Eddie Goes to UW-O

On the day that a group of Oshkosh Public Library staff members traveled to Middleton to take a look at our self-service holds set-up, Eddie and I headed for the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh campus to participate in Summerview, a preview day for prospective students and their parents. Eddie received a flyer in the mail about this event shortly his ACT scores became available. It should be gratifying to him how much unsolicited mail is generated by a composite score in the high 20s.


Like all the bike-riding I’ve done lately, the visit to the UW-O campus felt like it shaved a significant number of years off my life. Although I never attended classes there during the 8 years I lived in Oshkosh (1978-1986), the school was well within my orbit of activities. The house I rented on Spruce Street until 1983 is located three blocks north of the campus, and the Indian Trail Apartments, where I lived until JoAnna (1985 UW-O graduate) and I married, is just a block south. During the early 1980s, a large group of friends used to play volleyball during Sunday evening open gym at the Kolf Sports Center, and a smaller group used to attend occasional weekend “coffeehouse” music performances at the Reeve Union, well before its remodeling and expansion took place. Once JoAnna and I started dating during the summer of 1984, I felt an even stronger connection to the campus. During the fall of 1985, I taught an undergraduate library administration course in one of the classrooms in Polk Library. And then there were the hundreds of times I biked and walked through the campus. By May of 1986, I could have probably drawn a campus map to scale with each building clearly identified.
“Do you mind if I put in a CD?” I asked Eddie once we had cruised past Sun Prairie on highway 151.

Since we’d left the house, he’d been wearing a pair of ear buds attached to his iPod. I was spookily reminded of the quiet trips my dad and I shared on the drives between Warren and Buffalo back when I was a car-less college student – at those occasions when I had too much stuff to take along with me on the bus.
With only three discs from which to choose, I opened the case to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, his “double album” released in the spring of 1966, when I was a sophomore in high school. It opens with “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35”…….everybody must get stoned.

Some reactionaries might say that’s already two strikes against me, but Eddie’s musical tastes happen to be as far-ranging as mine.
Once we reached the northern edge of the campus – taking this approach due to considerable street and bridge reconstruction elsewhere – I parked in the first lot that came into view. From there, Eddie and I walked along a stretch of Algoma Boulevard that, to my eye, hadn’t changed at all since 1986. The cluster of academic and administrative buildings – Halsey, Swart, Harrington, Dempsey, and Clow – looked exactly as I remember them. Once I saw the steel-and-glass expanse of the recent addition to Reeve Union, though, the feelings of timelessness I had just experience started to diminish.
As soon as we entered the Union, a young woman greeted us enthusiastically, a welcoming smile stretched as far as she could manage across her face.

“Just go down to the end of the hall, turn left, and you’ll see a man in a white shirt,” she instructed.
Curiously, we had the hallway to ourselves. (Cue The Twilight Zone theme music.) Two other people, a mother and son, walked in about 10 seconds later. The greeter’s voice reverberated off the walls as she gave them the same instructions. With so few people in evidence, I wondered if our Summerview session had attracted an unusually small turnout. Not at all. When we entered the second floor ballroom, where the “Welcome” part of the program was to take place, we found a group of nearly 200 people had already assembled. Most of them sat quietly and listened to a two-piece (piano and bass) jazz combo. Eddie and I found ourselves behaving in a similarly reserved manner.

“I thought I might see someone I know,” Eddie commented after scanning the large room.

Up to this point, I hadn’t seen any familiar faces either. (As a point of comparison, about a dozen members of Andy’s 2006 high school class ended up attending UW-O, so the possibility was certainly there.)
Between 9:45 and 10:00 a.m., Jill Endries, Director of Admissions, gave us a fast-paced, fact-filled pep talk and introduced ten members of her staff, more than half of them UW-O grads.

