A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Denman knew from experience that it would happen, but the rest of last summer's participants didn't see it coming. Within the walls of Caius, a college founded in 1348 at a university founded a century earlier, 56 students and 10 faculty and staff members would become a community. They would read and write and travel together, meet daily over morning coffee and afternoon tea (and biscuits, always biscuits), dine together in a hall where the weight of tradition peered at them from portraits and shone through stained glass. They would encounter one another in nightshirts and sweaty running clothes and dressy banquet attire. They would share secrets and laundry soap, greasy midnight burgers and a touch of the summer flu. They'd pole their long, flat punts with vigor, if not skill, beneath the fabled bridges of the River Cam, bumping one another on purpose as they dodged the boats of those Others, the tourists.

Carole Kadlec Matthews '91, Melissa Inglis '91 and two program participants visit Chatsworth, the home of the Duke of Devonshire in Darbyshire during the summer of 1990.

"We're not tourists; we live here." Within a week, the same people who'd once struggled to find the college had begun to proclaim ownership. When they broke away from the sidewalk throngs to swipe their magnetic cards at the library door, when they strode alone past the "College Closed to Visitors" sign at the Gate of Humility, they imagined the Others' envy: "Look, that person belongs here." The same people who had once expressed outrage at the rules--especially the edict that no one but an elected fellow of the college is allowed to walk on the grass--now enforced the prohibitions with a convert's zeal. They felt personally offended if a camera-toting tourist absently wandered onto Caius' manicured lawn. They resolved to keep their own feet on the paved paths until the final banquet, when students and faculty members in formal dress would burrow their toes into lush green.

Like their teachers packing a semester's worth of material into six weeks, the students packed a summer's worth of experience into each day. Soon they could barely remember that first group meeting, when Denman asked, "Any questions?" and Therese Hickey of UCLA responded plaintively, "When will it be summer?" After that, even the weather shifted into fast-forward, cold rain giving way to warm sunshine that looked nothing like the England in their minds.

Jorie Cohn's mind stopped playing its obsessive video, "the one where I was tragically lost, didn't have any friends, and was overwhelmingly homesick." Cohn, a teacher and master's student from Chicago, arrived in Cambridge knowing no one in the program. A few days later, she was standing with a group in King's Parade, straining for a glimpse of Prince Philip, who had come to the university to bestow honorary degrees. Unable to see in the crowd, the petite Cohn found herself hoisted onto the massive shoulders of Scott Kubec of Florida Atlantic University. Thus began a camaraderie that expanded to a group of six (three from UNH, three from other schools) who banded together for the summer. They traveled to Liverpool and Paris, and Amsterdam twice--the first failed attempt becoming the fire that forged the friendship.

Cambridge dons gather for an honorary degree ceremony presided over by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Friendships born in Cambridge tend to outlast the summer, sometimes by years. Susan Reed and Carole Kadlec Matthews still keep in touch with their fellow '91 grad Melissa Inglis, nearly 11 years after their Cambridge summer. "It's kind of funny," Inglis says, "to go 3,000 miles to meet people from home who will become your good friends." The three remember wandering the outdoor markets, sampling every dessert at their favorite cafe and, of course, checking out the pubs. "I wasn't old enough to go to bars at home, so the social thing was big," Inglis acknowledges. "But the pubs shut down at 11, so you had time to get back and do your homework."

Nobody escapes Cambridge without homework. Students take two courses from a range that varies each year--usually five history and literature courses taught by Cambridge faculty members, and two other courses reflecting the specialties of a changing roster of UNH professors. But learning isn't limited by course choice or classroom walls. Many students who weren't registered for last summer's history classes joined them on visits to tiny country churches and grand cathedrals; nearly everyone joined the Shakespeare classes for performances at Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

In Cambridge, it's cool to care about learning. "Not only were the students friendly and social, but they were there because they wanted to be," says Leon Lum, who finished his degree in bioengineering at UC-San Diego last May and then spent the summer studying history in Cambridge. "The program was not a requirement that everyone had to take, but a special experience that people wanted to be part of."