Vic and the Fourth Class: Part One, by Nils Parker

This is the 3rd installment in a story of Nils’s college experience at Cal.
Part 1, “You Must Be New Here”.
Part 2, “Officer Ruiz.

The semester prior to setting the bonfire to (literally) end all bonfires was the hardest of my college career. I did not intend for it to be that way. All summer, I saved money and dreamt up ways to have fun back at Cloyne. It would be easy. I had a girlfriend. My friends were graduating with me. Football season was around the corner and we lived two blocks from the stadium. We would all spend the year celebrating the end of college by doing absolutely nothing constructive. What happened? I worked 30 hours a week. I broke up with my girlfriend. Cal football sucked again. And, instead of giving in to procrastination, malaise, or senioritis, I battled them. I fought the urge to coast instead of embracing it. I even took a full load of courses.

And I blame it all on Vic.

Vic was the History Department’s undergraduate advisor. He was everything you’d expect from an advisor at a school like Berkeley. Early 30s, he wore hiking shorts and Tevas to work, and biked there every morning from his place in the hills. The girls loved his olive complexion and the thicket of dark chest hair that sprouted from underneath his unbuttoned Polo shirt. They thought it made him look rugged and mysterious, like Scott Bakula. It also made him one of the hardest people in the department to drop in on. On any given day, accomplished professors’ doors would be closed and their offices empty. Vic’s door would be open and full of hormones.

He recommended you come see him at the beginning of every semester, but I only saw him at the beginning of every year and only if I could pull off the Drop In. I hated making appointments for this kind of stuff. It gives the other person too much time to review your files and dissect your failings. I was perfectly aware of my shortcomings—thankyouverymuch—and I knew just how to fix them. Mine was a problem of motivation; I was a senior who didn’t want to do anything. By catching Vic when he wasn’t busy and coming to him with a specific set of questions, I could set the agenda for our conversation and any advice he might give would more likely than not relate to my questions rather than the numerous subjects I was purposely avoiding.

During the first week of fall semester my senior year, I was fortunate enough to find him unoccupied one day around noon. I took the opportunity to interrupt his lunch and get in my annual visit. I had no idea what we would talk about. I had stayed afloat in the sink-or-swim waters of public higher education for three years. I’d already signed up for classes (three cupcakes) and I was on track to graduate in the spring. I was coming to Vic more as a courtesy than anything else.

“You need to take another class.” Vic said from behind his desk after peeking at my transcript and course load. This was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to take fewer classes. Not more. I had to think fast. I needed an excuse.

“I…I don’t think I can. I have work.”

“Well work less,” he said. Pretty sensible for a tree-hugging adrenaline freak. I wasn’t a hardship case. My tuition was fully paid and my room & board were covered. “Your goal for this fall should be to have nothing left in the spring other than finishing your thesis. To do that, you need to take another class.” Vic tore off a piece of pita and swiped it through a tub of hummus. He crammed the wedge in his mouth and tried to reassure me as he chewed. “It’ll all be worth it come January.” said the man who didn’t have to do the work. “You can party it up then.” I wanted to party it up NOW.

Vic swung his feet down onto the floor in a gesture of seriousness, sat up straight in his rickety old desk chair, and put on his ‘molder of young minds’ face, pausing for effect. “This is the stretch run, Nils. If you want to go to a good law school, you can’t afford to put yourself in bad positions by coasting and settling for B minuses.”

Vic was giving me too much credit, or maybe not enough, I’m not sure. I never “settled” for B minuses. I finagled B minuses. My transcript to that point was a study in duality. If I liked a class, I got an A or an A minus. If I hated a class, I completely wrote it off. I never went. If I did attend a lecture, it wasn’t on a whim; there was a purpose. I’d go on the first day to get the syllabus and a feel for the class. I’d go for the mid-term exam review so I knew what to read and what to skip. Ditto for finals review. Other than that, I never did the reading. Many times I didn’t even buy the books. If I did, I sold them in the first two weeks to someone in the class looking for a deal. For fourteen of a semester’s fifteen weeks, I did nothing. I abandoned all responsibility and accountability. I spent the other week of the semester hustling, scamming, conniving and cramming. Have you seen “The Sting” with Robert Redford and Paul Newman? I made them look shiftless and complacent. I found old exams. I scrounged multiple sets of class notes. I got extensions from professors. I read the first and last sentence of every paragraph assigned. I took every shortcut conceivable to get myself to a place where I could speak as intelligently on a subject as the rest of the people in my class who sat squarely on the bulge of the bell curve. When I emerged from one of these classes with a B minus at the end of the semester, it was not because I had settled for mediocrity. It was because I had busted my ass—for about a week—to avoid failure.

