Students who happily stayed developed affection for the dusty, somewhat dilapidated campus — with its army hospital barracks and all the ghosts who lived there.

My strongest non-academic memories of my first months at CSF involve exploring the far-flung edges of campus on endless spring afternoons, and the smell of wildflowers on the wind. One such day in early April, my roommate and I walked into La Salle Hall and found the downstairs lounge crowded with students. A couple of guys were trying to dial in MTV on the ancient television set. Kurt Cobain had died.

When I think of how I experienced the Lasallian tradition, and how it changed me, my first memory is always of that night. Several local and student bands were scheduled to play Oñate Hall that evening. The all-CSF audience was small and typically mellow, sad about Cobain and trying to enjoy the music, which included numerous Nirvana covers. The lead singer of an off-campus band startled us all by suddenly mocking Cobain’s music and suicide — and our grief. In those days, CSF was the kind of place where fistfights were rare and no one locked their dormroom doors, so at first, we all just stared, stunned. The singer’s cold cynicism was not our way. We were not joiners, but we understood this wasn’t right. No one yelled. No one forced the singer to leave. Instead, we stopped giving him our attention. We talked quietly among ourselves about the situation and refused to be complacently entertained until a different band took the stage and the music began again.

For me, a young woman whose usual response to this sort of challenge was anger, this was a revelation. A person could make a point with silence. Compassion might be stronger than cynicism. This lesson was fundamental to the adult I became, as well as the writer.

And even while it was a place where I learned about the world, CSF was also my haven from the harsher universe beyond the campus. In the recent words of a college friend, the College of Santa Fe was a magical bubble inside the bubble of Santa Fe.