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But just because our short-term memory has slipped, don’t think that we don’t remember our Webb days clearly. We remember them well and are inclined to attach perhaps undeserved significance to events which happened “back in the day.” For example: In 1959, 40 years before Napster and the presumed beginning of the music sharing revolution, I bought a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder. It did two things: record and play back about 45 minutes of music. It had a knob, a lever, and a 40-page instruction book. Now I have an iPhone. It does hundreds of things, any one of which would have been considered a miracle back in my day, but what amazes me is—no knob, no lever and no instruction book! How on earth is anyone supposed to use this thing?
The Final Word By Jim Drasdo ’63
Remarks made at Alumni Weekend 2018
Well, it starts with imagination and willingness to try things with no assurance they will work. It requires collaboration, preferably with someone younger. If one gets stuck, you can research, even go to the website. But mostly, it requires getting started and learning new tricks as one goes along. I think they call this experiential learning. It strikes me that this whole process is a metaphor for how education has changed since my day at Webb. Less instruction. More imagination, more experimentation, collaboration and experiential learning. If experiential learning is indeed where education is
Tonight when the festivities are over and you are on your way home, you may see a number of gray-haired men meandering about the Webb campus. These are my people. We’re not lost, and we aren’t homeless, we are trying to remember where we parked our cars.
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headed, I think it bodes very well for Webb. It’s always been part of our DNA; isn’t that what a Peccary Trip is all about? But first let me address the elephant in the room – geography. Most boarding schools were built in the Arcadian model of locating the school in a semi-remote, bucolic location free from the distractions of the city and the real world so the boys and their teachers (or masters) could devote their full attention to the very serious business of memorizing Latin verbs and Roman emperors. Webb was like that, too. I had an uncle who went to Webb in the 1930’s and he described how the air in the spring was perfumed with the scent of orange blossoms. I don’t think many of us here today had similar experiences.
Of all the Western boarding schools, Webb was uniquely and adversely affected by the growth and encroachment of Los Angeles. Orange groves gave way to suburbs and our air was fouled by the westerly winds, which trapped the city’s exhaust against our beautiful mountains. It’s rather miraculous that Webb survived the period from the midsixties through the nineties.
control) progress and prosperity happen fastest where ideas are having sex with one another. What he meant was that ideas beget ideas and when you put a bunch of high-energy idea generators in close proximity with one another, you create energy—Steve Jobs called this a force field; I prefer to call it buzz. But if I were locating a school today, this is where I would want to locate it.
But in the early 1990’s the air began to clear. It was
Let’s look to the real world for confirming evidence.
also the time Susan Nelson and Taylor came to Webb.
Take computers; they used to be in the basement of the corporate headquarters, then they went to a server farm and now they are headed for the cloud. But the real action isn’t just in the cloud, it’s on what’s called the INTELLIGENT EDGE, where latency is non-existent (a necessity for selfdriving cars) and ideas of new and better ways of doing things are everywhere.
They brought new energy to the school, but I think the improvement in the air had more to do with catalytic converters and the oxygenates that got added to our gasoline. Today the air is much, much better than it was in my day. And the great news is that it is almost certain to getting much better because electric cars are coming. And downtown Los Angeles has become much more interesting and accessible. Los Angeles has always been a city of great imagination—it gave us Howard Hughes and the aerospace industry, and movies, was the epicenter of science fiction, and gave birth to Disneyland and even Tinder, but downtown Los Angeles was always a dreary place. Not anymore. Maybe it’s because of the improved air quality, but for whatever reason, Downtown LA has become a very hip and interesting place. With less than an hour Metro ride, a Webb student can go to the Frank Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall and watch Gustavo Dudamel conduct the LA Philharmonic and then use his phone to locate Kogi, the food truck run by Roy Choi, and feast on a couple of Korean BBQ tacos and be back at Webb in time for dinner. That would be an afternoon well spent! Being near downtown LA has become a huge advantage instead of a yawn. And we are on the doorstep of the Claremont Colleges, one of the world’s great academic communities. And now we are taking advantage of it. Imagine being able to take computer science at Harvey Mudd or go to Pomona College labs for Chemistry classes. Hopefully, this is just the beginning. Matt Ridley is a well-known British journalist and author, and he wrote that (don’t worry Taylor, I’ve got this under
And where are Millennials choosing to live? In places like Brooklyn, Oakland, Venice Beach near Los Angeles, and Pioneer Square in Seattle. These are all adjacent to a worldclass city, near a university and edgy. What are corporations doing? General Electric, which invented the suburban corporate campus in rural Connecticut, is giving it up and moving to Boston so they can be edgy and attract Millennials. Weyerhaeuser, which has the most beautiful corporate campus I’ve ever seen, it looks like a national park; it’s giving it up and moving to Pioneer Square, an edgy neighborhood in Seattle. Suburbia is out, the Edge is in. Napoleon said that geography is destiny. I think he was right, and that after more than 50 years of geographic headwinds, Webb is now uniquely well positioned. The Intelligent Edge is where we have always been. I take great joy in Webb’s current success because Webb is a big part of who I am, just as all you are a big part of who she is. And she has a very significant birthday coming up. Wendy and I hope that you will join us in making The Centennial Campaign our shared success. And I know that with geography turned to her advantage and a greatly expanded endowment, Webb’s next 100 years can be astounding. * These remarks we given by Jim Drasdo ’63 on receiving the Colborn Distinguished Service Award at Alumni Weekend 2018.