Sierra and I meet every Monday for pie and tea and to talk about life. She is 20 and a junior on campus. I, well, I was 20 and a junior on campus the year Sierra was born.
In addition to being a friend, Sierra is my pipeline to student life and a reminder of how much and yet how little things have changed over the past two decades in Davis.
When I was a student, the restaurant where we now meet majored in pancakes and 10-cent cups of coffee that could be refilled all night for marathon study sessions. Today, I'm told, most restaurants in town frown on students camping out to study. And it seems those bottomless cups, drunk black or at their fanciest with cream and sugar, have given way to expensive lattés and cappuccinos.
In the '70s, graduate students toted quart-sized earthenware coffee mugs to Sandra Gilbert's class on women authors. Today, students carry insulated plastic coffee mugs, and some enterprising collegian has even developed a clip for hooking them onto your backpack. Have coffee, will travel.
And speaking of backpacks, purses are now shaped like backpacks. I know; Sierra carries one. And books--well, these days they are just as likely to be carried in shoulder-slung book bags--the kind we considered nerdy.
In the early 1970s the slide rule was just giving way to the pocket calculator, and faculty members were struggling with whether to allow them during exams. My palms still sweat at the thought of that first physics midterm, trying to make sense out of the C scale and D scale on my slide rule. Meanwhile, the guy next to me was clicking out an answer on his calculator. I trashed my slide rule that day. Only later would I learn that, had I really understood the physics of it all, I could have done the calculations by hand.
Calculators are now built into the software of desktop computers, and every student is computer literate. You can register for classes via computer, do research over the Internet and even keep in touch with the folks back home by e-mail. Computers are fast and nearly silent. Today's students don't have to learn how to sleep through the pounding of their roommate's typewriter.
Speaking of technology, students are now carrying cellular phones on campus. I saw a fellow the other day standing at the corner of Hutchison and California, right across from Chem 194, making a call to a friend in the library. Can you imagine what the library is like with backpacks and bookbags ringing left and right?
The library is supposed to be stable, even stodgy, but Shields Library here on campus is the mecca of change. You now enter the library from the west side rather than the east. The addition of the new Art Deco entrance has dramatically altered traffic patterns between the library and the MU. Everyone now walks diagonally across the west Quad, wreaking havoc with the lawn and frustrating the landscape maintenance staff no end. As for the library's old basement undergraduate reading room, it's now walled off. I pity the generations of students who will never know the exhilaration of climbing out into the early morning sunshine after pulling an all-nighter down there.
But I have digressed. Sierra and I actually don't talk much about coffee, computers or the library.
We talk about courses, majors and careers, about how she is juggling classes, work and her wedding plans. We talk about people and priorities. I warn her that problems won't disappear after graduation and marriage; they'll just change.
I think she knows.
She is at the age of options and opportunities. I envy that age, but wouldn't care to return to it. There is something solid about having been around long enough to witness changes in a community and on a campus. Something secure about having a history.
I'm curious how Davis--the town and the campus--will be transformed by the next 20 years. How will students be carrying their books in the year 2016? What kind of coffee will they be drinking?
Sierra and I will have to meet then for pie and tea and to talk about life. We'll get back to you on it.
-- Patricia Bailey '77
