Ahhh....KING-fm is playing Brahms' "Academic Festival Overture" right now. Normally I am not a huge fan of Brahms but I LOVE this piece - for me it sums up all the romantic imaginings that I had about what it would be to be on a college campus either as a student or a professor - the early broadness with what sound like hunting horns, and you can almost hear the pomp and circumstance and academic robes and hoods, and the old brick buildings, and the traditions. And then the purposeful bustle, where it sounds to me like people walking back and forth across campus to and from class, their coats flapping because they are walking so fast. And the fact that old drinking songs are woven in there, too - sort of memorializing the social aspects of college (in the pre-binge-drinking days. Or at least I assume there were days before binge drinking on college campuses became a problem). Conjures up images of basement rathskellers and people singing old, old songs around a slightly-out-of-tune piano.

But the piece is just so purposeful and so romantic, conjuring up images of old buildings and avuncular professors and the library and the coffeeshop and late nights talking about philosophy...it makes me a little sad that really, much of the university experience isn't really like that...at least not on ordinary days in the middle of the semester. And I think about how I imagine that in the past it would have been more so, the students wouldn't be working full-time at Wal-Mart and raising kids, and so, would have more time to devote to being a student. And that more professors saw their lives as a calling, rather than as something that merely pays the bills. (And before you say anything, I totally recognize that even 40 years ago, it would have been unusual for a woman to have been a professor in a scientific field, and there probably would have been some sexism in the old "why don't you go make coffee for us, dear" sense. But these are my own personal romantic imaginings and they don't have to conform to how bad old reality actually WAS...)