Epitaph of a Career

The last semester of my work life began last week. I have, tentatively, identified a last day, though I won’t begin a countdown just yet. Some principal colleagues and family know this will be my ultimate semester, along with a number of the already retired—who recommend it without exception. My advisees have been informed. I have not, however, declared my last day to the wider universe owing to a certain superstition about such announcements and the universe’s proclivity for mischief. One never wants to appear too sure about such things, such big things, lest the universe invite you to reconsider and recant. Which can be especially embarrassing for someone whose career has been all about careful consideration.

Retirement, to me, is a death of sorts, the end of a life of a certain kind of significance, of a life of “work,” which has, for most of us, been a source, if not the primary source, of our public sense of identity. We were condemned in an old book to a life of work, earning our bread by “the sweat of our brow,” owing to some relationship misunderstanding and miscommunication—who has not participated in that original sin! The consequence of which was a lifetime of tillage and shepherding. That modern life affords a respite from an entire lifetime of labor in fields and vineyards reveals a blessing of no small import, and yet, that blessing mixes rest and relief with anxiety and even a touch of remorse. What have we done with our work lives and what further in ending them?

We in education like to claim that our work and our impact on the world is categorically good, undeniably positive, incontestably positive, and everlasting to boot. (Maybe, maybe, maybe, and absolutely.) My dear Henry is often quoted in support of this attitude, “A parent gives life, but as a parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he [sic] can never tell where his influence stops.” This seemingly beneficent passage often gets boiled down to a slogan emblazonable on a T-shirt:  “A teacher affects eternity.”  Henry, more skeptical, noted that we make of our students—and advisees— “either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists," almost in spite of” ourselves.  An educator affects eternity, for better and worse. Whether by art or science, we instruct and profess and advise in the faith that… human beings are ennobled by learning, not merely enabled. “In the faith that,” which appears on the entablature of Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, now appears here as the epitaph of my work life.