Living on the Advisor Plan

By RUSSELL MARTIN '74

espite what the calendar contends, it simply cannot be possible that 25 years -- a quarter-century to the day, in fact -- have passed since I came to Colorado College as an anxious, even frightened freshman, but then promptly became famous. Actually, I suppose fame overstates the case a bit, but my picture was on the front page of the Catalyst that first week, and my new friend Larry Straus and I did begin on our four remarkably consequential years here opining that it sure looked like college would be okay. This is how it happened:

It seemed unlikely that it had been hung there, but a rope swing was suspended then from a ponderosa pine that still stands near the entrance to Shove chapel, and despite the stature and maturity that we clearly evidenced in our new status as college students, I happened to be running beneath the swing and was pushing Larry, seated in its seat, high over my head as a Catalyst photographer happened by and snapped her shutter. And it really was a fine photograph -- two boyish faces smiling widely, utterly free from burden or worry, as though this were some neighborhood playground and we were still six or seven, our hair requisitely long in the emblem of that era, flowing behind our heads like flags of freedom and possibility. Larry promptly sent the front page of the paper home to his parents in New Jersey with a captioning note explaining that here he was hard at work out West; Larry's mother -- in the way that mothers are -- was wise enough to save it, and more than two decades later the photograph remains a very valued momento of a time when Larry and I and our many new friends and classmates came of age, came alive, and began the sometimes awkward, often jubilant transition between adolescence and adulthood, between youthful dependency and dawning responsibility, and in the process, Colorado College became what it remains -- a specifically frozen place and time, both of which are so entirely characterized by heartache and nascent love, maddening confusion and the delight of discovery, plain failure and the first promises of accomplishment that the totality of our experience here is nearly impossible to describe successfully.

From faulty memory, however, I can tell you that the autumn of 1970 smelled a lot like petoulli oil and a little like pizza; its dress code was heavy leather hiking boots worn beneath both Levis and billowing skirts; 1970 sounded like James Taylor and George Harrison, The Band and the Grateful Dead; it was a time when the left-wing of the political spectrum rather than the right hated the government -- go figure -- and despite momentous problems in our country, the future then seemed open and welcoming and bright. My friendship with Larry Straus blossomed in the fall of 1970 because we shared so much in common -- a passion for rock-climbing and a ready willingness to spend afternoons on the vertical walls of the Garden of the Gods instead of inside the far-less precipitous library; an interest in investigating whether meaningful religious experience could exist outside the constraints of conventional practice; we loved skiing of every kind, and we were enthralled by the sort of young women who were extraordinary on the one hand, yet unusual enough to hang out with the likes of us on the other. And we discovered on that very first day, Larry and I both had been selected -- for reasons we didn't know -- to participate in the experimental Advisor Plan.

The Advisor Plan, set in place, in part, by the liberating momentum of the decade that just had ended, was designed to let its participants select the courses they would take at the College based almost entirely on their own parochial interests. As long as you could convince your faculty advisor to issue consent, you simply could take whatever courses you wanted to take without the need to be mindful of divisional requirements or the future demands of a major. Indeed, you didn't ever have to declare a major, if you didn't want to, and I can vouch for the fact that if you chose never even to enter the science center that then was Olin Hall, you didn't have to. It was cool; and Larry and I were sure we were very lucky.

In that liberal liberal-arts autumn as well, the only grades you could receive at Colorado College were honors, pass, or fail, but for more than a few of us students, those three grades seemed one too many: the notion of an honors grade somehow offended our egalitarian sensibilities. The collegiate experience, from the student perspective at least, ought to be an open book in every conceivable sense, and this institutions willingness to explore novel means of matriculation and of measuring and marking our academic efforts were lures to Colorado Springs as large and lustrous as the spectacular eastern face of Pikes Peak. And yes, one more experimental program of substance also was initiated in the fall of 1970, this one called the Block Plan, I believe, and some of you may remember it as well.

