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Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 11:50:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michele Tepper <mtepper>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: One-word test: UL?

Andrew J. Pardoe <apardoe@u.washington.edu> wrote: >
>Now I grant that this is just my experience. Better universities may give
>credit for smart-ass remarks. After all, didn't Professor James give away
>full credit for a note stating that Gertrude didn't want to think today?

Nope, and that's Miss Stein to you.

Back by popular request (obAltaVistaBait: Ian Munro to the white courtesy phone please...):

"It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and also going to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James' course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left.

The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course."

• Gertrude Stein, _The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ (1933) reprinted in _Collected Writings of Gertrude Stein_, Carl Van Vechten, ed. (1945; rpt New York: Vintage, 1990), 74-5.

Note the difference between not wanting to think and not feeling like [taking] an exam. It's a slight variation on the exam UL since it's made clear in the pages that lead up and follow this story that Stein did very well in James's class and that he remained a mentor to her throughout her college career (on p. 75, for example, she related the conversation in which he tells her "a medical education opens all doors, as Oliver Wendell Holmes told me and as I tell you," leading her to apply to Johns Hopkins Medical School); in this case, it's less of the snotty blowoff answer than a snotty 'I've already passed your class and I know it, let me out of this exam hall.'

>Andrew "Shoulda gone to Hah-vahd" Pardoe

Well, Stein entered the Harvard Annex in 1893, which was renamed Radcliffe over community objections in the next year, but she didn't intend to take a degree and so had to pass the entrance exams in her final year there in order to be allowed to graduate. Because she failed the Latin exam the first time around, she didn't receive her degree until 1898, by which time she had already begun her studies at Johns Hopkins, to which she was admitted on the condition that she pass the Latin exam and get her degree. So, again, you are wrong about some subtle but important points.

By the way, Stein graduated magna cum laude in philosophy, and at least one biographer (Linda Wagner-Martin, _Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family_, ISBN 0-8135-2169-6) claims that she was admitted on the strength of her having been James's pupil.

Michele "eighty per cent Rotarian" Tepper