What A Different World Gave Us That College Couldn’t

A Different World premiered on September 24, 1987. I was one year old — too young to understand a single thing about Hillman, Whitley, or Dwayne, but somehow the show was already there in the background of my life before I could form a memory of it. I never got the away-from-home college experience. No dorm room, no roommate drama, no walk across a quad between classes. Our circumstances didn't allow for it, and for a long time that felt like a door that just never opened.

Then in 2015, on maternity leave with my first child, I started rewatching *A Different World* from the beginning. I don't know if I meant to at first — it just became the thing playing while I rocked her to sleep, the thing on in the background while I got her ready for the day, the thing I came back to by lunchtime once the morning routine was done. Some days it was two episodes. Some days it was four. Postpartum has its own weather, and this was mine — I needed something familiar running in the house, and Hillman was familiar even though I'd never set foot on a campus like it.

The show was dated in places. The hair, the slang, the technology — all of it belonged to 1987. But the parts that weren't dated were the parts that mattered: the professors who pushed you, the friendships that outlasted the semester, the feeling of a place that was yours because you showed up and claimed it. I didn't live any of that. But watching it, I understood what it could have felt like. For those of us who didn't get the dorm room and the meal plan and the late-night study group, *A Different World* was as close as some of us got — and it gave us something to hope our own kids might have someday, even if we didn't.

I raced the clock without meaning to. Every day I told myself I'd get through as many seasons as I could before leave ended, like the show was a job I had to finish before going back to the one that paid me. When I hit the final season, the final episode, my leave was ending too. One chapter closed right as the other one did.

Here's the part I didn't see coming: my daughter is eleven now, and she has never watched a single episode of *A Different World*. Not one. And she is completely certain — no hesitation, no wavering — that she's going to an HBCU and she's pledging a sorority when she gets there. I didn't sit her down and tell her that story. But she grew up around a mother who loved this world enough to build a magazine out of it, and somewhere in that, she picked up a dream I'd only gotten to watch.

Maybe that's the whole point of what we're building here. Not just the nostalgia, not just the archive — the part where something gets passed down even when nobody's trying to pass it. I got Hillman from a TV screen during the hardest, most tender stretch of my life. My daughter is going to get the real thing.