The Students Grade L.A.

It is a tradition at many colleges for students to spend a semester or a year abroad. That used to mean Europe almost exclusively, but in recent years it has come to include places like Vietnam, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Bali ... and Los Angeles.

The phenomenon of East Coast college students arriving for a semester of study in L.A., as if it were a foreign land, is rife with potential irony, not to mention humor. Imagine wide-eyed sophomores and juniors from the East descending on this cinema city so dotted with theme parks and palms. Would they immediately bolt for the nearest beaches, to study the surfing culture? Or to Beverly Hills, to chart shopping habits of the stars? Would they gripe, in the grand tradition of their rockbound forefathers, that L.A. is too plastic, too spread out, too lacking in culture, public transportation, good food?

Does a semester in L.A. qualify as a culturally enriching academic experience?

At most big-name Eastern schools, the answer is no. Los Angeles is not on the menu for the Ivy League, says Robert Shaw, a dean at Brown University. There are so many more diverse and enriching environments to explore, he explains.

But the paradise and paradoxes of L.A. seemed enrichment enough for 19 students and two professors from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, located in the scenic Finger Lakes district of upstate New York, in the city of Geneva, population 15,000. The conjoined colleges share a campus, faculty and liberal arts curriculum that encourages off-campus study and travel to exotic places.

Mark Gearan, HWS provost and former director of the Peace Corps under President Clinton, says his school offers study in 25 countries, along with options for semesters in Boston, Washington, New York and, starting six years ago, Los Angeles. “New York is not as popular as L.A.,” he says, partly because HWS is only five hours by car from Manhattan, and many students were raised in or around that city.

“L.A. is considered by some to be an exotic destination,” he says, “and with good reason.” Those interested in urban studies, public policy and/or the film world probably could not find a more rewarding laboratory, he says. For them, L.A. has the same kind of allure as the rain forest has for entomologists.

The most recent group of HWS students arrived in January, settled into shared apartments at the Oakwood complex on Barham Boulevard in Burbank, and began a semester of working at unpaid internships around the city, combined with course studies in politics and public policy (taught by HWS political science professor Craig Rimmerman) and courses in film and media culture (taught by HWS associate professor of film studies Elisabeth Lyon, who helped start the school’s L.A. studies program).

Now, don’t snicker. This is a serious learning opportunity, both professors say. And it had better be, since parents of HWS students pay about $27,000 tuition per year (plus $8,000 for room and board).

Right before their semester in Los Angeles ended last week, we caught up with the students. Will they take home the kind of enlightening experiences they’d hoped for? An insight into a culture different from their own?

Tara Van De Mark of Baltimore majors in anthropology and public policy. What drew her here, she says, were the books she’d read about “things like lethal air in L.A., and about the junction of environmental and social issues. About how people in poor communities are subjected to harsher environmental conditions. They must live near incinerators that burn trash, near power lines, near freeways with toxic fumes. There were things I’d never heard about, although I’d been fighting to save endangered species and on wilderness issues since I was a child.”

Van De Mark says most people think of L.A. as “limos on Sunset and all that jazz.” What she found was completely different: “an amazing grass-roots network connected on a plethora of social issues.” Her internship was as a computer specialist for Sweatshop Watch, an advocacy group for garment workers. She doesn’t think Angelenos understand or care about what’s going on in troubled parts of their own city, she says. “Even the local newscasts don’t reflect the truth. I was surprised that they only emphasize less serious things. So people don’t even know what’s really going on around them.”

She took public transportation to work each day--or at least, she tried. And she learned “how garment workers and other poor people live, how it takes them up to two hours to get to work, some of them with babies they must drop off at day care first, and how the delays affect their lives, their jobs, their mental health.” Her own route to work was troublesome enough. She had to beg a ride each day from the Barham Boulevard apartment to the Red Line subway stop at Universal City. She took the subway to 7th and Figueroa, then a bus to 12th and Los Angeles streets. “If I had no ride to the train, I couldn’t work.” What’s more, she says, “our semester is over, and I haven’t begun to explore even a fraction of the city. That’s because it is so expensive to travel around, and without a car you simply cannot get from place to place. I was in London for three weeks and traveled the entire city using the [subway] and the buses. I mastered it within a week.”

