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The end of the academic year always leaves me circumspect, and doubly so when I dip into the long-procrastinated task of office cleaning. The process is sedimentary. The sifting begins at the top with the current year’s paperwork, wending its way downward to artifacts of the distant past.
Most years, the planned big dig bogs down two or three annums deep, where I’m overwhelmed by the task before me and overwrought by the emotional import of what I’ve unearthed: emblems of students’ intellectual and spiritual growth preserved as if in amber. For the student, the term paper is often ephemeral—a product made to meet a pressing deadline and, practically, to pass a class. But for the professor the same essay becomes a souvenir: the French “to remember” and the Latin “to occur in the mind.”
Usually, it’s the student papers that move me, making me joyful and wistful all at once. But this year I dig deeper, all the way down to the dusty paper trail tracing professional me from junior professor to “senior” scholar. Like many educators, I’ve grown expert at savoring student growth longitudinally from first-year seminars to senior-year capstones, while growing rusty at tracing or tending to my own.
Granted, the recurring self-evaluations required for tenure and promotion files simulate this process for faculty, but in tying self-reflection and self-gnosis so tightly to performance, these well-intended processes ironically undermine real self-discovery. Like being asked by a job interviewer to name our worst weakness, our subsequent self-analysis turns out more rhetorical than sincere: “I care too much,” we answer euphemistically, or “I just try too hard.” Too often workplace self-reviews serve as crude or caricatured simulacrum of the real thing; in them authentic self-analysis succumbs to fears for job security.
The annual office cleanup is clarion by comparison. Here emerges the evidentiary record of the professional we’ve been, are and are still becoming. This year I’m taken aback by the creativity and even whimsicality of the mothballed assignments the dig brings to light. The young me, whom I see from a unit focused on the usefulness of heteronyms in artistic expression, believed wholeheartedly in the mercurial nature of identity—that we as writers and thinkers can be anything, or many things, as art dictates. Here in confident and sometimes daring lesson plans emerges the young professor’s love of media and music as tools of invention and inspiration—from the charismatic blues of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to the metaphoric conceits baked into the lyrics of Loudon Wainwright and John Mellencamp. Rabble-rousing artifacts of social change pepper the early phases of my paper trail, too. The portrait of the young artist as professor testifies to a rigorous devotion to community and region as antidote to what Eric Zencey decries as “rootless professors.”
Undeniably innovative and self-confident if not a bit scared, Young Me puts Middle-Aged Me to shame, and in the midst of my spring cleaning I spiral down the rabbit hole of self-critique and incrimination. “You’ve grown old and overly cautious,” I chastise myself. Like looking in the mirror to see crow’s-feet and salt-and-pepper where once we saw raven hair and beamish eyes, the latest model elicits harsh judgment.
It’s here that I stop the self-immolation before it snowballs, reminding myself to be a friend to time past as well as to time present—as I hope always to do for my students, whom I would never shame for growth or change, refusing to engage in the fool’s errand of comparing them then to them now. The student on fire with a progressive desire for social equity when they were 20, swearing they would never marry or grow wealthy, and who returns to campus 20 years later a happily partnered capitalist conservative, has not let themselves down, or me. To the contrary, they’ve joined the stream of life the rest of us do our level best to navigate—allowing ourselves to grow, change, adapt and adjust along the way. With luck, they return to find their abiding alma mater loves and values them still and all.
This year’s office cleaning reminds me that we academics should be kind to ourselves as we age in our profession. Too often, the Peter Pan pedagogue in their Ivory Tower holds themselves apart or above, swearing never to grow old. If we academics are indeed part and parcel of the humanity—the humanities—we embrace, we should be wise to the studies that suggest most of us will change significantly in our professional lifetime.
We’re likely to grow more conservative with age, less tolerant of the profane, more dubious of the unproven or untested. But at the same time, we’re wiser and slower to judgment, as well as quicker to acknowledge our privilege, set necessary boundaries and express our gratitude. Perhaps best of all, we’re more able to love others genuinely on their own terms and not just as Pygmalion-like projection of ourselves. The most life-affirming colleges and universities partner us in this evolution, following growth where it leads, being equally a friend to the old as well as the new.
