How sweet is this?
“He looked at it — he actually has his student ID from the University of Chicago in his wallet — and he said, ‘Yes, that indeed is (me).’”
Don’t think many people still have their college ID, much less carries it in their wallet 50 years later :).
Pretty sure I still have mine somewhere. And at least one high school ID. But I would never carry them around with me in my wallet.
I sent this to my D who was accepted EA. She is so excited to vote this year!
I still have mine too, but I don’t carry it! I think that’s cute.
He must be very proud of his Alma Mater. My speculation is that The University must have had a big influence on him.
He has been quoted as saying he “had no interest in my studies” while at the university. He was definitely into activist causes of the day (the early 1960’s prior to the real deluge of student activism), but that comment is a little surprising. In my student days at the U. of C. (which overlapped with the last year of those of Sanders), I never met anyone, no matter how much of an activist or otherwise taken up with more ordinary extracurricular activities, who would have said anything like that. Discouraged, maybe. Confused. Overwelmed. But not interested? Never.
Maybe he has been misquoted or is exaggerating or is simply being self-deprecatory. However, it did take him 5 years plus a summer session to complete his undergrad. True, he transferred to Chicago, but I knew others who had done that and managed to finish in four years. Indeed, almost everyone who wasn’t derailed with a problem did it in 4 years and many did it in 3 (by virtue of the entering battery of examinations, a legacy of the Hutchins era, that permitted “passing out” of common core requirements).
It is touching that Bernie keeps his old student i.d. in his wallet. Very likely he discovered his political orientation and vocation while at the university, and that must mean a lot to him. I wonder if he might even have met a figure like Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Presidential candidate, while there. I remember Thomas giving a lecture at Mandel Hall in 1963 or 1964. Could there have been a passing of the torch? Sanders has a fair chance of going a lot further than Thomas ever went.
Still, that comment about lack of interest in his studies baffles me. It would be odd coming from any student at almost any era of the University of Chicago. Trying to understand the world through study of it was the very thing that brought most of us to the university in the first place, especially those with strong interests in social and political matters. In my experience almost everyone seemed to be trying to figure things out in the light of the books they were reading and the courses they were taking. That’s what made the library such a social hot spot. Sometimes one’s studies went well, sometimes not so well. But hardly anybody was indifferent to them. In Sanders’ day there were many eminent authorities, most teaching undergraduate courses, in the subjects one would expect him to be most interested in - history, sociology and political science. There were also younger profs with more edgy activist interests. Could he have been too busy organizing and demonstrating to care about any of the theoretical underpinning for what he was doing? Was activism in the early 60’s a full-time job? Hardly seems likely.