Oxy’s Worldview Strengthens Students and Community

Sunday I’ll attend the 108th commencement exercises at Occidental College, where I’ll say goodbye to nearly 400 young women and men who remind me of why I love Los Angeles.

They, and my alma mater, refute some of the great lies spread about L.A.

You know the lies: History, tradition and culture are scorned in Los Angeles. Almost everyone in L.A. is good-looking but stupid. And blond. Those who aren’t blond can’t get along with those who are and vice versa.

Proof to the contrary is overlooked, even when it’s right under our noses--in places like Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

Many have never heard of “Oxy,” though it’s less than 10 miles northeast of downtown.

That’s too bad. If more knew of Occidental and its students, many Angelenos would get over their anxiety about our present and future, and our much-maligned city would get more respect.

Before I got to know Los Angeles, I also believed many of the lies.

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An Ivy League reject, I arrived at Oxy in 1983 from Honolulu. Oxy was my safety school, and L.A. my destination of last resort. It was too close to home--and too far from the civilizing influence of Europe, as I’d been brainwashed to believe.

Forced to settle for Oxy, I made the best of it. I became a student leader and forged close ties to professors who

pushed me to think big.

When I finished, I won a graduate award to study for a year in Europe and Asia. I was thrilled to be leaving behind what I thought were parochial environs.

But it was on a trip to Oxford, to visit an Oxy classmate on a scholarship, that I began to truly admire my college and Los Angeles.

After a day spent enraging a groundskeeper by playing Frisbee on the cricket squares and drinking port picked up on credit from the college steward, I remarked to my Oxy chum and another scholar from Pomona College that school in Los Angeles was seldom so care-free. We might have considered ourselves sunbaked yokels, but the truth was we often ran into each other after midnight in the Occidental library, which was open and (sometimes) full until 2 a.m.

As we barbecued dinner outside his Oxford dorm room, next to a mound built centuries ago to ward off marauding hordes, my L.A. friends made another sharp observation: Oxford was hurt by its arrogant Eurocentrism. How great could an institution be, they asked, if it wasn’t doing its best to understand most of the world?

That is a question frequently asked these days at Oxy. About the time I graduated, Oxy began to expand its worldview. More courses in non-European subjects were added, as were programs to build understanding among students of different cultures.

Oxy, once fond of identifying with pastoral Eastern campuses, strengthened its ties to the inner-city neighborhoods that surround it. About 500 of the college’s 1,500 students now volunteer regularly throughout the city.

Some of my former schoolmates are put off by the changes. Community, they tell me, is giving way to tribalism as ethnic groups assert their identities. Standards are dropping to accommodate special interest groups, they believe.

But many of my white college friends remember our school days as peaceful because they were comfortably in the mainstream; those of us on the margins were burdened with adopting their standards. None of us were better off then.

The proof will be at commencement Sunday in the same hillside amphitheater where I got my degree nine years ago.

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One of those who will get an honorary degree, the noted writer and Ezra Pound scholar John Espey, Class of ‘35, is part of an Oxy generation that included literary giants Lawrence Clark Powell and M.F.K. Fisher. In a memoir of his childhood as the son of Presbyterian missionaries in China, Espey recalls Christians turning away local Buddhist and Taoist priests, as well as the representative from the Confucian center, from burial ceremonies.

That, Espey wrote, reflected the “assumption of superior knowledge in all things” held by Americans of the era. “Quite apart from the question of manners,” he pointed out in describing the slight, “one of the other creeds might just possibly contain the truth.”

Oxy students today know that well. “Multiculturalism” is part of intellectual honesty.

I suspect Espey will enjoy them as much as the Buddhist invocation.

My commencement was marked by protests from students who were upset that a ranking member of the California Club was being honored. The club admitted only white men. I walked out during his speech.

Tomorrow I’ll stand with that man. We are both members of Oxy’s board of trustees--with no hard feelings, I hope. Leading the exercises will be college President John Slaughter, an African American . . . and a member of the California Club.

On hand will be parents, some of whom are among the wealthiest people in the United States. Others are among the poorest. Greetings to them in the commencement program are written in Spanish, Chinese, Korean and several other languages. (How I wish it could have been so for my relatives and the parents of my friends at our commencement.)

Into the real world will go some of the finest people I know. Their time in today’s Los Angeles and Occidental has left them more knowledgeable of the world, the nation, the neighborhood and their classmates than was my class at graduation. It will take them a few years to make their mark on the world. I can’t wait.