Jennifer Delton
Class of ‘89 (American studies)
My boyfriend’s grandmother, Mimi, registered me at the University of Minnesota. She could not stand the fact that her grandson was dating a woman who was not going to college. Since I wasn’t really doing anything (hence the problem), and since I had some money saved, I went. There was never any “aha” moment of enlightenment, no scales lifted from my eyes. Instead, I just slid into the U as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This was where I belonged.
Photo by Emma Dodge Hanson
I earned my degree in American studies, and I now teach at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. My students get an excellent education. But they don’t get what I got from CLA. They don’t get the teeming cosmopolitan campus alive with possibility, self-reliance, and ambition. They don’t get to submerge themselves in that strange mix of striving immigrants, sophisticated hipsters, laid-off workers, foreign students, honor students, single moms, frat boys, farm kids, athletes, artists, Trotskyists, Pan-Africanists, and small-town heroes. They don’t get that real, organic diversity that encompasses so much more than mere race and ethnicity. They do get close, meaningful relationships with their professors, but then so did I.
I have stories about the 16A bus, apartheid protests, the 400 Bar, and arguing with people who called themselves Buddhists. But those are just stories. The most important things I took away from CLA were the questions my professors posed, and with which I still struggle: Can capitalism ever be just? Is race different from ethnicity? Was there an opportunity for real democracy in the 1930s? Is consensus a mask for tyranny? I have different answers now than I did 16 years ago. But those are still the right questions.
Jennifer Delton is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she teaches classes on race, politics, and foreign policy in American history. Besides her B.A. from the U of M, she holds a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University (’97). She is the author of Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, and is currently writing a book about corporate efforts to integrate American workplaces in the 1940s-1960s.
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