35-Year-Old Sophomore Gordon Fauth Juggles Yet Another Experience: College Life

As he stands in the Square waiting to get his picture taken, Gordon M. Fauth '93 has to be reminded to smile. It's a sunny, brisk day, and chattering students and the Out-of-Town News worker cut between Fauth and the Crimson photographer, ducking their heads, nodding in silent apology and moving on down the street. All around swirl the sounds of the Square, from the hawks of the Square Deal man to the laughter of the kids in the pit by the T-stop. Gordon's silence and stiff posture are strangely out of place in this acre of motion and life. He fixes his steady, unchanging expression on the lens of the camera, and slightly bends his lips, trying to comply with the photographer's simple request. Despite the smile, however, he stands upright, hands awkwardly at his sides, the Harvard insignia from his sweatshirt planted on his chest.

One gets the impression that this is a familiar position for Fauth--existing as part of a world, and carrying the banner of that world, but at the same time standing out from that world, not knowing exactly how or why to fit in.

At Harvard, Fauth's obvious stand-out characteristic is his age--he is 35 and a sophomore at the College. At first glance, it seems as if his first-year facebook picture is one of those jokes which the facebook editors like to stick in for fun: Fauth has a beard, and he is surrounded on all sides by posed high school yearbook photos.

As in the Square and the facebook, Fauth has, throughout his life, existed between several worlds.

Secularism, Religion and Alfalfa

Fauth was born in Toppenish, Washington; he grew up on an Indian reservation.

Because his parents, both of whom were highly religious, were skeptical of the benefits of a secular education, Fauth's formal schooling ended with the eighth grade. And even during these years, Fauth's education was sporadic, for his parents' religious work involved much travel and took him out of school for as much as a year and a half at a time, he says.

He never went to high school.

But during those younger years, when he was required by law to attend school and learn math, history, and English, Fauth's life involved a lot of juggling; at the end of each school day he returned home to his father, a priest, and a household in which the number one priority was God. His home life mainly involved worship and working on his family's alfalfa farm.

After the eighth grade, Fauth worked as a day laborer on the farms in the area, he says. At age 17, he moved, along with his parents, to Jerusalem, where his dad became the pastor of a church at which Fauth's grandfather had been the priest.

But at this point in recounting his history, Fauth's speech becomes more vague. He stayed more or less under his parents' wing, he says working for a church newspaper distributed to American churches from Jerusalem. And sometimes during those years he got out on his own and traveled around most of the Middle East.

"I hadn't intended to be away [from America for] that long, but one year becomes the next," Fauth says about his time in Israel. His speech is filled with a sense of the general, as if a decade and more of his life had passed him by almost inconsequentially.

Time To Come Home

Seventeen years later, Fauth returned to the United States for the first time since his arrival in Israel. His visit to America was brief--the stay lasted only one month, during the summer of 1988. But that one month seems to have been more important to Fauth than his previous 17 years in Jerusalem. It was during this month that he decided it was time to come home.

When Fauth speaks of his experiences during this month, his voice becomes softer, more passionate. One senses this was a time that helped him find his own place in the world.

"I can remember flying over Long Island. It was toward dusk and you could see the light down below--I had a strong sense of identification," he says.

Fauth stayed in New York City for a day, then flew to the Midwest and then headed home to the Pacific Northwest. In this familiar region he did some gold panning with a cousin and visited the California redwood forests. He even found some gold, but it was "not enough to pay for the gas fare," he quips.

The month, significantly, was July: Fauth was just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July--and he celebrated it three times.

Fauth reached the West Coast just in time for the Independence Day festivities--first, he headed for Salem, Oregon for a party. As expected, he moved on from there and headed for another celebration, this time in Drain, Oregon, where they played "a lot of softball," he recalls fondly. He ended the day of celebration, not in Drain, but Corvallis, Oregon, where he and some relatives watched the sun go down on what was for them just another Fourth of July, but was for Fauth a return--a knowledge that he was finally where he ought to be.

Applications, Acceptance and Adjustment

Upon returning to Israel, Fauth lost no time in sending away to various universities for applications. Although his parents objected to secular education, Fauth says at that point in his life he finally knew that he wanted to go to college, despite the fact that he had bypassed high school.

He took, and did exceedingly well on, a barrage of standardized tests, from the SAT to six Achievement Tests, to the LSAT and the GRE. All the schools to which he applied, including Duke University, the University of Chicago, three University of California schools and Harvard, accepted him. Only Yale rejected him.

And just like the many high school seniors who got into Harvard with him in 1989, it was difficult for Fauth to say no to the College. So, after an alumni interview at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Fauth soon found himself in Cambridge and in the middle of Harvard Yard.

"I do remember standing in the Yard the first day and feeling slightly disappointed that there was none of that electric tingle that the literature promised me," Fauth says. But despite the initial disappointment, Fauth has, indeed, found a home here. He is on the Undergraduate Council as well as the Coop board, and he is a government major who, like many other such students, plans to go to law school.

And then it's on to electoral politics, he says.

For the first time in his life, Fauth is completely on his own. He is even, as he says, "swinging in the opposite direction [from religion]." And by this year, he has gotten over the tremendous age gap between himself and his fellow undergraduates.

Hillary K. Anger '93, a friend of Gordon's, says she met the sophomore on the Undergraduate Council and enjoys talking to him because "he's so much older than most students and he has reflected on so much more."

"He's so much more mature than most sophomores I know," she adds.

Indeed, Fauth admits "most of the students have been quite kind to me."

"That first semester last year, I did feel a lot older than I needed to," he says.

But despite his amazing ability to adjust to college life and to juggle his past with his present, Fauth seems to make himself difficult for the outsider to understand. He admits that his parents were "disappointed" when he decided to come to Harvard--being a government major did not help his situation with them, for, as Fauth says, they preached "political non-involvement." But in a monotone, Fauth states that father and mother "basically just accepted it."

On why he moved to Israel in the first place, despite the fact that he has always considered America to be his home, Fauth says, "Israel is an interesting place to live." While in Israel, he came close to marriage several times, he says, offering no more detail.

Perhaps Fauth speaks in generalities about the past because he has made the decision to close that chapter of his life and open a new one. His first 34 years were filled with farm-work, churches, herky-jerky education, a lot of reading, traveling and near-marriage. A lot for one person. But only now, it seems, at the age of 35 and as a sophomore at Harvard, does Fauth seem truly content with his life--only now that he is in a land which will provide him with that once-elusive secular education, and many more Northwestern Fourth of July dusks.