WEBVTT

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Who are you?

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I'm Debbie Holdstein, and I'm a college teacher right now at the Illinois Institute of Technology

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where I teach English.

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And you went to Northwestern, Debbie?

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Yep.

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From 1971 to 1973, I was a transfer student, and I transferred from Carnegie Mellon University.

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And what was it like for you there as a woman and as a student?

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What did you think of the education?

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I'm a lot kinder toward Northwestern now than I used to be.

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I look back and realize that my education was pretty good.

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I think what bothered me the most about Northwestern was that most of the women there who sought

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to find their own identities sought it through the sorority system, which was extremely,

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even when I was there in the early 70s.

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And women were identified that way.

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Everybody was extremely money conscious, which put me off because I was kind of an average

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middle class kid from New York City who had gone to an average kind of middle class school

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for my first two years.

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Then I came to Northwestern where people would complain about not having any money all the

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time and then drive off in their Maseratis down Sheridan Road.

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And you were a commuter as well, right?

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I lived right near campus on Foster Street.

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And a lot of my friends were the kind of people who weren't really interested in getting an

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education.

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They were kind of interested in getting good grades, getting a piece of paper, and making

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big bucks and would do their best to take as many Bergen Evans type courses as they

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could get away with, not go to class all semester, borrow notes for the midterm and final, and

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ace the course, not having learned very much except for some crash memorization types of

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things.

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And I found that a little frustrating.

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What about you?

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You turned out pretty well.

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Lucky.

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What kind of room was there for any kind of radical thought or questioning of the system?

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I found very little room.

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I found that it, maybe this was because I was a transfer student and what I'm feeling

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may be unfair and not taking it in all points of view, but the people who professed to be

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radicals were not.

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They were the ones in the Maseratis who had their blue jeans expertly, perfectly faded

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before they bought them by a boutique down on Rush Street.

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And that kind of, I wanted to say dualism, more like hypocrisy kind of bothered me.

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Okay, hi.

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Would you introduce yourself?

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I'm Marion Fisher, graduate of Northwestern, class of 34.

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Class of 34.

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And what was it like as a student, Marion, when you were there?

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Well, it was pleasant, rather hard, but not too hard.

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And I had classes that for the most part interested me.

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I did that work and I belonged to a sorority.

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What sorority was it?

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Delta Zeta.

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And we had many good times at the house, as sorority girls do.

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And I think we did many of the same things that girls do today.

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We had our weekly meetings, we had tea's, we had dances, we went out for homecoming,

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we made floats, everything of that sort.

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We had a lot of fun.

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And studying too.

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And you studied for your career, which was?

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I majored in English and in Latin.

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And had a minor in German, in education.

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And you ended up teaching Latin, most of your, most of your, and English.

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Latin and English both for many years.

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And the last six years I taught the class of German also.

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And was department chairman at our high school.

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Was a department chairman.

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And now you live both in Park Ridge and in Florida.

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Yeah, six months each place and I enjoy that.

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I like the summers up north and the winters in Florida.

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Okay, thanks very much.

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My name is Lisa Lewis and I went to Northwestern for graduate school for one year.

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Before I started graduate school at Northwestern I was unemployed for about four and a half months.

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And I didn't know what I was going to do and as a last ditch effort I decided to go back to school.

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And I was getting unemployment checks, I had to cancel the unemployment checks in order to begin going to Northwestern.

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So consequently I had no money when I went to Northwestern and borrowed everything.

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And the result now is a series of payment booklets.

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Which I got independently through a bank.

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My parents co-signed the loan so it's impossible to default.

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And these booklets tell me how much I have to pay over the course of ten years.

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I started paying in February and the total amount is $10,311.60.

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That's for one year of school.

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For one year at Northwestern.

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So these booklets you can go through and see how much you will owe at particular dates in your life.

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For instance, on June 7th, 1983 I will still owe $8,936.72.

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April 7th, 1984 I will still owe $8,077.42.

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March 10th, 1985 $7,132.19.

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They go on.

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July 2nd, 1985.

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Is this your only loan?

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This is one of my loans.

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This is through the private bank.

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When will you be all paid up?

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Well, let me put the end here.

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My name is Judy Whittaker and this is my apartment.

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This is my kitchen table right now.

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Chuck said he was coming over to film me this morning so this is what he gets.

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The reason I understood he was choosing me for this film was that I went to Northwestern.

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I am one of the proverbial graduates of the Northwestern Finishing School for Girls.

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I graduated from Northwestern with a BA in history in 1966.

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With an average of 2.00001.

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I made it out of there with a scan of my teeth.

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Not that I was stupid.

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But anyway, I say in defense.

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Anyway, I was thinking about what do you want to hear about Northwestern.

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I went to a girls boarding school, Catholic High School, and I got to Northwestern and

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it was a real blast in the head.

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In my freshman year I gave up Catholicism and I gave up girls and I took up boys.

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I gave up girdles that was.

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I wish I had taken up girls.

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I took up boys and was always out.

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I managed to have a lot of fun.

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Got cut from Rush my freshman year.

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I tried but I can remember crying that Pi-Fi didn't want me.

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I was pretty upset.

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In sophomore year I moved into what my father called Northwestern Hilton.

