I went to Queen's - a fine university with the proudly stupidest frosh week in the country. This was, when I was there, supposed to be somehow evidence of a higher social class.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.
I went to university and I was a bit out of my depth, socially.
I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time.
In the U.K., there is a sort of obsession with class.
Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.
I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse.
My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, 'You bastards.' I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call 'The Waffle House Epiphany': I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a dent in the universe.
My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
I never went to class. That the university graduated me at all is an indictment of our educational system.