Rebecca Blank
Class of ‘76 (economics), summa cum laude
My most intense memory of my years at the University of Minnesota is walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge two times a day (actually, running across the bridge, given how long it took to get from the East Bank to the West Bank) between back-to-back classes on 10-degrees-below-zero days.
Photo by Bob Kalmbach
I don’t have a single moment-in-time memory that encapsulates my years in CLA. What I do have is a feeling about the place that comes back to me when I close my eyes and think “college.” It’s a feeling of finding an intellectual home, of recognizing what I could be and could do with my life.
I felt it during a class on Shakespeare, when I was furiously taking notes in the middle of my first semester and looked up at the teacher, who was enthusiastically explaining a nuance of the text, and I thought, “This guy makes his living by thinking about things like this. This is fun.”
I felt it again and again in my economics classes (where I majored) when I handed in an assignment or took an exam and thought, “This is interesting. I can do this. And it’s fun.” And I felt it in a class on calculus when I suddenly “saw” a pattern and a technique that was being explained and thought, “I’ve got it! This is fun.” I had never before been in a world where the teacher in almost every class challenged me to think and enjoyed it enormously when I showed him or her that I could. The U taught me how to think—to really think, even when it was hard work—and to take pleasure in that work.
Those running-across-the-bridge memories aren’t primarily about the cold or the heavy boots or the squeaky snow. They’re about my mind racing ahead to the next class. At the U of M I found a love of learning that I hope never to lose.
Blank is dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She is also Henry Carter Adams Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, professor of economics, and codirector of the National Poverty Center at the Ford School. Her books include It Takes A Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty, The New World of Welfare, and Is the Market Moral?
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