The Block Plan, the instructional innovation that immediately lent the college enormous renown and made it unique among similar institutions, has survived the ensuing quarter-century of course, its periodic modifications reflecting both lessons learned from its implementation and the evolving attitudes of the years. But although a pass-fail option remains available to students even today, the college, in practice, had re-employed the initial letters of the alphabet well before the transitional 1970s were finished. I can't tell you precisely when the poor Advisor Plan expired. My class may have been the last one on whom it was tested, and I've shouldered the burden for more than two decades that I was to blame for its failure, in fact.

Confident of my own wise counsel in the early 1970s, I determinedly fled from courses in the natural sciences, foolishly presuming that little of the steaming stew of life could be encountered in chemistry labs or anatomy courses. Although I loved the euphoria and the fear that I felt as I clung to a thrusting slab of stone, somehow I never managed even a single geology course -- the Front Range, the Tarryalls, the Wet Mountains, and Sangre de Cristos comprising the splendid classrooms. Politics were inherently fascinating to me, but somehow political science was not. History and anthropology seemed unacceptably ... old, and the classics were similarly suspect. Music correctly couldn't be academic, could it? And business and economics, of course, were out of the question.

As I confess to you that earlier idiocy and my poorly advised participation in the Advisor Plan, it crosses my mind that what I actually chose to do during my tenure at Colorado College was to spend so much time in Armstrong Hall that I may, in fact, still have some answering to do for that buildings mysterious air and allegedly toxic nooks and crannies. But in my meager defense in this matter, I was a regular student in the religion department; I philosophized as best my modest mind would allow me; and I spent nearly three years out of four in the English Department, reading the really good stuff. It was my great good fortune to learn the marvelous malleability of language from writers named Shakespeare and Cervantes, to discover rhythm and euphonious lilt of alliteration from Yeats and Thomas and Scott Momaday, who entranced us in the flesh one long-ago evening in Bemis Lounge. It was in the province of the English Department where simple storytelling became something called literature in the process of being examined, marveled at, and sometimes immensely enjoyed. And it was in the English Department as well where Ruth Barton, foremost among many others, encouraged me to try to tell stories of my own. The creative writing, such as it was, that I produced back in those student days was fiction almost entirely: naive stories in which landscape was painted far too preciously, peopled by characters, it seems in retrospect, cut out of little more than cardboard. In substantial contrast, the stories I've continued to tell since graduation have been reported rather than imagined, for the most part, and in order to try to bring them to a kind of lucid and lyrical life they have required me to study -- on my own and very much belatedly -- rocks and the rivers that wash them away, the wondrous terrain of the human brain, orbital mechanics and the larger splendor of the universe -- studies I could have commenced at college had I had any sense at all.

Yet it may be that the miracle of this thing that we prosaically call a college education is that what it foremost teaches you is how to recover from your myriad mistakes. And although I did the Advisor Plan real disservice in the years when I lived and studied here, I remain its strong proponent, its more enduring fan. During the few years of its implementation, it represented an impressive respect for what the student was ready to learn -- and surely a certain desire, something of a nagging hunger, is the primary prerequisite for the eventual sustenance that is information, elucidation, the thing we label learning. The Advisor Plan implicitly announced to us, You're on your own. It offered us both freedom and authority to fall on our faces -- as I so dramatically did -- but also the opportunity to set courses for the future that we knew were utterly our own, and somehow that nascent responsibility served us then, and I know it serves me now.

