It’s the sixties – a time when the Beatles were God and just about everything was being turned upside down. University President Stephen Hulbert describes these years – his college years – as a time of evolving turmoil. “My generation started, in a lot of ways, with the transition to the Kennedy years and to discussions around the Peace Corps, civil rights and Martin Luther King,” Hulbert says.

A Massachusetts native, Hulbert attended Worcester State College near his hometown of Westboro, Mass. The first member of his family without aspirations of becoming a banker, he says he wanted to become a teacher and join the Peace Corps.

Hulbert says college life during his era was much simpler than it is today.

“You focused your life around getting a degree in four years,” Hulbert says. “It was the typical residential college life.”

College life at Worcester was joining a club, fraternity or sorority, attending a school dance, socializing at bars and playing intramural sports, Hulbert says. Most students spent their weekends visiting another college or attending a university-sponsored activity.

Although Hulbert commuted to school in his Triumph TR4, an English sports car produced in the ’60s, he was still involved with campus activities. He was a member of student government and the yearbook staff and played intramural sports. Hulbert also had a part-time job throughout his undergraduate years.

“I was a bartender,” Hulbert says. “Actually, I was a bartender at the age of 18, and my boss found out on my 21st birthday that he’d hired an underage youngster to bartend with one of his sons.”

Hulbert says his social life developed around working at the bar because it was a college hangout. On weekends he and his friends would party with friends at Boston University or attend Boston Red Sox and Celtics games.

Although Hulbert says he had a good time in college, his dream of becoming a high school history teacher and joining the Peace Corps changed.

He received a reality check during his period of student-teaching junior high students.

“I naively thought I wanted to be a high school history teacher until I met junior high kids,” Hulbert says. “I realized I neither had the patience nor the interest.”

Looking back on his desire to join the Peace Corps, Hulbert says living overseas would have been a unique experience. But because violence broke out in the area of Indonesia he was supposed to be sent, Hulbert was not able to go.

“It would have been four to six

months before they [the Peace Corps] could give me a new assignment, and like any good college student on the way out, I didn’t want to wait around,” Hulbert says.

Hulbert says he was a ‘B’ student in college and never had to study much. The introductory courses he took during his freshman and sophomore years bored him, he says, because they weren’t exciting or challenging.

However, during his junior and senior years and the years he spent at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst for his master’s degree and at the University at Albany, State University of New York for his doctorate, Hulbert says he fell in love with studying. It was then that he could focus on what he was truly interested in.

“I always knew I liked how organizations ran,” Hulbert says.

Looking back on his college experience, Hulbert says he’s surprised by what stands out most to him.

“I thought my memories would be of people and activities,” Hulbert says. “But it was classes and certain faculty that stretched me and challenged me. Even though it’s the faculty that drove me crazy, I found out that I was learning something and appreciating them.