Goodbye, and Thanks

I will soon embark on one of the greatest adventures of my life. This week I close the door on my academic career and enter the portal to the great unknown of retirement. For the first time in 47 years, I will wake up and not go to an office, the last 35 years of which were spent as a professor on five college campuses. For 18 years I have called Texas A&M home, and, in some sense, I always will.

We moved here mid-career with our two youngest kids in tow, one entering high school and one in sixth grade. They have moved on to opposite ends of the world, but before the youngest was gone, we entered the world of caring for aging parents for almost a decade. I suppose that gave us insight into this next stage that lies ahead, particularly its brevity.

The three Cursed C’s—COVID, Chegg, and ChatGPT—became a tailwind for me to intentionally land the plane. Turning an Accounting Ethics class into a Zoom course for 103 people on two weeks’ notice taught me a number of new and helpful skills, virtually none of which I was particularly interested in learning. Teaching with a mask insured that my oxygen sats were minimized, and it was as much fun as screaming at the person in the swimming lane next to me, but it beat standing behind a plexiglass chalkboard and pretending it was normal. The academic steroids Chegg, Course Hero, and generative AI have led to the relative impossibility of determining whether students are doing their own work, submitting the previous work of someone else, or providing a mashup of all the mediocre thinking on the topic over a period of time, and they have aged me a lot. I have actually come to deeply appreciate the grammar and punctuation errors that used to drive me crazy, because at a minimum they represent original work.

But that is not what I will remember. I will remember the excitement of an early-career publication, of celebrating a grant with my best friend, Paul, at Nebraska. I will remember a funky disco bowling party at Hillsdale, and handing my students letters as they lined up to graduate telling them what I had seen change in their lives in the years that I knew them. And I really knew them, because I taught each of them between four and six different courses. I will also remember Lee, who pretended I was mentoring him while all the time pointing me to what it looks like when smarts, humor, and love for people combine in an academic setting. I will remember teaching at North Alabama, a campus with a live lion, and wondering what in the world the emergency plan was if he got out of his enclosure. I will remember St. Mary’s University for my best friend and antithesis, Mark, and for the Marianist charism that allowed me as an evangelical to love the students as freely as those in the religious order who ran the place.

But, in the end, it was this place that shaped me. Texas A&M is a place that remembers, and at this time of the year when we celebrate Muster, we reflect on the importance of individual lives. This year I answered the roll call “here” for a dear friend who reminded me once more what it looks like to be faithful to God to the last breath of your life, because that is my ultimate goal. We remember big things and little things here—service, mentoring, teaching, research—and we do it intentionally. Others may remind us that we have not won a national championship since 1939. But central to this university is remembering to say thank you to those who have helped us.

I have a file folder stuffed with cards and notes that I have received through the years here. In fact, it was a cluster of thank you notes that I received after being a guest speaker on campus that was one of the factors that propelled me to transplant my family here. I had always thought a small campus culture was by far the best, and I brought a couple of students I was mentoring with me so that they could see the big academic environment. Instead, they found themselves surrounded by friendly Aggies who engaged them, accounting students who, unwittingly, permanently ensnared my heart.

In all the ups and downs of the last few years, I never lost my love for those students, or the classroom, or the life of a college campus. Linda and I will miss the students around our dinner table, and I will miss the conversations in the hallways and the visits from former students in town to recruit the current crop. My life has been enriched by my faculty colleagues and their consistent pursuit of excellence here in Mays Business School. I always tell my students that I run as fast as I can to stay at the median of my department, and it is really true here. Perhaps I can’t run that fast anymore, but I am not going to wait around until they have to tell me so.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Jim Benjamin, the man for whom my department is named. He put his trust in me to take on a variety of roles and he showed me how to lead with excellence. My subsequent department leaders, Nate Sharp and Sean McGuire, have treated me with the same level of respect. I have laughed regularly with all three of them and have been given the freedom to tell them the truth, something that, it turned out, was more important to me than I knew before I came here. They allowed me to find my place and to flourish in the last half of my academic career.

And I will miss the classroom itself, the feel of walking in and having no idea how it will go that day, but of anticipating that something good will happen. It is not just the light of recognition in students’ eyes when they get a concept that will live in my memory, but the unexpressed pain I have seen of those struggling to get by, or the Herculean effort of a student in the Corps of Cadets trying to stay awake after being up since 4:30 a.m. I will miss the unique smell and feel of the room, and even the emptiness I feel on the last day of class when I am the only one remaining.

Deep in the recesses of our minds we believe that the things that fulfill us, the things that define us, will go on forever. But I have seen with my own eyes through our aging parents that the mind of a physicist, and the hands of a pianist, wither and fade away with time. Those transitions give way to new patterns of thinking that can lead, I have observed, to despair or contentment. While I continue to cling to who I am, I am gradually letting go of what I do. This week represents the next step in fulfilling my calling.

It’s going to be hard to do better than what I have had, but I’m here for the challenge. So goodbye, professor life. It has been a genuine pleasure, and the accumulation of relationships and conversations you have provided me rests deep in my soul, providing nourishment for the wilderness hike ahead. It has been a long time since I walked roads without guideposts.

But here we go.