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New apartments.

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I got to admit, this is almost a little embarrassing.

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I was living pretty high on the hog.

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My parents were paying all that tuition plus $100 a month.

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So I got to admit that things were pretty easy.

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My junior year I went through Rush again just because I was living with sorority people

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and they were all moving in the house.

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I pledged but the same year I also dropped out and went home and wanted to get away because

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I thought the whole thing was ridiculous and stupid.

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My parents said go back and get the degree so I went back and got the degree but I also

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got a psychoanalyst.

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By the way, the reason I graduated with a zero point point is that I had a very hard

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time writing papers.

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So here it is, 1981.

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I graduated in 1966 and this is a paper in progress.

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Anyway, I'm doing it for a course but I'm doing it mostly because I want to do it.

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When I got out of Northwestern, I went along with all the glazes, sorority parties and

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all that kind of crap.

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But basically what was happening to me inside, I was so goddamn confused and alienated and

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messed up inside that I didn't expose much of myself in the glaze and the parties and

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all the crap.

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So I got out and my father stopped supporting me and it was kind of like I was facing everything.

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I was facing who I was which I hadn't really looked at or felt real scared to expose it

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and I was facing economic stuff, teach and that kind of stuff.

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So it was the year after I got out that I really came to terms a lot more with who I

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was than I ever did at Northwestern.

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There was just no way.

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I was just too locked in, I was too scared, nobody was pushing me to really deal with

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inside except the shrink that I had and that wasn't enough.

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I came to terms with things a little bit more politically too and started dealing with what

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Northwestern was.

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And I'm still dealing with what Northwestern was and what the whole middle class bourgeois

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trip is.

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I mean I haven't worked through all that.

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What do you see when you go back to the campus?

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I feel like it's South Africa.

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I go up to the library and it's so white and it's so suburban and living down here in the

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city I feel like I'm walking into South Africa.

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You know I'm not kidding about that.

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It's so suburban.

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It's very strange to me.

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And I don't see how anybody can learn up there.

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You know and I know that people supposedly do but I would think that it would be very

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suffocating.

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They don't know how much people live.

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No, but the interesting thing is that even if you refuse to join a sorority, to say I

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refuse that you're going to put a label on me based on how much money my father makes.

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What they do then is they label you as an independent.

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Which means you're too poor to be in a sorority or you're too weird to be in a sorority.

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And that's what the whole value system was based on.

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And that permeated into the whole school.

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It's so like you felt like you were a walking piece of plastic.

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That's why I said that Evanston is like being in Marshall Fields all the time.

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Yeah.

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Because?

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Because you're just living in this world of values that's completely alien.

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But some people like to be in Marshall Fields.

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I mean some people think they're happy doing it, right?

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Yeah, but I wasn't.

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I don't like to go to Marshall Fields.

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I think they're selling all this stuff and it really shouldn't cost as much.

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It shouldn't be this much up at anything.

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But it's only because you're in Marshall Fields and there's little crystal chandeliers

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that they charge ten bucks more for the clothes.

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And that's kind of what it was.

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It was like at Overland, people did not go to school to get married anymore.

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That was passe, you know?

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People used to do that back in the 50s, but people don't do that anymore.

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Wait, was the girls still majoring?

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Oh, you better believe it, you know?

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Did the girls go for that or just the guys go for that?

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The girls go to get married.

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They want to go catch themselves a lawyer.

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So they become psych majors, you know?

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Do psych majors get lawyers?

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I didn't stay there long enough to find out, you know?

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Why did you get out?

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How did you get out and how did you change?

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I had a bad dream one night.

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No, I'm not kidding.

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I really did.

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I had this dream about being in a house.

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And I was behind a fence, a big, tall kind of stone wall fence.

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And I could see into a window, into a house.

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And I could see right in because it was backlit.

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And I saw a man come into the house and there was a child lying on a bed.

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And the man was sneaking up and he was going to kill the child.

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Which you will conform to, right?

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I mean, it's not like you have to do certain things.

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Yeah, but it's pretty uncomfortable to be in the role of a weirdo in a straight school.

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Because people, they're uncomfortable having you there.

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You're not supposed to be there.

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You're supposed to be at one of the hippie schools.

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You're not supposed to be at a country club school.

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That means you must be a techie.

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And everybody knows that all techies have bad breath.

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People who are into the sciences and the technical areas,

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well, they can be a little bit weird.

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They all have short hair and have a slide ruler here.

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And smell.

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So it's like, I was, you know...

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I wasn't a techie.

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I took some, I took Russian.

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Techies don't take Russian.

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You know, I mean, that's...

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They take physics and...

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Why did you go to Northwestern?

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Originally.

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Because it was not the U of C and yet it was close to Chicago.

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Does that make any sense?

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No, because it was supposedly a decent school.

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And it was in Chicago and I knew I could get into it.

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You wanted to be in Chicago.

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And it didn't matter that...

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Yeah, because I wanted to go ride horses in the summers.

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That's what I did all year.

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Go to school during the week, come home on the weekends and go riding.

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And it was actually kind of good that I don't think I would have lasted the whole year.

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Otherwise, if I had to stay there on weekends...

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When was this?

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Seventy...

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Three seventy-four.