Whenever one of Professor John Pfordresher’s (CAS ’65) students makes a particularly interesting comment, he takes note and incorporates the concept into his lesson the next time the text comes up in a course.

“I become a kind of carrier,” he says. “I take what one Georgetown student says and convey it to another.”

In his own way, Pfordresher is a vertical link creating a dialogue between different generations of Hoyas. Pfordresher is not only a bridge between different generations of students. He, like so many other students-turned-faculty, links different eras of Georgetown.

The campus that Pfordresher arrived at as a freshman in the fall 1961 was notably different from the campus he returned to as an English professor in the fall 1973 – and even more different than campus today.

The College only admitted males, and although the School of Foreign Service and the Nursing School did have some female students, the various schools were sufficiently separated so that male-female interaction was rare. Racial and socioeconomic diversity were equally as uncommon.

For freshmen, curfew was 10:30 p.m., and lights-out was an hour later during the week. On weekends, curfew extended to midnight. The Healy Gates served more than their current decorative function, closing after curfew to lock late arrivers outside, Pfordresher said.

By Pfordresher’s senior year, the rules began to relax. He recalls the novelty of being allowed to have female guests in his room on Sunday afternoons – under the strict condition, however, that the door remain open.

Pfordresher also describes an “experimental corridor” on the second floor of New South, which was then still relatively new. Students living on the corridor were permitted a later curfew, but the privilege to live on the floor was granted according to academic merit. The result was that all the students who lived on the floor were trying to maintain high GPAs and rarely took advantage of their newly won liberty.

Without television or Internet and having only communal telephones, dormitories were spartan, rarely including more than a bed, desk and closet.

“We basically worked a lot,” says Philosophy Professor John Brough (CAS ’63, GRD ’70). “There wasn’t a lot of social life.”

Several well-known groups did exist then, including Mask and Bauble, Philodemic Society, THE HOYA, the first incarnation of WGTB and a student government known as the Yard. Among the traditions that they recall, both Pfordresher and Brough lamented the end of “Calliope,” a student-written musical that Mask and Bauble produced each spring.

Brough remembered weekends when the university would hold an informal dance on Friday evening followed by a formal event Saturday evening. It was an excuse for the boys to invite their girlfriends to campus for the weekend. “Mixers” were also held with local girls’ schools, such as Holy Trinity, arymount and Georgetown Visitation. The legal age for beer and wine consumption in the District at the time was 18, but Brough says that drunkenness was not a problem.

Basketball games were played in McDonough Gymnasium, although the team was not particularly good at the time, according to Brough. There was no varsity football program when he was an undergraduate.

Additionally, the neighborhood around campus was different, although perhaps to a lesser extent.

“In the 1960s, [Georgetown] felt like a kind of dozy, tranquil party of Washington, really far from any type of urban pressure or excitement,” Pfordresher says.

Beyond changes in the physical appearance of campus – both professors remarked that campus has become much more urban and busy – Pfordresher and Brough have noticed a startling change in the student body.

After graduating, Pfordresher headed to the University of innesota, where he received his doctorate degree. By the time he returned to the Hilltop, after teaching briefly at the University of New Hampshire, the social upheavals of the 1960s had transformed campus.

In contrast, Brough never really left, immediately matriculating as a graduate student in the philosophy department. The changes are equally as striking nonetheless.

Pfordresher is convinced that the increase in diversity – socioeconomic as well as racial – has resulted in an improvement in the quality of the student body. With the acceptance of women to the college in the late 1960s, it was as if the lower third of the student body was dropped, he says.

Yet despite all the changes he has seen, Pfordresher says there is also a great deal of continuity.

“Like the human body continues to stay the same even after all the individual cells die, Georgetown continues to be the same organism that it was when I was a student,” he says.