“I don’t know if I want to go to law school anymore, Vic.”

“Why not?” He wasn’t overly concerned. He advised hundreds of students. I was not the first senior to have a change of heart.

“I don’t know.” I’d been saying I was going to be a lawyer since I was twelve years old. It was just something that was going to happen, whether I wanted it or not. Forced, finally, to wrestle with the specter of adulthood as graduation approached, I realized I had no idea why I wanted to be a lawyer. Plus, law school is a lot of work.

“Do me this favor: take the semester seriously and make yourself proud.” Barf. As often as guidance counselors and academic advisors talk about helping their students make important life decisions, I don’t know if any of them are ever ready for you to have an epiphany right in front of them.

I looked around Vic’s office as he finished up his lunch. His shelves were filled with travel guides and classic historical texts; their cracked bindings a testament to his actually having read them. His walls were covered with certificates of achievement and pictures with past students. I was looking at a very complete snapshot of Vic’s very full adult life. It made me feel like an asshole. Vic stood up, wiped the pita crumbs from his shirt, and extended his hand. In it was the course catalog. “Add a class.” I took it and left.

I flipped through the catalog while I meandered back up the hill to Cloyne. Published on flimsy paper with cheap black ink, several of its offerings rubbed off on my fingers as I built up a light sweat. Philosophy of Individual Morality and Social Responsibility seemed intriguing until it smudged into an illegible mess. Astronomy 10 looked good, but it had a required discussion section and they all met at 9am. By the time I entered the Cloyne kitchen to make a snack, I’d worked through dozens of unsatisfactory options for a fourth class and found three harder classes to replace my cream puff schedule. Not only did they fulfill degree requirements, they fit into my philosophy on curriculum as well: no Monday classes, no Friday classes, and nothing before 11am. There was one problem: I still needed a fourth class.

I explained my dilemma to my buddy Don who was also in the kitchen making a snack. “You should take a De-Cal class,” he said.

“What’s a De-Cal class?”

“It stands for Democratic Education at Cal.” Don answered tersely. Don was hungry and surly. When he got that way, he exercised his discretion as Cloyne’s food manager and cooked himself a hearty meal with all the best ingredients he’d ordered earlier in the week and deliberately mislabeled or hidden from the rest of the house. As classes had only just begun, the kitchen was fully stocked and Don was able to cook with as much of whatever as he wanted. He popped the rack of lamb and the bacon-wrapped scallops into the oven before elaborating. “Students teach ‘em. They’re a bunch of one and two unit pass-fail classes about weird shit. I think there’s a female sexuality class this semester where they talk about dildos and wet dreams and shit. You should check it out.”

“Are they any good?”

“I don’t know. Ask Maarten, he’s teaching one this semester.”

“What on?”

“I don’t know. Ask Andy. I heard him talking about it.”

The De-Cal program, I discovered, has been around in one form or another since the mid-60’s. I figured it was the University’s way of appeasing all those student groups that are always dissatisfied with the curriculum because it never adequately represents the traditionally oppressed segments of society. The administration probably said fine, ‘you come up with an idea for a class, develop a syllabus, and convince a member of the faculty to sign off on it, you can teach it.’ The bureaucratic version of “put up or shut up.” Shockingly, there have been some really interesting classes offered under the De-Cal banner: one on Tupac, one on Madonna, one on the social commentary and cultural relevance of The Simpsons. Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panthers taught one back in 1968.

Maarten, an aspiring filmmaker, was teaching a class on Apocalyptic Film. He gave me a copy of the syllabus at dinner the next night. It was littered with awesome movies. Awesomely awesome movies and awesomely bad movies. There is no in between, I would find out, when it comes to movies about the end of the world.

“How’d you find a sponsor for this?”

“I sell pot to half the film department,” Maarten responded casually. “It wasn’t hard.”

I was in.