Bulletin from the Bicentennial
What Wonders the Next Century Will Bring
By Herbert Hadad
The snickering ceased around 2048. The mocking stopped by early 2098.
Odious and insolent words had been heard in tall marbled halls and paneled
boardrooms from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Cambridge, England. They had
been directed, for the better part of 200 years, at an increasingly sylvan
academic metropolis whose main entrance remained on Huntington Avenue (long
since restored from the cumbersome "Avenue of the Arts") in the
city of Boston. But for believers in the Northeastern dream, the best was
yet to come. The year 2098 would not yield your typical self-congratulatory
bicentennial. No rich graduates in hard hats posing with silver-plated
shovels. No grip-and-grin photo ops featuring four-foot-long checks. Prolonged
speeches by distinguished statesmen and specially commissioned pieces of
cacophonous music were not prohibited, but attendance at these events was
purely voluntary and exceedingly slim. By the time Northeastern's bicentennial
was over, not only the university, not only Boston, but this whole cockeyed
world was going to be a better place. But first let's back up 100 years
or so.
Around the time of the centennial-which, dusty archives tell us, occasioned
a year-long panoply of celebrations and speeches on Northeastern's past
but only a single magazine article (so far as we can tell) on the university's
potential future-N.U. was a flourishing educational concern. It had just
under 27,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students, faculty
and staff numbering almost 4,500, nearly 140,000 living alumni, and an
endowment so fragile that trustees chronically woke up trembling and screaming
in the middle of the night. Some other institutions, particularly those
whose buildings and reputations were embraced (some would say choked) by
a weed imported from England, chortled about endowments almost too large
to count.
Northeastern had mounted a Centennial Campaign and had in fact doubled
the endowment from $172 million to more than $350 million-not exactly chump
change but still potentially perilous for an important university. The
problem was so acute that the sixth university president, Richard M. Freeland,
who insisted he made no effort to look like Robert F. Kennedy or orate
like William Jennings Bryan, went on the stump trying to raise funds to
ameliorate the problem. One night, for instance, he rented a ballroom in
someone else's club in New York City and told the gathered alumni numbed
on cheese and white wine that he was worried about the endowment and that
Northeastern was ninety-one percent dependent on tuition, a poor formula
for carrying out the good works and deeds he foresaw for his school. People
clapped and raced for the doors, some blaming their departure on a date
with something called Seinfeld, while others babbled about something called
Baywatch.
But President Freeland was also prescient. He anticipated his university's
future and developed what he came to call his mantra: "Northeastern
is a national research university that is student-centered, practice-oriented,
and urban." While it did not exactly trip off the tongue, like "a
chicken in every pot" or "hell, no, we won't go," Freeland
repeated it often enough and ordered it published in so much university
literature that it soon had a profound effect. It was reported that everyone
from trustees and alumni to students and even an influential professor
named Jack Levin began to utter it, often while burning incense. The slogan
became popular in Back Bay T-shirt emporiums, it insinuated itself into
the country's academic psyche, the National Education Association mounted
a seminar on its "hidden meanings and religious relevance," and
it was translated into some forty-seven languages. The mantra inspired
an aeronautical engineering student to attempt to skywrite it, but while
making a radical turn to correct some punctuation, his craft plunged into
the Charles River and he had to be rescued.
Like other great epochs, however, the new Northeastern century began
in a wilderness, where the university had to find its way through both
tribulation and triumph. Electronic technology had been harnessed for higher
education even before the beginning of the twenty-first century, and Northeastern
was no laggard in joining this wave. Eventually, classroom time was reduced
to a minimum, and eliminated altogether in some disciplines, as students
pinned their attention to monitors and computers in their dormitories,
soaking up the knowledge and wisdom of a small, elite corps of professors
who delivered recorded lectures to thousands of students simultaneously.
But no one anticipated another problem. Students spent so much time
in dorms that one day police cordoned off N.U.'s entire residential neighborhood
and health inspectors in protective suits entered. They found, among other
things, barbecue-flavored potato chips that carbon-tested at twenty-five
years and chocolate-covered malted milk balls that had begun to reproduce
themselves. The budget for faculty had plummeted, to be sure, as had the
need for classrooms and laboratories, but what had been harnessed, it turned
out, had spun out of control. A whole generation of would-be teachers was
never trained or hired, ideas never promulgated, the exciting give-and-take
between student and lecturer never experienced. To its credit, Northeastern
became one of the first universities to abandon the electronic elitist
approach to education. Northeastern returned to the traditional American
methods of education, which it maintained until and beyond the bicentennial.
