to be Supreme Court case studies, which excites me because I think I might want to go to law school. And the professor—a young white guy named Jim Steyer—is already peppering his lectures with war stories about his time at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. And he is cute. Which doesn’t hurt. By midway through the quarter every one of the two hundred students in that class know we’d stumbled upon something special. And I, to my great relief, am managing the very intense workload, keeping up with assignments, and making analytical connections at a pretty deep level. I can feel my body healing from the wounds of intellectual inadequacy inflicted by the first quarter.