Hugo Schwyzer

In last Wednesday’s post about the virtues of studying abroad, I mentioned my own experiences as a professor and co-director of Pasadena City College’s Florence semester program in the autumn of 2000. In passing, I noted that we had a serious incident take place in which one of our students was very nearly killed in a fall from a sixth-floor balcony. He remains a pariplegic six years later, and the litigation surrounding the tragedy was only recently resolved.

For a variety of reasons (not the least of which is the continued possibility of litigation), I can’t discuss the fall and its aftermath in too much detail. I can say that the young man who fell so far and was hurt so badly was a bright, popular, athletic, hard-working student who had made many friends among his fellow Pasadenans in Florence. I can also say that the incident taught me a lot about college-age folks, and about the responsibility of someone who is leading a study abroad program.

With a few exceptions, most of our 45 students on the semester-long trip to Florence were of traditional age; almost all were between 18-21. They were all legal adults, if barely so. And before leaving on the trip, my co-director (a fellow PCC prof in the sciences) and I made it clear that we had no intention of acting as chaperones. If these students had been underage, we would have had a host of legal and moral responsibilities; given that they were old enough to sign contracts (and drink alcohol under Italian law), we figured that we were in no way in loco parentis. We saw our role as guides; we led tours of the city and gave lectures. We saw our role as friendly mentors, and were both more than willing to lend an ear to those who were homesick or quarreling with their roommates. But for the most part, we tried to treat our students as “junior scholars and peers”.

My co-director and I often went out to dinner with groups of students. We joined them for dancing. I formed a small running club, and we went running in and around the Cascine four or five mornings a week. A couple of students even came along when I got what turned out to be my last tattoo, from the renowned Giulio Tommaselli in the Via Della Mosca. (One gal even got her first ink there, so inspired was she.) In other words, I felt very much as if the students and I were good friends. I was 33 at the time, a dozen to fifteen years older, not yet old enough to be seen as a father figure. I thought of myself as a knowledgeable older brother, and it seemed a good arrangement.

And then came Rocky’s fall in mid-October. I was awakened by a phone call early on a Saturday morning from a frantic student; she was calling from the hospital where Rocky was in surgery and fighting for his life. I threw on some clothes, called a taxi, and was at the ER within twenty minutes.

And what I learned over the next few days changed my teaching forever. About eight students had been partying with Rocky at the time of his fall. When I reached the hospital, they were ashen, weeping, bewildered. And what struck me, in this moment of crisis, was that they all looked so very, very young. It was as if the shock and fear of the incident had caused them all to regress to early adolescence. They clung to me, clearly expecting that no matter what, I would do something to make things better.

I called my co-director, and she came to the hospital as fast as she could. I made the awful phone call home to California, waking the young man’s grandparents up from a sound sleep with the news that their grandson was fighting for his life. (The doctors gave him a 10% chance of survival). And once we knew that there was nothing more we could do for Rocky, we took the kids off for breakfast. They huddled together, weeping, but after protesting that they weren’t hungry, they all wolfed down huge amounts of food.

Over the next day, as word of the accident spread through our little community in Florence, the students gathered in apartments to pray and to talk and to wait for news. And again and again, I was struck by how small, fragile, and young they all seemed! I could feel that though they were only a dozen years my junior, they desperately needed me to be the competent, reliable grown-up. They needed a Daddy figure, most of them, because they needed to fall apart. And though they were brave and very good to each other, it was still evident to me that they weren’t all fully adult. They were in that strange transition time that is college, so full of maturity and sophistication on the one hand and so terribly fragile and uncertain on the other. Thousands of miles from home, away from their families, facing the possible death of a companion and a friend, that fragility became abundantly evident.

We made sure the kids ate. We gave them time to talk. We talked to their worried parents for them. We bought them coffee, and, I’m not ashamed to say, we bought them cigarettes. (For those who were already smokers, I figured now was the time to use abundant quantities of nicotine. I smoked more in the week after Rocky’s accident than in any other seven-day period in my life.) My co-director and I went from “older buddies” to “Mom and Dad” overnight.

Rocky’s family flew over. Rocky survived, and the student insurance company footed the astronomical bill for a private air ambulance to carry him and his family from Italy back to Los Angeles. We finished up the semester, and in the final few weeks we had in Florence, we got back to partying and dancing and going out together. But I was more careful to keep strict boundaries in place with my students. The gap between 33 and 18 was wider now, and the distinction between peer and professor was infinitely clearer to me. Frankly, one of the great silver linings of this tragedy was, I suppose, that it taught me not to confuse legal and physical adulthood with genuine maturity; it taught me to better honor my role as a mentor and a professor. And it taught me that in a time of crisis, I am well-suited to the role of Daddy, when I’m surrounded by folks who suddenly need a father figure on whom they can rely.