The university's newfound stature as a bastion of classical education
attracted the young people of the late twenty-first century in increasing
numbers, despite Boston's cold, damp, and sometimes snowbound winters and
the sniffles these conditions engendered. After a hasty emergency meeting,
the board of trustees decided to forsake the school's century-old plan
for controlled growth and throw open the doors. Northeastern had been the
largest private university in the United States back in the 1960s and 1970s
and, almost exactly a century later, it again took on the benefits and
responsibilities of that distinction.
Co-op coordinators initially were beside themselves, concerned about
finding career-related jobs for more than 200,000 students that were not
absolutely boring, irrelevant jobs, as some coordinators had specialized
in, once upon a time. School officials shuddered at the prospect of finding
classroom and dormitory space. Others worried about the adequacy of faculty
and staff. In fact, the only site on campus from which nothing was emitted
but subtle murmurs of a serene, sensual bliss was the bursar's office.
It turned out that the worries of the others were without merit. While
some other Boston universities had expropriated their surroundings to expand
(we won't indulge in name-calling), Northeastern had entered into a partnership
with its community, the adjoining Roxbury neighborhood, providing jobs,
education, housing, dignity, and friendship. By the time of the Great Influx,
as the rush of new students came to be called, the Northeastern flag flew
all the way from Massachusetts Avenue to Mattapan Square and west to the
Dedham line. The towns of Milton and Westwood vied for the next round of
expansion.
So Northeastern had established its credentials beyond
any doubt. Based on the vision of President Freeland and his team, N.U.
was becoming one of the great educational experiments in history. The Tobin
Elementary School in Roxbury was renamed the Tobin Institute at Northeastern,
which had the perfect ring for youngsters who now saw for themselves a
more promising future. It's true that the chorus of hosannas was far from
universal. This was still America, and competition to be the best and biggest
remained intense. Pitiful catcalls of "upstart YMCA night school"
and worse were heard from ivory towers on occasion, but seemed increasingly
quaint, like real bow ties, watch fobs, and rumbling trolley cars.
Northeastern also began to export its famous cooperative education program,
opening satellite campuses from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Berkeley, California,
and overseas, from Oxford, England, to Beijing. Research in many areas-the
sciences, law, business, and what was once called "liberal arts"
but was now titled Other Important Stuff-thrived with a stream of huge
donations. Some heavy-hitters did not even insist that their names be attached
to new buildings, laboratories, chairs, walkways, or bricks. This time,
our fund-raisers wept in appreciation.
With this level of success, however, came new and unexpected problems.
As Northeastern glided like a giant pedagogical battleship toward the end
of its second century, there came a sneak attack from the employment sector.
Our students, still sniffling through damp, cold, and sometimes snowbound
winters, were so well-trained and highly motivated that drafting wars began.
Large numbers of students were tempted into accepting lucrative jobs in
warm-weather climes without completing their education. In what became
a landmark meeting, Northeastern officials consulted those of the National
Football League and National Basketball Association and then composed the
Co-op Compact, under which any job draft was prohibited before graduation.
Serendipitously, the meeting took place in a stadium, once called Foxboro
and now enclosed, that the university had acquired. Northeastern, with
200,000-plus students, had become a formidable national sports power and
had long ago outgrown the stadiums and arenas abandoned by several nearby
institutions when they became so outclassed that they dropped athletics
entirely. Besides, the Huntington Avenue monorail to Foxborough got fans
to the games in less time than it once had taken them to reach the Boston
Garden, which was restored in name from the FleetCenter, thankfully retiring
a bad bathroom joke.
Yet at the same time that these bold initiatives were unfolding on the
public stage, a completely discreet research project was also under way.
Eschewing the university's grand and futuristic laboratories and classrooms,
a few faculty members and students were conducting work in the old YMCA.
The year was 2095. Virtually no one knew or cared about the tinkering.
And why should they? Northeastern was enjoying its status, accepting fewer
than ten percent of those applying for admission, attracting the most brilliant
instructors, publishing academic treatises that became best-sellers, watching
with glee as the endowment clicked into ten figures. The editor of the
university magazine fought with university brass over running a cover photo
of the benefactor who pushed the endowment into the billion-dollar column
presenting a giant check, and won.
