It’s 8 PM on a Thursday evening in the late 1980s. Dinner is over. Homework is done. My mom and I have claimed our seats on the worn-out gold sofa my parents picked up at a thrift store. It sags in the middle in just the right way to hold a shared bowl of popcorn coated in a slurry of melted government butter and garlic salt. We are ready to watch “our shows,” beginning with The Cosby Show. As much as I loved the idyllic world of the Huxtables, I both coveted and felt estranged from their wealth, firm but loving parenting, and emphasis on intellect and the arts. My home life felt distant from those qualities so that Roseanne felt much more familiar to me, though even the Connors’ life was enviable for teenaged me. As a kid from a working-poor family who lived in a trailer park bookended by upper-middle-class homes, I don’t recall a time when the world failed to tell me, sometimes with a metaphorical megaphone: that my family and I had failed at the American dream.
Given that the TV was often on from the time we woke up until we went to bed, cable TV shows were more than just entertainment for me. Even as a serious reader (nearly 1a hundred books a year by the time I was in middle school), much of my understanding of the world outside my door came through what my grandmother, and many of her generation, called the “boob tube.” By the time I lost my first baby tooth, I had accepted as truth the rural comedy stereotype of the hillbilly: lovable simpletons with no agency. From The Andy Griffith Show to The Beverly Hillbillies to The Dukes of Hazzard, audiences were taught to admire the hillbilly’s practical wisdom while accepting their social inferiority. Poverty became comic scenery, and accents became shorthand for ignorance, obscuring the diversity and complexity of Appalachian lives. For a child watching from a West Virginia trailer park, the question becomes especially pointed: What futures did television make imaginable for people who came from where I come from?
Then, in the fall of my ninth-grade year, A Different World debuted on Thursday nights at 8:30. A spin-off of The Cosby Show, the half-hour sitcom followed Denise (Lisa Bonet), Clair (Phylicia Rashad) and Heathcliff’s (Bill Cosby) second-oldest daughter, as she went off to her parents’ alma mater, Hillman, a historically Black college in the South. As someone who loved learning and talking about learning and books and art and music and philosophy, I fell in love with the Hillman experience. Up to that moment, I hadn’t thought much about going to college. No one in my family had ever graduated from high school, let alone attended a university. And the fictional versions of college life I had encountered in movies that played on Saturday and Sunday mornings on cable channels didn’t spark my interest in pursuing higher education. Based on those impressions, college life seemed to involve fraternities, football games, rich kids, toga parties, or Rodney Dangerfield jumping off a diving board.
By the second season of A Different World, I was convinced that my future happiness could be found studying for my math test in the common area of Gilbert Hall or eating greasy fries with my gang at The Pit. By that point in the show, iconic actress, dancer, director, and producer Debbie Allen had become the showrunner, and the sitcom had moved away from featuring Denise Huxtable as its center and focused instead on an ensemble cast that revolved around the on-again-off-again romantic relationship between working-class math major Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and wealthy socialite art history major Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy). Fifteen-year-old me was smitten. I wanted what they had: a life of hitting the books, challenging my innate abilities and building new ones, and, perhaps most of all, community. Despite their love for each other, the characters often fought over serious differences, including when Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer) advocated for a corporate boycott over South African apartheid even though the targeted company funded her friend Kim Reese’s (Charnele Brown) much-needed scholarship.
As much as I wanted to be part of that world, I understood that it was not mine.I don’t want to mistake my identification with A Different World for representation. Hillman was not created to show a white girl from a West Virginia trailer park what her future might look like. For Black viewers, especially young people imagining themselves at an HBCU, the show’s significance was different and more culturally specific. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics data indicates that HBCU enrollment grew from roughly 223,000 students to over 280,000 during the show’s run, outpacing national higher education growth averages. Although it is hard to directly prove that A Different World contributed to this enrollment increase, interviews with Black young people who grew up during this era support this conclusion. I truly understand why. The show invited viewers into a world that few of us had ever had the opportunity to explore: a rich, complicated, yet wholly wonderful universe of HBCU campus culture. At that point, A Different World seemed more like a documentary than a fictional TV show, something Debbie Allen tried her hardest to achieve week after week. She went so far as to take the writers to visit HBCUs to talk with faculty and students to get a feel for their lived experiences.
