“这不是我梦想的样子 of ending my career,” Mary Gordon ’71 admits to me on the phone. 过去的一年是动荡的一年. When Barnard closed its campus as COVID-19 tore through 纽约市 in March, Gordon went out to Milwaukee to stay with her daughter and her grandsons. 在那里, 在病毒病例的新闻中, 世界范围内的抗议活动, 这是一场不同于近期记忆的选举, 她教在线课程, 在家教育孩子们, 出版了一本新小说, 她的第九.
It was a particularly strange time to publish a book. 戈登应该知道:除了小说, 她的花名册上有几部中篇小说, 短篇小说集, 还有非虚构作品. 她因此获得了无数奖项, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and the honor of State Author of New York in 2008.
回报, 9月首播, received good reviews but went without the usual fanfare of publicity tours. “If you weren’t either the election or the pandemic, 没人想听这件事,戈登说。. “所以我真的不知道. 我只是试着不去想它.”
But it hasn’t been all doom and gloom for Gordon, Barnard’s McIntosh Professor of English and Writing until she retired in May 2020. “[Teaching virtually] actually was a very satisfying experience because it meant a lot to the students,戈登谈到在线教学时说. “What I taught — literature and writing — I had always wanted it to be a source of refreshment, 在这种隔离的情况下确实如此.”
(也就是说, 作为她以前的学生之一, I feel confident in stating that Gordon’s teaching had made a substantial impact long before lockdown. Another Barnard alumna and professor, Mary Beth Keane ’99, wrote a tribute to Gordon’s mentorship in 《世界十大电子游戏平台》 in 2019.)
Gordon has certainly found her own refuge in the liberal arts over the past several months. 除了在家教育她的孙子, 8岁和10岁——她教他们“我能教的”,，意思是希腊神话和意大利语, supervised the co-writing of a novel called 汤姆·莱文:狗侦探 -戈登制定了自己的教学大纲.
“I’m reading all the George Eliot that I haven’t read, 我决心学西班牙语,戈登说。. “我在读埃琳娜·费兰特的意大利语. 实际上我已经完成了 战争与和平 during the pandemic, which I hadn’t read since high school.”
In a way, retiring during a pandemic is a fitting bookend to Gordon’s time at Barnard. 作为1971年的毕业生, she first arrived on campus right before the historic protests of 1968, 这一年与2020年相比 《世界十大电子游戏平台》,
大西洋, 华盛顿邮报 for its civil unrest, flu pandemic, presidential election.
“It was just at the beginning of the women’s movement, we 虽然t we were going to change the world in about 10 minutes,戈登谈到她的学生时代时说. “十大电竞游戏综合排名确实处于世界十大电子游戏平台的中心. And I went from Catholic school to trying to occupy buildings in the Columbia protests of ’68, 所以这是一次真正的政治觉醒.”
The transition from high school to Barnard was a paradigm shift for Gordon. Her school didn’t approve of its students attending Ivy League schools — perhaps in no small part, 按照戈登的说法, because the principal claimed to have met a Columbia professor who said that “within a week he could make a girl lose her faith, 她的童贞, 以及她所有的政治信念.” The administration actually refused to send her transcripts until Gordon called the Barnard admissions office and implored them to intervene.
“I was such a ferocious 17-year-old,” Gordon recalls. “It was like I was being pulled here by some force. 当我到这里的时候，我很激动. I felt like I was intellectually on fire from the minute I got here.”
And so returning to Barnard as a professor in 1988 was a dream come true. “我在其他地方当过客座教师, 没有什么比十大电竞游戏综合排名的学生更好的了,戈登说。. “我们是一种非常特殊的猫.”
It isn’t just the singularity of attending a women’s college in 纽约市, either. “我感觉非常强烈, 我希望这不会消失, that one of the reasons why we produced a disproportionate number of writers is that we ground our writers in literature,戈登谈到教授十大电竞游戏综合排名的作家时说. “对我来说, it’s always been very important that the students have read literature and have read older literature, I think it gives a real depth and texture to Barnard student writing that a lot of other places don’t have.”
仍然, she felt it was the right time for her to retire, 在开玩笑, “I didn’t want to be like Carol Channing doing 你好,多莉! 在步行者上.” And while she’ll miss the hope and sustenance she felt from her regular interactions with students, she feels secure in stepping aside for a younger generation of professors while she focuses on her own work. 在某种程度上, 教书一直是我的日常工作, so it’s not like I’m going to have to take up ceramics or something to fill my days,戈登说。. “我会写。.”
To that end, Gordon is working on a nonfiction book entitled 你是什么样的天主教徒?, in which she compares public figures who all claim that their ideologies are informed by Catholicism and yet hold radically different values from one another. 她是, 当然, 还在写小说, “but I’m superstitious about talking about things until they’re done.”
有一件事她可以肯定, 虽然, 2021年，我们会走到哪里, a Barnard education will keep paying dividends. “[Quarantine] is when your liberal arts education pays off, because you have the consolation of a life of the mind,戈登说。. “What the future will be in terms of employment, I have absolutely no idea. But I think that one good thing about it is maybe it will break that mindset that college is vocational school and you train for a particular job, 因为没人知道这些工作是什么. 以一种奇怪的方式, it’s a vindication of a liberal arts education, 这就是批判性思维, 思维灵活性, 更大的想象. [Those] are the things that are going to pay off.”
