"I am a kind of baby boomer. I realize we sort of have a bad image in your generation - the majority of us went on to just become George Bush - but there were just enough of us, not everybody, but enough to make a difference, and I was part of that 'just enough,'" says Ronna Johnson, a lecturer in the English and American Studies departments, as she recalls her days as an undergraduate at Boston University (BU).
"I am really proud of it," she adds, "and thankful I was born when I was born and could see what I could see."
And she saw a lot, from student protests at BU during the Vietnam War to graduate school in Ann Arbor, and back to Boston again when she landed at Tufts.
"I was somebody that was meant to be an academic," she says. "I think this is the world I was meant to be in. It satisfies me."
Johnson's academic journey began when she was accepted into a very small, now-defunct, honors college at Boston University. The two-year program, which had a student-teacher ratio of 12 to one and only 200 students per class, was modeled on a Harvard study of progressive education.
"It was all pass-fail," Johnson says. "For the first two years of college I didn't get any grades. We all worked together in seminar groups in close proximity to our professors and each other. The idea was to help us learn to educate ourselves."
Though education was extremely important to Johnson, the politics and the social climate of the late 60s also influenced her college years. She remembers one of the major factors in her college application process: "My criteria [for choosing a college] was what kind of anti-war political movement any school had."
The school fit her priorities perfectly. The BU campus, at the time, was very involved in the antiwar movement, in part because of its faculty, which included noted political scientist and historian Howard Zinn.
"I thrived in that program," she says. "I couldn't have been happier. The politics were exactly what I had been looking for."
"I took my inspiration from Howard Zinn, trust me on that, and I take it to this day," Johnson says. "He is one of my heroes on the academic front."
Zinn's classes at the University were flooded by students - some enrolled, many not.
"Monday morning, everybody turned up whether you were in the class or not," Johnson says. "Hundreds of people came. It was a meeting point for what was going on in the world. I was not even enrolled for [the class]. I just went because it was so important."
But Johnson's political activism extended beyond the classroom. "On May 4, 1970, I was sitting in a classroom in my college taking an essay test in a sociology course," Johnson remembers. "In walked a classmate and announced that four students at [Kent State University] had been shot, and he was asking everybody to get up and leave the exam to protest this violent government response. I didn't think twice about it, I got up and walked out, and I was a good student. I was so horrified."
"What a turning point that was for me to think, 'Okay, I could not be a good girl - this was more important than being a good girl, much more important,'" she says. "I personally identified with those students - it could have been me. We didn't have any guns, dogs, gas... it was just our bodies on the line. It was very dramatic."
Johnson and her fellow students succeeded that May in closing the school in solidarity with the students at Kent State. Finals were postponed until the following fall. "I don't think students today would walk out of an exam," Johnson says. "They wouldn't want to wreck their careers. We didn't care, we were so outraged."
According to Johnson, this gap between the generations is partly due to the "disinformation put forth about what it meant to have a dissenting view."
"We were whitewashed and sold short by the writers of history, starting with Reagan and Bush One," she says. "I am so worried that students today have this very superficial idea of what the 1960s counterculture was. Reagan floated the idea that we were just hedonists - we didn't have politics and we didn't have ethics. But we did have politics, serious politics."
While staying true to those politics, Johnson moved from her small honors college into the main BU population her junior year. It was at this point that she became an English major and began to fully realize her passion for literature. "I have always been fascinated by language," she explains. Pushed by her professors at BU and her father, Johnson went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"It was there that I began to discover women writers," says Johnson, who also encountered her first women professors at Michigan. "There were hardly any [female professors] at BU when I went," she says. "I am thankful to my male professors for being willing to take me in and groom me as opposed to just boys."
Though Johnson "took off," when she arrived in Michigan, she soon tired of the school. "I rebelled," she recalls. "It was too pre-professional. I just wanted to drop out."
One of her professors recognized this resistance to the establishment within her work. "I wrote a very quirky paper on Samuel Beckett for one of my professors, and he wrote back 'I really like this very much, but it ain't the grad school game,'" she says. Nonetheless, the professor gave her an A.
Despite success in her classes, Johnson dropped out of school upon completing her master's degree. She soon regretted the decision. "I found out life was just really novels," she says. "I needed to be back in school. It was a waste for me not to be in the one place that really could nurture and advance my passions."
So she returned to the academic world, this time enrolling here at Tufts. "It was the opposite of Michigan - small," she says. "It seemed like a very nurturing environment, and it was. I definitely thrived here and finished my degree."
Now that she's a lecturer in the English department, Johnson's politics still affect her life and work.
"Writers who are against the grain all come together in the research that I do," she says. "My personal, social and political college experience - the context in which I studied - was significant in focusing these interests for me," she says.
She is currently writing a book that focuses on Beatnik writer Jack Kerouac - not on what he wrote himself, but what was written about him.
"It has been controversial to study this," she says. "It would have been a safer pass to study Melville or something. But it's been very rewarding. I got to find my own way. I never had to make a choice about a career direction that honored the
practical over my desires or my talents even."
One of the many rewards? "My husband ran into Howard Zinn in Cambridge," Johnson says. (Her husband, who works at WGBH, also attended BU and Tufts). According to Johnson, Zinn wanted to know what the two were doing with their lives - and Zinn's response was a reward in itself.
"Zinn said that would do," Johnson exclaims. "[He said] we weren't part of some terrible machine. We were trying to have useful lives."
"You can't always have everything," she says. "But are the things you can have and do have, are they the important things? Are they enough?"
"Yes, the things I have are the important things," Johnson concludes. "They are enough."