My intention isn’t for my story to flatten that experience or claim it as my own, nor do I want my own connection with the show to obscure its particular significance for the millions of Black young people who watched it every week. A Different World not only opened up the vibrant cultural heritage of HBCUs to me; it also allowed me to see possibilities for what could be not just for me, but for everyone who loves to learn: intellectual curiosity, friendship, mentorship, argument, ambition, and belonging. Those possibilities crossed the distance between Hillman and a trailer park in West Virginia without erasing the very real differences between them.
The irony is that, on paper at least, I had been headed toward college for years. I had tested into the gifted program when I was in fifth grade and spent the rest of my school years on a college-prep track, sort of. The problem with a school system dividing kids into tracks from grade school on is that kids without positive representations of learning, encouragement to pursue future goals, or even, like in my case, future planning may focus more on daily survival than on academic success. The only people I knew who went to college were my teachers, and their efforts were focused on their material. They had no idea, of course, that my, relatively speaking, mediocre performance in Honors Chemistry or Advanced Psychology or Music Theory (country music legend, Brad Paisley, and I took this class together) had as little to do with ability as it did with showing up at school hungry, being unable to do my homework the night before I had spent that time dodging my dad’s fists, or working until past legal hours for minors because I was saving up for a pair of glasses I had needed since third grade. Even though I am certain now that I belonged in the gifted program and on the college-prep track, teenaged me felt like as much of an outsider among the kids of doctors, lawyers, and teachers as I did among my own social-economic class peers. Although I had a few friends my own age, teen boys were uninterested in my overweight, smart, writerly self. It is no wonder, then, that when an older neighbor’s friend paid attention to me, I put everything I had into our relationship and abandoned any thoughts of my own future.
He was 22, and I was 16. At first, my parents did not permit me to date him for obvious reasons, but my stubbornness prevailed, and I found out I was pregnant just two days shy of my seventeenth birthday. When I told them my news one icy February night, they kicked me out with nothing. I went to the welfare office and asked them for help so that I could finish high school and raise my baby, and they told me I had two choices: marry the unborn baby’s father or stay at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. More than one of my pregnant cousins had been sent there when their parents kicked them out, and I knew from the stories they told about restricted access to their babies, compulsory life-skills classes that amounted to shaming them for being poor and uneducated, and limited visiting hours that it was not the place for me. So, a week later, I married my boyfriend, and we moved in with his parents, who lived far out in the country, off the school bus route. When I asked my obstetrician to write a slip for me to qualify for homebound learning, which was not uncommon for pregnant teenagers in my county, he said, pointing to my growing abdomen, “Absolutely not. You need to go to school and show everyone what you have done.” That afternoon, I dropped off my books (all but the school’s copy of The Great Gatsby) and formally withdrew from high school with just three months left to go before graduation. A Different World, now at the end of its fourth season, seemed more like a different universe.
My daughter Samantha was born in mid-August 1991. At 8 lbs. 11 oz., she was a healthy newborn with inquisitive brown eyes. Her potential, however, would never be realized. A week before Thanksgiving of that year, her father murdered her. She was three and a half months old. I had just turned 18. For his crime, he was sent to a medium security prison for only seven years. Her life was tragically ended. My life would never be the same.
About six months later, I was working the midnight shift at a gas station convenience store and sleeping most of my days away. My parents begrudgingly let me move back in with them, and one evening, as I was getting ready for my shift, I heard Aretha Franklin’s voice booming from the living room belting out the theme song to A Different World. By the time I made it to my seat on that sagging gold couch, Whitley and Dwayne were talking about their future together. The comfort of seeing old “friends” and an old familiar place reminded me that I once imagined what college would be like.
