Upstate NY schools - Bard, Skidmore, Ithaca

JHS
Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:57:39 +0000

And the kids I was talking about at Hamilton and Hobart are people who tend to dress a bit too informally for occasions (like job interviews) where a little bit of formality would be appropriate, who are extremely non-materialistic about life goals (and would never even use the phrase “career goals”, at least without retching), live without markers of materialistic wealth or social prestige, embrace earthy crunchy hippie values and people, and profess not to be able to tell the difference between Obama and the Republican right. In other words, not preppy.

My Hamilton nephew is the child of hippies who separated before he was born, and both of his parents spent a significant portion of his youth on public assistance. He comes from a rural community, and post-college he lives in an even more isolated rural community, where he and a Hamilton classmate are trying to have a community-supported bakery. Neither of them has a car; all bakery business is transacted on foot or by bicycle. His hair is – and was throughout college – shoulder-length. He got where he is now, in the Rockies, by riding his bicycle there from Virginia Beach with four other Hamilton classmates, some of whom continued on to Portland OR.

So am I OK in characterizing this guy as crunchy? He registers pretty darn high on the crunchometer! If he’s not totally crunchy, it’s because of the raisins, not diamonds or pearls.

I’m sure he’s not exactly the typical Hamilton student, but he loved it there, felt like he had lots of friends, had a succession of girlfriends each more adorable than the last, grew as a person and as a student, and if the atmosphere had been as preppy and materialistic as described he would have been completely miserable.