From LSATs to Alabama

Studying for the LSAT's in the fall. Emily Lazar found she "got to the point where I thought my eyes could roll back in my head and I'd still be able to fill in the right little boxes." That reaction was part of a growing feeling that she spent her time "Supplying the appropriate responses to everything:" she felt a need to plan something to "get me out of this upper-middle-class intellectual rut I've been traveling in for 21 years."

So when everyone else was applying to law school or looking for work in New York, the Illinois native began focusing on her area of specialization as a History and Literature concentrator: the American South. With the aid of Robert Coles '50, professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, she found the project that will keep her suitably far from the Harvard mainstream for at least a year--coordinating a pilot educational program for five schools in rural Alabama.

I'll be lucky if anyone even notices I'm there. Lazar says now, quick to point out that the work is not "an ego thing where you think you can make the big difference." Rather, it's "hand-aid work"--casing surface problems and encouraging individual students.

Alabama schools are desperately underfunded because Alabama has the lowest property tax in the country and "would have to increase it by 66 per cent even to tie for 49th," Lazar says.

In the long run. Lazar hopes to attack some of these deeper problems: besides practical work--improving curriculum, trying to farm out university graduates to teach instead of local people, arranging school-to-school transfers for students--Lazar will spend about a year writing a paper on the school system. to be used in political lobbying for more funding.

Such political action. Lazar says, is the only way to effect any lasting change in the schools where she will work. She contemplates settling permanently in the South, perhaps after obtaining a law degree, and continuing to apply political pressure.

A series of "little things, just flukes," led Lazar to find a position in education, about which she says she knows "absolutely nothing." At Harvard, she says, she did "almost nothing extracurricular, dabbling in a play, a couple of jobs," and now writing the Southern sections of HSA's Let's Go: USA.

When she started toying with the idea of living in the South, Coles, who taught her in a seminar, provided "the only support from someone I respected." Coles serves on the board of directors of the Lyndhurst Foundation. a University of Alabama-connected philanthropic organization that has sponsored many health care programs in the South and is now branching out into education. He "found a connection," and over spring vacation Lazar took a 24-hour bus ride from Chicago to Birmingham to meet this stranger.

"I sat up front the whole way and talked to the driver. I couldn't believe I was doing this, off by myself, going to meet a man I couldn't be sure even existed." But about a month later, having grappled with the probable loneliness of the job--she may not be able even to visit home for a year--and the probable frustration of doing what she knows won't transcend "band-aid work," she decided to take the job. "It was the kind of thing I never could have forgiven myself if I didn't accept."