While a student, Bill Maher was not a fan of his alma mater, Cornell University. And to this day, he continues to have bad associations with the school, he told Marc Maron on an upcoming episode of his podcast "WTF" that will be released on Thursday, February 16.
"I got an excellent education, and that's all I got from it," Maher told Maron in an excerpt, describing that he felt isolated and ignored at the school during his attendance there in the mid-'70s. "If I had to do it over again, or I had known what Cornell had been like, I never would have gone there."
Maher graduated from Cornell with a degrees in English and History in 1978. He attended at the same time as fellow left-leaning broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who graduated in 1979.
The "Real Time" host described a recent trip back, to perform a concert, with a friend who also attended the school. "We walked around saying, it's the same as it ever was. Cold, with gangs of men in their blue parkas walking around... it hasn't changed at all since the '70s."
His stand-up career did not come until after he finished college, when he started working at the club Catch A Rising Star in New York City before appearing on Johnny Carson and David Letterman's shows. But he described to Maron that he felt like an outsider throughout his years as a student. "...If you're not one of the cool kids -- which I wasn't, in either high school or college -- it can be rough. And it was especially rough at Cornell."
You can download the full episode of Maher's "WTF" episode on the morning of February 16 from the podcast's website.