Going To College: A Personal Reminiscence

The expectation was that upon graduation we would go on to law school, as that was and continues to be a familiar career path for political science majors. Allen and I had no such plans. After graduation we spent a year at RJJ immersed in semicha study. Although we were ordained – as that was the common practice at advanced yeshivas in New York during this period – there was no prospect that we would serve as rabbis.

Allen then went to Yale, which at the time had the outstanding Political Science department in the country. After he received his doctorate he began a distinguished career in academia. He is a world-renowned expert on governmental budgeting. Into his ninth decade, he continues to teach at the University of Maryland where he is a Distinguished Professor. His Yale classmates were an exceptional group of brilliant students, each of whom ultimately made a significant contribution to scholarship.

I applied to Harvard and was accepted, but chose to go to NYU because my communal activity served as a powerful magnet for me to remain in New York. My experience in graduate school hopefully will be the subject of another article.

Neither Allen nor I attended our Brooklyn College graduation. In fact, I seem to have an instinctive dislike of graduations. However, each year there is an event at Brooklyn College honoring a small number of alumni who graduated fifty or more years earlier and who have made significant contributions to American life. Several years ago Allen and I were so recognized, the first set of twins to be honored by Brooklyn as distinguished alumni.