Curiously, President Freeland, long since retired, had a role not only
in setting the mission of Northeastern but in selecting his successor who
would serve in 2098. It seems Freeland and his wife, Elsa Nuñez,
had many years earlier introduced a young man and a young woman from two
of the most incompatible families on the planet. But there is never an
accounting for love: a romance had blossomed like a fragrant flower in
the desert, and a family had eventually been established and flourished.
Northeastern's twelfth president, Dr. Arafat-Netanyahu, never grew tired
of telling the story of the family's genesis. And it fell to Dr. Arafat-Netanyahu
to plan the bicentennial and announce the unexpected big news.
A symposium might sound like a dull little affair by N.U.'s standards
as a preeminent 200-year-old institution, but no one who attended left
as the same person and everyone in attendance became a part of history.
Northeastern invited leaders from the great and modest powers of the world.
Under the intense protection of the university's crack security force,
supplemented by the Boston Police Department, United States Secret Service,
and foreign defense specialists cackling in a babel of quarrelsome tongues,
the leaders met in the Opera House across the street from the main quadrangle.
(The Opera House had been ingeniously rebuilt on air rights over the Marino
Recreation Center. Righteous protest over the demolition of the original
Opera House finally had borne fruit, and it tasted especially sweet after
140 years.)
There were the usual squabbles over which world representative was more
important than the next, and seating arrangements took a few days to iron
out, followed by the fixing of squealing sound systems, the rounding up
of all the requisite translators, and the dizzying adjustments of menus
to comply with religious and regional choices and foibles. The caterer
who delivered mu-shu pork to the Israeli, Pakistani, and Iranian delegates
was summarily dismissed without a tip. The one who served all-beef patties
to the Hindus in the hall barely escaped the swipe of a scimitar, for even
in those enlightened times, food had the power to excite the stomach and
provoke intemperate behavior.
But when Dr. Arafat-Netanyahu rose and announced the simple, profound
meaning of the symposium, a miracle occurred. After a prolonged hush, glorious
pandemonium broke out. Shouts of jubilation and exaltation reverberated
across the Opera House. World leaders, who only recently had threatened
one another with the direst of deeds, rattling sabers and issuing ultimatums,
embraced. Some clung to one another, resembling lovers reluctant to end
an exquisite moment. Laughter and sobs by the scores intermingled, creating
a joyful din never before heard on this Earth. The security forces were
at first baffled, but when they realized there was not a safer, happier
place in the world than the Northeastern Opera House, they laid down their
weapons and bandoliers and walkie-talkies and imitated their chiefs, shaking
hands, hugging their counterparts, shouting heartfelt, often indecipherable
words of praise and affection.
The university research project had been revealed. Working diligently,
unbeknownst to both the campus and the world outside it, N.U. students
and faculty had utilized research funds earmarked "for the benefit
of mankind" and, in the dingy confines of the old YMCA, had aimed
to finally master the secret of the common cold and end the sniffles-not
only for Northeastern students but for all mankind. In this quest, they,
like researchers before them, had failed. But the selfless years of earnest
effort brought an amazing and unexpected reward. Our team had tripped over
the remedy for a malady that had long plagued mankind-every member of every
society from the most pitifully indigent to the most lavishly advantaged.
Our team had discovered the cure for acid indigestion.
"Burp Heard 'Round the World" read the headline in the next
morning's New York Times. The scrappy Boston Herald led with a Jamaica
Plain homemaker who had chased a cat burglar from her apartment, but also
squeezed the bicentennial news on page one. The Boston Globe, still smarting
from running too many fabricated accounts, initially missed the story entirely
because the editor didn't believe it. He instead published a page-one piece
comparing the salaries and perquisites of Ivy League college presidents.
But a Northeastern copy boy on co-op saved the day by convincing the editor
he'd be transferred to Fitchburg if he didn't print the biggest story of
the century.
Northeastern's naysayers experienced a heartburn that no medical remedy
could relieve. To be sure, no critic of N.U. ever again delivered a glib
and pompous denunciation. In fact, most of them applied for positions.
Probably the most touching story of the day, aside from the news of
the peptic triumph, was a little sidebar on the inside pages of the newspapers
and the end of the holovision broadcasts. It referred to Northeastern's
mission established a century earlier. The words had once sounded like
something of a boast but now sounded so modest and obvious: "Northeastern
is a national research university that is student-centered, practice-oriented,
and urban."
Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and freelance writer, wrote
"Journey through the Land of the Gaels" in the September 1997
issue. He is also a public information officer for the U.S. Department
of Justice, serving in the Office of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.
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