Year off from college

By Lewis Diuguid

The Kansas City Star

Malia Obama’s plan to take a year off after graduating from high school and then attend Harvard University in 2017, reminded me of my older brother’s plan nearly 45 years ago.

The difference between Malia’s folks’ reaction and ours shows how the world has changed. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were supportive of their older daughter.

Harvard encourages students who’ve been admitted to defer their studies for a year to broaden themselves with travel, pursue a special project or activity, work or spend time in another substantive manner. Malia’s parents are both Harvard Law School graduates.

Malia, 18, has spent nearly half her life under a magnifying glass. Neither she nor her 14-year-old sister, Sasha, has the luxury of being a typical teen.

With a year off and the Obamas out of the White House, Malia could let her hair down, run free and be herself. The Obamas plan to stay in the Washington area so Sasha, who heads into her sophomore year, can finish high school.

The support the Obamas showed Malia was different from my folks’ reaction to my brother, David, announcing in 1972 after his freshman year as a Harvard pre-med student that he planned to take a year off to backpack in Europe. David was the oldest and the brightest of four kids.

Doing well his first year at Harvard gave David the confidence to tell our folks his plan. Mom and dad were college-educated. There was never a doubt that their kids would go to college, too. As the oldest, David led the way. Failure was never an option.

David is a year older than I am; our sister, Renee, is a year younger than me; and our brother Vincent is six years my junior. While David was away in college, we were going to school in St. Louis and working at dad’s chemical company.

Parents’ reaction

I will never forget mom’s reaction to David’s plan: “Boy, have you lost your mind! We’ve worked too hard and raked and scraped and saved to send you to college – Harvard of all places – for you to take a year off gallivanting around Europe for a year like you’re rich!”

Dad was just as emphatic and blistered David with the worst of his native Virginia accent. Our folks knew that a lot of black people then didn’t have the opportunity to go to college.

Those teens who did had to concentrate on their studies and avoid the party life and other entanglements of being away from home. They had to manage their time and money wisely and stay focused on getting good grades. The best way to get through college was to do it without interruptions. David, who is a physician now in New York City, wanted to disrupt that, and Mom and Dad would not tolerate it.

Our folks also knew that if they permitted David to do it, that would open that door for the rest of us to follow, and that definitely wasn’t happening. Our folks saved so each of us could go to college. We got jobs on campus to pay for books and incidentals. The goal was to graduate debt free.

I did the same for my daughters, and my siblings did it for their kids, too. It was part of our folks’ legacy of parenting.

Now for Malia the playing field is even more level, especially for the president’s daughter. Let’s hope it’s that way for other African-Americans pursuing a higher education, and their folks won’t react the way mine did when a kid announces that she wants to take a year off.

Lewis Diuguid is a columnist for the Kansas City Star. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.