“And that’s not because getting a job in Admissions is the only thing a UW-O grad can do,” she joked. “You’ll find that there’s a great sense of loyalty to the school among graduates,” she added as a serious counterpoint.
Eddie and I spent the next hour attending two “Student Services Sessions” from among the seven that were offered. Some of them – Admissions and Residence Life, for example – seemed, even to Eddie, to be geared to families going through the college prep process for the first time. I let him do the choosing, and as a result, we learned about financial aid for the first half hour and international education during the second. Most of the students in the latter session expressed a specific interest in foreign language studies. Eddie was more interested in the actual travel option. He can barely speak a word of Spanish after struggling through courses during his freshman and sophomore years. His international academic experience is much more likely to be accomplished through science field trips.
Along with the rest of the Summerview group, we ate lunch at one of the campus Commons – one that features an “all you care to eat dining experience”, with a variety of entrée stations, including vegetarian. Eddie and I tried to figure out how the meal plan works for this venue. Maybe we should have gone to the Residence Life session after all. What is life really like in the residence halls? And how is the food? What meal plan options are available to you? [From the program description.]


The first hour of the afternoon provided time for two Academic Workshop sessions, when representatives from the various departments described their major programs of study. UW-O’s 57 programs were clustered into 15 different groups – plus an “Undeclared” section. Eddie’s first choice was the Environmental Studies, Geology, and Geography/Urban Planning cluster, which attracted an obviously anticipated small group. We met in a small conference room around a rectangular table with 14 chairs, 5 of which remained unoccupied. Perhaps yesterday’s mail influenced Eddie’s first choice. He finally received the results of the two AP tests he took in May. He received a “5” (extremely well qualified) in his Environmental Studies course – or APES, as he referred to it after the first week of classes. He received a “4” (well qualified) on the Psychology exam, but our second Academic Workshop session focused on Math, Physics, and Astronomy. After these two sessions, particularly the descriptions of small class sizes and regular contact with the professors, Eddie’s inclination to attend Oshkosh was strongly reinforced.

At this point, Eddie was ready to return home, but I insisted that we take the scheduled campus tour.

“I promised your mom I’d take pictures,” I said, only half-joking. “It’s been quite awhile since her last visit here.”
Our tour guide was a Communications major entering his senior year, who appeared, not surprisingly, very much at ease in this role. We spent the biggest chunk of our time at the $21 million Student Recreation and Wellness Center, which opened just last fall. (If only libraries get could this kind of attention.) This state-of-the art facility includes basketball courts, two strength and conditioning areas, a jogging and walking track, indoor soccer court, volleyball courts, climbing wall, golf simulators, outdoor patio along the Fox River, and a food service area with wireless Internet service. All in the goal of a healthy mind in a healthy body, I suppose. As a November 10, 2002, New York Times article (“Extreme Exercise; Way Cool Rec Centers”) pointed out: While critics balk at the idea of a climbing wall taking precedence over the library's wish list, recruitment-minded colleges are sparing no expense to build centers that rival private health clubs.

UW-Oshkosh is just trying to keep pace, I suppose.

Begone tennis courts: voila, trees.

How different it is from when I was in college in the late 60s and early 70s. At that time, it was all administrators could do to build enough dormitory and classroom space for the leading edge of baby boomers taking over their campuses. (And sometimes doing so literally.) During my first two years at Buffalo, I lived in an off-campus “garden apartment” complex (not after we were done with it) that the university had purchased to house their “excess” students. In addition, at least a quarter of my classes took place in buildings that can most generously be described as glorified trailers. For physical exercise, I guess we were content to throw a Frisbee around the quad, which, considering Buffalo’s weather, would have been limited to September and May.

One of the last stops on our tour was Taylor Hall, one of the few “residence halls” to have been thoroughly remodeled since its original construction in the 1960s. The newer amenities include an atrium-like lobby and air-conditioning. The poor students spending a portion of their summer in neighboring Webster Hall had to be content with fans, many of which were placed right in front of open windows. In spite of the refurbishing, the small, cramped rooms still look like relics from another era. Mine, for example. As far as I know, Oshkosh has yet to see what the New York Times refer to in a March 18, 2007, article as “souped-up student housing”. (…..imagine a different kind of student housing, one with loft- and villa-like settings, private bedrooms and baths, professional-style kitchens with granite countertops, weekly housecleaning services, plasma-screen TVs, wireless and high-speed Internet connections in every room, fitness centers, swimming pools, even hot tubs and tanning booths.)
As if students needs further incentives not to study. It’s not an issue for Eddie. He knows his parents would never be that indulgent. Could never.

OK, I admit it. I love this building.