True class

Here's an idea for an alumni magazine: Dig up what your classmates are really doing

THIS MONTH, 02138, the glossy, celebrity-filled "lifestyle" magazine for and about Harvard alumni, was sold to Manhattan Media, which plans to use the title to anchor "a series of like-minded magazines" for the alumni of other Ivy League schools. Tom Allon, Manhattan Media's CEO, said that 02138 "has struck a nerve with Harvard alumni thanks to its lively, irreverent, sophisticated perspective, and we're confident that it's a model that will resonate with other Ivy League alumni."

That, to use a term from the century of Harvard's founding, is balderdash. According to every Harvard alumnus I've asked, the magazine has struck no nerve - and even a quick glance finds that it's quite reverential toward its subjects, not at all irreverent. (Full disclosure: I met with Bom Kim and Daniel Loss, the magazine's founders, to interview for a job in early 2006, and withdrew my name a week later.) It's hard to imagine that this model will "resonate with other Ivy League alumni" any better than it has resonated with Harvard's.

But the magazine's future need not be grim. Tom Allon, listen up: I know how you can make 02138 a hit.

What college alumni really want - what could make a magazine like 02138 a must-read, indeed a guilty pleasure - are real alumni notes, the kind that tell the truth about all the school's graduates.

You know that section in the back of the alumni magazine where you can find, arranged by year of graduation, the latest news about who had a baby, who's married, who's remarried, and who got a promotion? That information sent by the alumni themselves? It's good stuff, a nice bimonthly shot of whatever-happened-to, but it tends to come from a predictable group of alumni, the ones eager to relive their glory days by staying in touch via glossy white paper. The people most likely to be missing: Commune dwellers in rural Washington, freegan activists, doulas, those who have changed their sex. If there existed an alumni magazine that fed my curiosity about the freaks and geeks as well as the jocks and BMOCs - well, I'd pay $20 an issue.

It wouldn't be hard to produce. Hire a bunch of interns or recent graduates excited for their big break in publishing. Give them back issues of the official alumni magazine and a password to the alumni database. Have them make lists of alumni who have never sent in notes. Then set them loose on free government databases, the websites of small town newspapers and, of course, Google. Provide phones to make calls. Then report what they find out: who's living off the grid in Idaho and who's living on her parents' sofa; who's chasing good surf around the world; not just who's married but who's divorced, and not just who's had kids but who's childless.

The idea of digging up news on reticent alumni is anathema to most alumni magazine editors, who with few exceptions are supposed to help, or at least not hurt, their schools' fund-raising. Many magazines have volunteer class scribes who solicit news from willing correspondents, of course. But even alumni magazines that defy stereotype by reporting objectively on their universities, like Harvard magazine, or by having unusually intellectual content, like Boston College magazine, go soft when it comes to the back pages.

Explaining why his magazine, like most, writes only about willing subjects, Ben Birnbaum, the BC editor, wrote in an e-mail, "The alumni notes section of our magazine is a community, not Page Six. We'll let the [New York] Post bear its burden; we'll carry ours." At Harvard magazine, which is affiliated with the school but independently financed and edited, editor John Rosenberg said that the magazine does report its alumni notes, rather than relying just on voluntary submissions. But there is no effort to find people with ignominious or unusual stories. "We don't do a felon of the month," Rosenberg said (though he added that the magazine covered alumnus Ted Kaczynski).

Fair enough. My vision of better alumni notes isn't about searching crime blotters for johns and parking-ticket scofflaws (though deep down, aren't we all curious which of our classmates got busted for soliciting sex?). But tracking down some reluctant alumni could do more than just yield fascinating stories: It could open the door to more frank, nuanced takes on the collegiate experience. A disaffected alumna who would never send word of her marriage to the alumni pages might be persuaded to write an essay about how Greek life ruined her undergraduate years. Once tracked down, an athlete who never went pro could be interviewed about the false promise of college athletics. Another graduate could at last reveal his erstwhile affair with a professor, something he never even told his roommate. A running feature could solicit responses to the question, "Why haven't you stayed in touch with anybody at all?"

As it stands, the "community" around an alumni magazine is a club skewed naturally toward the alma mater's boosters and enthusiasts. To an extent this is an unavoidable reality, but colleges and their magazines would do well to resist it. The alumni page presents a skewed and artificial sampling of the directions our lives took; it's at odds with the more complicated truths that a good education teaches us to cherish. The magazines should continue the project of college, in all its messiness. Who knows what stories, what voices, could be heard if a magazine made a point of finding alumni with more mixed feelings, or even those who couldn't care less?

I ran my idea for truly different alumni notes by Tom Allon, 02138's new boss. "An independent alumni magazine has more ability to be edgy," he agreed. "But it's a fine line, because there's the question of access, and you do want to stay on reasonably good terms with the university."

Well, 02138 tried that, saying nice things about famous alumni, glorifying them with expensive photo shoots and smooth copy. And soon it was up for sale. I'm offering you a better way, Tom. You've bought yourself an alumni magazine. Now go dig up some alumni.

Mark Oppenheimer writes Critical Faculties every month. His website is markoppenheimer.com.