Tom Keane

Living Large

Big families today are rare. But they're also priceless. Just ask my father - or my 10 siblings.

When The Brady Bunch first aired, my siblings and I would gather around the television, incredulous: Are there really families that small?

We were 13 - two parents, 11 children. Every Sunday, we'd pile into our one car (a sedan, not a station wagon) for the trip to church. We would travel stacked up like cordwood, three layers of kids in the front and back seats, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest teetering on top. When asked, we could all recite back our names as one word: "tombobmarykellymartygregjimmykathykevinbrianbridget." Mealtimes were a survival of the quickest. There was extra food, but not enough for all, meaning only the fast eaters got seconds. When the neighbors next door decided to put their home on the market, my mother corralled us inside during open houses. She understood how the sight of nearly a dozen urchins wandering the yard could be off -putting to a prospective buyer.

 It was a perpetual cacophony of kids and chaos. If sibling rivalry is the factorial of the number of children, ours was an arrangement of 39,916,800 conceivable alliances and enmities, constantly shifting with age, moods, and the regular production of yet another baby. My parents, Betty Ann and Tom, met in 1954. She was an actress; he was an ex-GI knocking about. She took an instant dislike to him; he was infatuated. After a series of excuses, she finally agreed to a date. It must have gone well. They were married a year later, and thereafter followed an extraordinary period of fecundity: three girls and seven boys in 11 years and then, six years later, Bridget ("a bonus," my father would always say).

Large families were once the norm in America. At the beginning of the 19th century, the average woman had seven children; today, the number is down to 2.1. The circumstances under which I grew up are now extraordinarily rare, with only 1.6 percent of all families having seven or more people (including adults), according to the US Census Bureau. Many say that it's for the best. Psychologists warn about the stress of growing up where there's no privacy. They fret about the fierce competition for attention. Some even argue that kids from bigger families have lower IQs and achieve less. Yet judging by books such as Cheaper by the Dozen, I am hardly alone in remembering my big-family childhood as a time in which love, humor, and never-ending activity more than made up for its shortcomings.

To my knowledge, however, none of those memoirs has talked about what it's like after the kids become adults. All 11 of us went to college. By conventional measures of success, all have done well. And interestingly enough, our family has remained stunningly tightknit, in ways that I rarely observe in those with just a few children. Marriages didn't pull us apart. Instead, they just made the club larger (albeit, with a chapter billing itself "The Out-Laws"). That's not to say there isn't friction. But several of my siblings are literally best friends with one another. My brother Brian ran one of my political campaigns. My brother Marty and a brother-in-law, Chris, are partners together in a law firm. Collectively, we have produced 31 children of our own; those cousins, too, are close.

Earlier this year, my father celebrated his 83d birthday, and my sister Mary 'Beth arranged for a party at her home. Forty-two showed up. Unusual? Hardly. Three weeks later, more than 20 of us made it to nephew Aidan's fifth birthday. Maybe it's that we all like free meals, but whether it's today on Father's Day, or Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother's Day, birthdays, graduations, baptisms, or, most often, no particular reason at all, you'll find a loud and laughing crowd of us gathered together.

I understand the many reasons large families have declined. Both parents have careers, kids are expensive, and modern-day Malthusians look down at those who would dare overpopulate. My siblings and I feel the same pressures. The most children any of us has is five; I have just two. It's regrettable, though. Far from a curse, being part of a big family is a gift, one that too few of today's generation will ever receive.

Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, June 15, 2008.

How Town Hurts Gown

If Boston doesn't do more to support higher ed, say goodbye to our position as America's premier college city.

Higher education is Boston's golden goose, the linchpin of our high-tech, knowledge-based economy. It's a goose we often love to hate, kicking it around the barnyard when it annoys us and demanding things we wouldn't really ask of any other bird. And why not? It's not as if the goose is going anywhere, right?

Or maybe it is. Graduation ceremonies have just passed, and things may seem good right now. Yet the Boston area's colleges and universities face tough times. Worse, globalization and the Internet threaten to change fundamentally the ways in which they do business. Someday soon, the goose may fly the coop.

No question, we do enjoy picking on higher ed. State legislators are talking about taxing colleges that have large endowments. In April, as it does almost every year, the Boston City Council targeted colleges' tax-exempt status, trying to force them to pay more into city coffers (churches and hospitals - also tax-exempt - were curiously unaffected by the measure). In March, the city imposed rules (now under court challenge) making it harder for college students to live off campus. At the same time, almost every proposal for a new dorm has met with fierce opposition, so much so that Boston has actually asked colleges to consider stopping growth and freezing enrollments. And then there is the insistent demand for "community benefits" whenever a school does expand. Harvard, for example, agreed to pay $25 million to be allowed to build a new science center in Allston.

Contrast this with the way we treat private businesses. When Genzyme recently began expanding its own operations in Allston, it paid nothing in community community benefits. And did anyone object to its growth? Of course not. Indeed, the state and city both did all they could to encourage that growth. Granted, there are differences between a private business and a college. You'll rarely find Genzyme's customers urinating on your front lawn at 3 a.m., for instance. Nevertheless, the cavalier attitude we have toward higher ed is striking.

In a different era, that might not matter. The problem, though, is that higher ed is in trouble. Applications were at a record high this year, but beginning next year, the baby boom bubble bursts, and the applicant pool will start shrinking. In addition, the number of high school seniors in the region is declining, meaning that for schools merely to keep pace, they will need to attract more students from outside. Yet that's getting ever harder to do. We're proud of our longstanding reputation as America's premier college town, but, in fact, only 16 of the top 125 schools in the country are located in New England, according to US News & World Report. The rest fiercely compete against us not only on the basis of class size, lab space, and faculty, but also on amenities such as dorms. Today's students are no longer satisfied with crowded quads and grungy bathrooms down the hall. Quality of life matters, and prevented from building, Boston schools have a tough time delivering.

Equally problematic is competition from overseas. Foreign students once flocked to New England; now their numbers are down. Some are going to colleges elsewhere in the States. Others are staying home and attending newly built schools there. Our own schools are now building elsewhere as well. Emerson opened a campus in LA. MIT is building in Abu Dhabi, Harvard Medical will soon be in Dubai, and the University of Massachusetts is cutting a deal to offer courses in China. If the students aren't coming to Boston, the schools may as well go to them.

Then there's distance learning. Most colleges now offer online courses; community colleges, in fact, report that online enrollment is growing more than five times faster than on-campus enrollment. Eventually, students and schools will figure out that much of their learning can be done without leaving home.

Maybe, you're thinking, that's a good thing. Who needs those cheeky kids coming here and taking over our neighborhoods? That's one perspective. The other is that, should we lose that fresh blood and new thinking, our cutting-edge economy and vibrant culture will stultify. Rather than pitying the problems of left-behind cities such as Detroit, we'll be living them.

Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, June 8, 2008.