Alma mater, hail we greet thee!
Earlier this month I attended my 15-year college reunion. My alma mater was until relatively recently a Catholic women's college. While the school has changed incredibly since we were there, it is always fun to get back to Greensburg and the campus and wonder what ever happened to our twenty-year-old selves.
Outside the dining hall was a bulletin board put together by student volunteers, highlighting clips from yearbooks and newspapers from the classes that were meeting this reunion year. It is amusing how dated everything, including my own class' images, looked.
For instance, is there a college in the US today that would print in its school paper a record of all the Christmas-break engagements as this article from the late 1940s did?
Hair is certainly something that really dates an image. I love these pixie-haired dancers, looking like instead of dancing they're doing choreography. To their left, you will see, are my teased and hairsprayed classmates during our Freshmen Creche ceremony.
Now that the school is a completely co-educational university, there are even more changes that will, at some point in the future, make these images of and writings by the earlier graduates of the women's college, the alumnae, seem even more quaint to the alumni. They will look at us older graduates as funny relics of a different time, us silly proud graduates of a women's college in the 1990s. Our newspaper editorials about the value of an education at a women's college will seem to the future alumni as funny as those alumnae in the 1940s gushing over engagement rings seem to us.
Oh--I bought Myles this Seton Hill football with a sense of irony, as in how incredibly funny is it that Seton Hill (!) has a football team. And a contender in NCAA Division II at that!
In the not-too-distant future, other returning alumni will also probably buy Seton Hill footballs for their sons, though probably without the irony. They will have actually participated in the football culture and have happy memories about Homecomings and rivalries.
Outside the dining hall was a bulletin board put together by student volunteers, highlighting clips from yearbooks and newspapers from the classes that were meeting this reunion year. It is amusing how dated everything, including my own class' images, looked.
For instance, is there a college in the US today that would print in its school paper a record of all the Christmas-break engagements as this article from the late 1940s did?
Hair is certainly something that really dates an image. I love these pixie-haired dancers, looking like instead of dancing they're doing choreography. To their left, you will see, are my teased and hairsprayed classmates during our Freshmen Creche ceremony.
Now that the school is a completely co-educational university, there are even more changes that will, at some point in the future, make these images of and writings by the earlier graduates of the women's college, the alumnae, seem even more quaint to the alumni. They will look at us older graduates as funny relics of a different time, us silly proud graduates of a women's college in the 1990s. Our newspaper editorials about the value of an education at a women's college will seem to the future alumni as funny as those alumnae in the 1940s gushing over engagement rings seem to us.
Oh--I bought Myles this Seton Hill football with a sense of irony, as in how incredibly funny is it that Seton Hill (!) has a football team. And a contender in NCAA Division II at that!
In the not-too-distant future, other returning alumni will also probably buy Seton Hill footballs for their sons, though probably without the irony. They will have actually participated in the football culture and have happy memories about Homecomings and rivalries.
Comments
We'll hold onto it until winter when you are here for some snow football!