Wrong Impression

The recent article on Cal State San Marcos (“A Different Drummer,” Sept. 24) pointed out in a generally factual manner certain “differences” to be found on this new campus. But, as an instructor here, I am concerned that the facts apply to matters of form more than substance, and thus, in the understandable pursuit of novelty and humor, the article may have given an incomplete, even incorrect, impression.

For example, suppose that I pioneer the “drive-up” office hour, as indeed, I have done, with tongue in cheek. Doesn’t it matter more what is said than where it is said? The parking lot happens to be a convenient place to talk, but the campus facilities themselves are very pleasant, perfectly adequate to the simple needs of the present, not at all “cramped,” compared to other, more crowded, CSU campuses. What I see at San Marcos is education in its essence, free of distractions, with learning alone providing the excitement, a great deal of it.

We have only ourselves, what we read and write and say to each other, how we help each other understand, and the human community of the mind which those activities will form. The students are willing to take up the challenge of that experience, and I know that I will learn from it too in ways impossible to imagine elsewhere.

The term “drive-through campus” hurt my students’ feelings. After all, no one goes to any university to stay, but to change and find a better life. Many of the students are “local,” true enough, but this experience of active creation seems to have a way of insisting on its universal import. They will certainly be changed by it because they will be building, out of themselves and their locality, a special gift to California. And if many of them choose to stay nearby, all the better for them to admire what they have begun, and to meditate, as others arrive, on the idea in Wallace Stevens’ words that we “left what still is the look of things,” and that “what we said of it became a part of what it is.”

JAMES MACK

San Diego