Once Obviously Young and Naive at Old Eli
Gilbert S.C. Keith-Agaran | Photos courtesy Gil Keith-Agaran
Last summer my wife and I attended my 40th college class reunion in New Haven, Connecticut. During three of my college years, I lived in my assigned residential college: Branford (named after one of the towns that hosted the early classes of my school). It’s one of the collegiate gothic buildings modeled in the Oxbridge style with a comfortably large grassy courtyard and the famous Harkness Tower as an iconic symbol of the entire campus. Our reunion headquartered at Branford College (we could have stayed in one of the old college rooms but we opted for a hotel room at Long Wharf instead).
40th Reunions are comfortable things. We had a roomful of books and art created by classmates to page through and admire. We talked informally about family and children and grandchildren in many cases. Our class events included some talks by classmates about unexpected friendships from college and third acts in our lives. Most of us attending were comfortable with who we are—what we’ve done is done. Pau. Our ambitions have either been achieved or we’ve made peace with some of those shortcomings in our youthful dreams. We’re no longer preening for our peers about where we are in our lives and what we would be doing next.
In the summer of 2024, the November election had not yet taken place. Joe Biden was still two months away from ending his re-election bid and a New York jury had just convicted Donald Trump on 30+ counts. One of my college roommates was rumored to be a possible nominee for a Cabinet post if Trump won a second term.
Across the street from Branford sits the Old Campus quadrangle where most freshmen camped during our first year. I lived on the first floor of the first entryway to Bingham Hall, one of the corners of the campus located across from the New Haven town green. Named after Hiram Bingham III, grandson and son of the missionaries to Hawai‘i of the same name, it was the end of the campus. My Hiram was born in Honolulu, attended Punahou and Phillips Academy (Andover) and after graduating from Yale collected graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (one of the first Latin American history courses of study) and a Ph.D. from a college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He would go on to “discover” the Peruvian Incan city Machu Pichu (locals, of course, already knew where it was— think Christopher Columbus with America, Ferdinand Magellan and the Philippines, and Captain James Cook with the Sandwich Islands). Bingham would later serve as Connecticut Governor and a two-term U.S. Senator. Some have suggested Hiram III was one of the inspirations for cinematic explorers, archaeologists, adventurers Harry Steele (Charlton Heston) and then Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford).
In my time, there were twelve residential colleges in various architectural styles where students lived, took meals and sometimes had classes: Branford (Collegiate Gothic), Saybrook, Jonathan Edwards (Gothic Revival), Davenport (Collegiate Gothic / Georgian), Pierson (Georgian), Morse (Modernist), Ezra Stiles (Modernist), Trumbull (Collegiate Gothic), Calhoun (Collegiate Gothic), Timothy Dwight (Federal) and Silliman (Gothic Revival / French Renaissance / Georgian). Calhoun College (originally named after the Civil War Era Vice President and staunch defender of that peculiar Southern institution) was renamed in 2017 after pioneering computer programmer Grace Murray Hopper. Benjamin Franklin College (Collegiate Gothic) and Pauli Murray College (Collegiate Gothic) opened in 2017 in an area I remembered as Science Hill (where the hard science students would tread off for classes and labs and I only visited to pick up papers from the only computer printer students could access).
During the 1980s, there was only one fraternity (the founding chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon (ΔΚΕ)) so social activities (parties, concerts, plays) revolved around the colleges as well. I served as a Student Activities Committee (SAC) member for two years at Branford (planning SAC parties, social events and providing labor to set up and break down the dining hall for plays and required senior recitals for music majors). When someone complained that SAC only threw frat-like beer and music parties, another student retorted “Do you want SAC to provide milk and cookies instead?” We did start weekly milk and cookie evenings which proved to be popular breaks for Branfordites studying in their rooms (or who just wanted to come down and talk story).
When we arrived on campus in August of 1980, few of us dwelled on how recently the school had shifted to co-educational status—a little over a dozen years (almost a lifetime for eighteen-year-olds). Quite a number of women classmates were legacies (children of alumni) so I assume their fathers heartily approved opening admissions to their daughters and granddaughters. But you occasionally still heard some stodgy old blues who visited their sons remarking (somewhat in jest I thought at the time), “you know, Yale was Yale when Yale was male.” Since my Bingham was born in Honolulu and a native Hawaiian had taken some classes before the missionaries were sent out, I assumed the remark wasn’t also aimed at this Filipino kid from Maui.