Twenty-five years after the Advisor Plan let Larry Straus begin a journey of his own design, he now builds houses for a living in lovely western New Jersey, and only just a week ago, Larry completed an arduous five-month, 2,100-mile hike -- each mile advanced alone -- along the Appalachian Trail, traveling from swampy south Georgia to the shadowed woods of northern Maine -- a trek he actually began to urge on himself long ago in Colorado. I've often marveled over the ebb of time at what has become of other friends and fellow students who left here in the transitional and sometimes bemired 1970s, and I've known without need for recent testimony that Colorado College played a seminal part in the realization of their wide-ranging accomplishments, whether physical, familial, or those that are attached to important careers. And I'd particularly like to acknowledge in that regard the work of Ruth Musgrave and Michael King -- seated with me today and '70s grads as well -- for what they have done in the separately critical ways to keep this planet spinning, its orbit enduring and true and teeming with life.

For my part, I really haven't found regular work since I left here in the spring of 1974, my bags filled with complex emotions. What I do these days in an effort to keep the wolf away from the door is pick a subject -- that decision based on equal parts whim and passion -- then dig into it exclusive of any others for a stretch of time, until a deadline looms and the guilt grows great and I finally start to write, praying that the writing will one day build sufficient momentum to bear me along the way. One year, two years hence, if I am lucky, the project at last is done and its time to look in a new direction -- to snoop anew and to try to determine what novel subject might hold my fascination. And you know, as I try to describe to you this kind of work that I'm reluctant to call a career, I note that it sounds suspiciously like I still remain a student at Colorado College, taking one course at a time, my path lit by the vagaries of the Advisor Plan, and by my belief -- rooted in my childhood but cemented on this campus '- that we are the storytelling species, Homo once-upon-a-tempus, our brains built for seeking out relationships among things, for creating cerebral sorts of order, and for sensing and shaping narrative structure: how things were in the beginning, the middle, and at the end.

There are recurring times when I long to begin this winding and serendipitous quarter-century all over again, maybe even go to college correctly this time, but then at last I think better of the notion. In the end, I realize, it is the fact that one day turns relentlessly into the next, and that we travel just once from birth to death that lends life its sustaining vitality, its trials and sometimes nerve-wracking suspense, its joys come the close of the day. All we really can do along the way is to pay some substantial attention to the good advice that is offered us, or that we occasionally find hidden away somewhere like a cache. Then we necessarily continue on our own -- our instincts, our passions, our heady hopes comprising a lifelong advisor plan of a kind.

As I look back, I think it may be forgivable in the end that I had thoroughly wrecked the Advisor Plan by the time I graduated -- or that I, among others, inadvertently proved the Colleges longer-term wisdom in demanding a bit of divisional diversity for all its students, asking them to take a look, at least, at the wide spectrum of pursuits that allow open minds to come alive with questions; its wisdom as well in requiring the sort of angling toward specialization that is a major. Yet I would encourage those of you who are beginning your collegiate years today to keep in mind at least the spirit of the late Advisor Plan as you make your way toward a day four years from now that will seen to arrive as soon as tomorrow. Pursue your passions, whatever they may be, but be mindful that it is the nature of passion to give way to newer desires. Trust your instincts, yet be wary every time something seems entirely clear to you; be suspicious as hell if all the available answers ever seem to be yours. Fall in love while you're here if you're fortunate; soar into the air on a rope swing if you encounter one; climb on the rocks when you can.

Despite the recent indignities it has suffered in the misapplied names of family and morality and truth, this remains a lovely and remarkably livable city; and I can assure you that the men and women who will be your teachers here, and the friends with whom you will forge indestructible alliances before you too-quickly go separate ways will matter enormously to you throughout your lives. A story wonderfully worth the telling gets underway for you today -- a tale that will begin to unfold as a sudden glance seems to buckle your knees perhaps, or the story may simply fly up and away one day from the wondrous words in a book. Its transitions won't always be easy; its middling passages surely will evidence some drama, some strife in their turns and twists; and the ending -- as always happens with the best stories -- is entirely out of the tellers hands. Yet you'll love the living of this story; it will be one of the best stories you'll ever know. You will retell it, buoyed by what it recurrently whispers by way of vital reminder, for as long as you and lush stories survive.

Russell Martin delivered this address at the September 1995 honors convocation.