Tiffany Fields, 21, from Westbury, N.Y., is majoring in media and society. She was surprised, she says, by the lack of diversity in this very diverse city. “They speak about it here all the time. But because of the car culture, you never really see it. There’s an African American area, a Korean area, and so on. The different groups of people never really mingle. In New York, there are neighborhoods populated by certain groups, but the place is so compact that everybody sees everybody else every day. It’s segregated here in lots of ways. The people who ride the buses, for example, are a totally different social and economic group than people who drive cars. There is a huge gap between the rich and the poor that is more evident here than in New York. This is not good, in my view.”

Fields, who wants to be a casting director and served her internship at a Hollywood casting agency, says she loved the work--but the city is too entertainment-oriented. “It becomes boring after a while. Everywhere I went, every restaurant or coffee shop, they’re talking about struggles to get into the industry, to move up in the industry, to make it big in the industry. Can I meet anyone, please, who’s all about art? Or literature? You guys have a funny definition of culture. The Getty Center, for example, has great views, it’s architecturally beautiful, but it’s not ... as good as the museums we have in New York. I love New York. But guess what? I also love L.A. And because this is where I want to work, I will definitely be back. Come to think of it ... L.A. has a lot to offer that New York doesn’t have.”

Mike Nolan, 20, an English major from a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y., had never been to Los Angeles either. His internship was spent working for Roger Corman’s production company, where he worked on script reading and on his own script. “I’ve known for a long time that I want to write films. I’m coming back here to the UCLA screenwriting program soon. I could never live here and raise a family, though. I’m troubled about certain things. At sports events, for instance, nobody’s there for the sport, like they are in my home town. Here, they’re all full of vanity. They’re on their cell phones, reading magazines. Even a sporting event becomes a social scene. It’s all about who has the bigger car, who lives on the highest hill. It saddens me that people I met seem to care only about money. “I saw the noir side of the city--it’s just what I expected from watching ‘Mulholland Drive,’ ‘Heat,’ ‘Training Day’ and ‘Chinatown.’ But I’ll come back here for as long as it takes me to become successful. Maybe I’ll get an apartment near the beach....”

Danielle Pursley, 20, a media and society major, is from Barrington, R.I., “a town so tiny that there is no fast food, no movie house, no alcohol.” Her father manages a McDonald’s in a nearby town, where she works summers to help pay for college. She spent her senior high school year studying in Europe, she says, and her semester in Los Angeles was “every bit as interesting and involving,” she says. “To be honest, I never thought I’d like L.A. as much as I have. The first challenge for people here is transportation,” she noticed. To get to work at MTV on the Paramount lot (where she read scripts and answered phones), she carpooled with the three guys with whom she shared an apartment. They all chipped in to rent a car, she says.

“Inside the studio it was all glitz and glamour. But walk outside, and it’s all the have-nots. The poverty I saw is overwhelming to me. On my drive to work every day, I always felt how fortunate I was, how lucky to be able to go to school, to share a car. The people we saw had so little--and certainly no way to get around. We visited the first grade of a Compton school, taught by a recent graduate of HWS. It was the most memorable experience. I had never faced these urban problems one on one. When you’re sitting there, talking to these terrific little kids, and you realize they will probably never have the opportunities I have--and there is no rhyme or reason. When you sit down, and the kids’ first question to you is ‘how do you pay for college?’ It has made me want to get more involved in helping with these issues.”

Keith Castaldo, 20, from Plainfield, N.J., is a sophisticate who’s been to Europe many times with his father (an elementary school principal) and his mother (a prep school teacher). “I love L.A.,” Castaldo beams. “It is shallow. It is superficial. But what great weather. I am much more productive when it’s beautiful outside. And what a ton of stuff there is to do. I go down to the Roxy, the Whisky, the House of Blues, the Key Club--they all have live music.” He worked at Sotheby’s in the events department, “because I want to be in the business and law side of fine arts.”

On the downside, he says, L.A. is too crowded and congested and is “filled with problems that must be addressed. But these are not just problems of L.A. They are the problems almost everywhere in the world. L.A. is really a microcosm of things around the globe. This is the new place to be, to study, to fix. Something very big is gonna happen here pretty soon. And I mean something good.”

And, from the perspective of the teachers?

Rimmerman, 45, who’s spent semesters in London and Washington, D.C., says the semester in L.A. helped students “learn their place in the world and how they interact in the political and economic system within which we live.”

Lyon, 53, says many students gained an idea of the complexity of this city and the possibilities it offers for the future if the problems can be fixed. “There is nothing like going to another country to study--and believe me, Los Angeles is like another country.”