What's a college?

My dad used to shave in the downstairs bathroom. This bathroom had two doors, one by the sink, opening onto the family room and one opposite the toilet, leading to the kitchen. My dad is 6’3” and he would have to bend his knees to see himself in the mirror.

One morning as he went through this daily ritual, my youngest brother, Mike, asked him, “Dad, what’s a college?”

As my dad continued running the razor over his face, he replied, “You walk through one every day.”

This is the way it was for us with Bradley University when we were kids: our dad worked there and we walked through the campus to school. We lived across the street from the university, and if familiarity didn’t breed contempt with me, it surely dimmed the mystique of the place. Bradley was so much a part of our day-to-day lives that we didn’t really think about it that much. It was just there.

My dad worked in at least three different buildings on the campus during his tenure as Dean of Men, later renamed to the Director of Residential Life and the Judicial System. Doesn’t that change of title tell you a lot about the evolution in society, for better and worse? Through his almost 40 year career, he had offices in Bradley Hall, Swords Hall, and Sisson Hall. I don’t remember ever stopping in to see my dad at work, although one day when I was in junior high, in a cheesy grade school exercise, my friends and I polled some of the Bradley students as to what they thought of my dad. He got good reviews.

My memories of walking through the Bradley campus are specific, yet mundane: the wide, shallow steps between Bradley Hall and Westlake that led from Glenwood to the main quad; the impossibly steep wheelchair ramp between Westlake and the library; the “hills” in front of University Hall on Bradley; walking through the Swords Hall parking lot and marveling at the domed, space ship like appearance of the green house. A landmark day for us grade school kids was when the Sweet Shop, with its fancy candy, opened in the Student Center.

I remember the first time I noticed the two monstrous-looking appendages on the roof of Bradley Hall. “What are those?” I asked my father, shuddering. “Those are gargoyles,” he said. “They scare away the evil spirits.” A revelation: monsters for good.

The gargoyles are part of the gothic design of Bradley’s first two buildings, Bradley Hall and Westlake Hall. Bradley Polytechnic Institute was planned with input from William Raney Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, who was a member of Bradley’s original board of trustees. Bradley’s buildings look similar in style to those of the University of Chicago.

We soaked in the Bradley campus atmosphere as we walked to school. Any more, middle and upper class kids don’t seem to walk to school as much. My sister, Theresa, a Bradley grad, and her family live in Oak Park. The neighborhoods in this tree-filled, village-like suburb adjacent to Chicago, remind me of the neighborhoods of the West Bluff, albeit with vastly higher real estate values. Like their mother and aunt and uncles, my sister’s children attend a parochial school a few blocks away. But they don’t walk to school, and neither do their classmates. It’s a different day now.