Our “facebook” (the book with our photographs) had a picture of George Orwell on the cover and if you didn’t submit a mugshot, George also substituted for you inside. Did I mention we were the Class of 1984? The book contained a lot of stats—number of valedictorians, Eagle Scouts, captains of football teams, etc.
We had a pretty varied class—we probably had a student from every major preparatory school in the country (including O‘ahu College and ‘Iolani) and at least one freshman from every State and U.S. territory. But as one classmate quipped, our diversity was reflected by having someone from every suburb and township in Westchester, New York.
Growing up on Maui, we thought of our classmates as local, haole or fresh off the boat (FOB). I’m sure the Hawaiian kids likely saw themselves as somewhat separate from the “local-born” children of plantation workers. And one teacher observed I hung out with so many of the upcountry farmer kids I was almost Japanese (perhaps also a comment on being one of the few brown skinned students in the college prep classes).
In college, I discovered they were many different kinds of haoles as far as mainlanders were concerned. Early in my freshman year, one of my new friends (who would later be a roommate for two years) asked if I wanted to go see a movie. He said “Roots” was playing at one of the downtown theaters. So I went along with my Italian classmate to see “The Godfather” (his World War II paratrooper father had married a Swedish girl and brought her home to Connecticut after the war).
Growing up I assumed most folks were nominally Christian of some kind whether they attended church services regularly (I attended Doris Todd so Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and other mainstream denominations were fair game for evangelizing with the true Gospel). Yale was a mission field—full of secular humanists and their progeny, as well as idol worshippers and followers of exotic sects and cults. But the school did provide Chaplains for various faiths (I don’t recall a Buddhist or Muslim one).
I arrived in New Haven with that fundamentalist assurance you had to support Israel (if only because its restored existence was a harbinger of the Second Coming, the Apocalypse, the End Times and the Thousand Year reign of Christ). But I don’t recall knowing any Jewish friends growing up—or I never realized they were Jewish. I later realized a classmate from ‘Iolani School was Jewish (I didn’t associate certain names with different haole ethnicities or backgrounds until college).
I roomed freshman year with a self-described High Holiday Jew (he observed Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, like Christian folks I know who show up in church pews at Christmas and Easter). He once explained his surname indicated he came from the family line we Biblical fundamentalists thought of as the Priestly Tribe of Levi.
I roomed with a more observant Jew my Junior and Senior Years—a native South Carolinian whose family had lived in Charleston since antebellum times. He tacked up the Confederate battle flag on one of his bedroom walls. One classmate from Cincinnati thought my blue-eyed blonde roommate was a WASP when he was actually raised in the Conservative tradition of Judaism.
It was interesting to me to learn at one time the Ivy Leagues placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the Ancient Eight. Part of my amazement was because so many of my Jewish friends and classmates were also legacies. My freshman year roommate’s father was also in Branford College as an undergraduate.
There was antisemitism. No doubt about it. Sometimes spoken. Sometimes not. The WASPs had a certain way of expressing or signaling it in the way they commented or gestured or looked. And the traditions at Yale no doubt enshrined many of those attitudes and assumptions and values.
I always assumed my mainland classmates—women, Jews, prep and public-school graduates—just knew a lot more about Yale than me. I traveled to the East Coast for the first time, sight unseen. I applied only because my college counselor George Yoshimura insisted I apply to some “selective schools.” I remember attending the Valedictorian dinner sponsored by the Honolulu Advertiser and Thurston Twigg-Smith, its then-publisher and a Yale alum congratulating me—I didn’t know how to react appropriately to his comments and I probably appeared ungracious and unappreciative.
My classmates certainly appeared more comfortable with all the pomp and circumstance and tradition associated with attending Yale than this kid from the islands. I arrived in New Haven without a coat and tie. On the afternoon of the Freshman Class Assembly, my roommates took me to the Co-op to buy a blue blazer, a button-down shirt and a rep tie so I could attend —without standing out in my best Aloha Shirt—Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti’s famous Moral Majority address. I sat in Woolsey Hall with the price label still on one of the sleeves of my blazer.
It doesn’t bother me anymore.
Gilbert S.C. Keith-Agaran’s practices law in Wailuku. He represented Central Maui in the State House and State Senate from 2009–2023 and served in the Cayetano Administration from 1995–2002 and the Alan Arakawa Administration from 2002–2005.