Right before classes started for the 1992–1993 school year, A Different World’s last season, I went back to high school and repeated my senior year. I didn’t want a GED. I wanted a diploma. Even though I was denied enrollment in gifted and honors classes because I had dropped out (a decision that still bewilders and angers me), I continued working midnight shift and finished the school year with a 4.0. My guidance counselor, who knew, like everyone else, my life circumstances (because the murder and the trial had been all over the newspapers and local TV stations for well over a year), suggested that I go to college. Even though I had been dreaming of a life like the one at Hillman for almost six years, I was stunned at her suggestion. People like me, trailer park girls from Moundsville, West Virginia, did not go to college. She pushed me to apply to just one school, West Liberty State College (now West Liberty University). I got in, and my life changed again.
I showed up on the doorstep of West Lib in 1993 in pieces. I had a high school diploma, a job that paid $4.25 an hour, a dead daughter, and a husband in prison. (My guidance counselor convinced me to remain married to him to receive maximum financial aid, and I reluctantly did.) That fall, I joined a campus of 2,000 mostly working-class and poor kids at the oldest school in the state, and what I found there exceeded any dream I dreamed of Hillman. At this hilltop college just twelve miles above Wheeling, I lived out Whitley’s great-grandfather’s message to her when she was just seven years old. In “Here’s to Old Friends” (Season 3, Episode 12), she defends her choice to go to Hillman over Georgetown to follow in her family’s tradition that went back to her great-grandfather, who had been rejected by an Ivy League school because of his race. Imitating his deep voice, she says, “‘Baby, you can go to school any place, but no school will love you and teach you to love yourself and know yourself like Hillman.’” Just typing those words over thirty years later makes me weep, as I do when I think about how my undergraduate alma mater made the life I have today possible.
On the one hand, I guess I could argue that my own desire to make West Lib into my own private Hillman made me view my college experience with rose-tinted glasses, but I think it is far more than that. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged. I never felt like I was too poor or too dumb or not enough of anything. Although none of my classmates had experienced tragedy quite the same as my own, many of them had lived through major upheavals and unstable childhoods. And yet, we found ourselves together there just off Route 88, which was called the Cow Path to Culture because of the rural road it took to get there from Wheeling or Pittsburgh. I remember thinking every single day that I walked from Elbin Library to Main Hall to the student union that I was lucky to be there. Lucky that they took me in. Lucky that they accepted me and didn’t judge me for the sins of my father or my daughter’s father. I met lifelong friends there. I found my purpose in life there. I became a college English professor because I wanted to be like the faculty.
After I graduated in three years with honors, my professors helped me apply for and earn a fully funded MA and then a PhD. (But as a poor kid and a poorer twenty-something, I had to take out student loans to survive.) When I went on the job market, I applied to small public universities only because I wanted to be for my students what my professors were for me. Thirty years later, I am still doing exactly that as a tenured professor at a state-owned school that predominately serves poor and working-class kids in western Pennsylvania. Last night, I watched the first two episodes of the long-awaited legacy revival of A Different World. The campus looks different and the original cast looks older, but the spirit of the show I loved so much remains. Dwayne Wayne is now a high-ranking Hillman administrator (I guess I can forgive him for that), his wife Whitley is the head of her own cosmetics company, and their youngest child, Deborah, is a young woman more interested in going to a club than going to class.
Whether I imbued undergraduate experience with the glow of my wildest hopes and dreams, or it really was all the things I love about Hillman, is uncertain. All I know is that in the years since I graduated in 1996, they have continued to remind me that I am worthy of compassion, encouragement, and support. In 2016, I was the youngest graduate to be inducted into the Wall of Fame. Later that year, I was invited to be the commencement speaker. And in 2025, nearly thirty years after I graduated, they celebrated one of my poems being transformed by one of their music faculty into a beautiful libretto performed by our community choir (including me) to the accompaniment of the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra.
West Liberty University really was a different world from the one I came from. I have spent my entire career trying to repay a debt that far exceeds any quantifiable measure. Thank you, Hillman. Thank you, Debbie Allen. Thank you, Kadeem and Jasmine. Thank you, faculty of West Liberty State College. Even for me, words will never be enough.
