Tuesdays with Morrie

February 20, 2025

Whenever I think of Tuesdays with Morrie, my mind immediately goes to my beloved, now long-retired (but forever young) colleague, Julie. As the recently-released anniversary audiobook informed me, it’s been 25 years since the book’s publication. When it came out, the book created a buzz; everyone was reading it, including Julie’s husband, whose reaction was emotional. The book touched something deep—for him and for so many. I remember Julie saying—“But this is new to him; we live in this world.” Julie was not dismissing any of the impact of Albom’s book, but she did contextualize it in a way that has been memorable to me. I held off reading the book—in part, because I felt I would react similarly to both Julie’s husband and to Julie, and both reactions would carry their own version of heaviness or even pain. Other reactions threatened as well: What if something about Morrie as a professor, as a person, as a mentor would lay on me as a judgment of some deficiency? Or what if my connection would be too precise and worry me about the passing of everything?

I had read some of Albom’s other work, and I found him so readable and relatable. In beginning my journey into Tuesdays this morning, I learned that he graduated college in 1979, the year I graduated. So we’re connected, in age at least. Just where will the connections lead?

As I listened to the opening chapters, I was struck by the balanced approach Albom has taken to hagiography. Morrie immediately comes across as special, yes; but he also is presented as completely relatable. He’s a regular person, possibly scared; he’s larger than life, yes, but frail and ordinary too. In his “living funeral” we see something many of us have thought about, attending our own funeral. So even such distinctive episodes strike me as something not dramatic or heroic or extreme. The early onset to the disease, with the series of “ends,” all narrate very understandable progressions in the inevitable process, and Morrie’s reactions seem reasonable, both quotidian and poignant in equal measures.

My early reaction is one of gratitude. Thank you, Mitch Albom, for bringing us here, into the quotidian and cosmic feelings of things that the experience of death brings to bear. I’m just recently past my January 23-February 5 cycle, and so, thoughts of loss and grief are still with me, if mostly in echoes. I took some time today to re-read some blog entries of mine, and I’m struck at just how elegiac I’ve become. But Albom is elegiac too—in a way befitting Morrie, and in a way that might nudge me out of my current groove I’ve been descending into the past 14 years. Albom’s elegy no doubt is uplifting and epideictic about life in ways I have avoided or found impossible. But there’s something I’m sensing about Albom’s book already that perhaps might nudge me towards a new groove (is it possible to be “nudged” to a new groove? Isn’t a forceful shove/leap necessary?). My connections with Albom—his humility, his kindness, his awed appreciation, his registering of simple moments—have a capacity to nudge/shove me in ways that I suppose I guessed at earlier, and thus I avoided contact. I think I anticipated I would delve in too far—or maybe, quite simply, I wanted a little more of my own processing of things before falling under the spell, either of Morrie or Albom, as mentor.

I took a dip into my blog because others had been there this past week. My St. Norbert colleagues are embroiled in their Laurie Joyner days, and some have read my memoirs of SXU’s conflict with Joyner that I’ve posted, most recently in an “unsent” letter to the faculty of SNC. The entry I read today was “The Day Before February 5,” which grew out of two SSW sessions four years ago. It tells the story of Terry telling a story. He was rocking and swirling a bit in his recliner in the alley that day that Loretta and I delivered him his new recliner. How I enjoy the memories of that story, now multiple stories, bringing back my mother and Ang, and Terry’s unique memory and style. 

So, my first reaction to Albom is to think that maybe I can start pulling myself out of the darker strands of elegy that have consumed me. I have been descending further and further—out of good intentions I think—as though there were no other options. My good intention was to try to capture what was “true.” I felt the heartaches of my past fourteen years—the death of Angelo, the challenges of faculty union leadership, the woes of Joyner, the Trump experience, the elimination of the English major and humanities at SXU and elsewhere, the despair over the climate and the prospects for the future—all of it needed naming. I needed to bear witness, as I like to say so much these days. But Albom is pointing in a slightly different direction, which may eventually produce a diametrical outcome? What if we focus on something of hope and promise amidst the guarantees of loss and pain?

I remember when Morrie was featured in Nightline over a couple of different episodes—before and after his death, as I recall. So, I got to see and hear Morrie himself before any presentation of him, now these many years later, through Albom’s book. I felt the identification, as he seemed to be the kind of person, the kind of professor, I aspired to be eventually. But that was in 1995, one year before SXU entered my life, the year Moira was born, a few years into the Kevin era, and just a few months into my Ph.D. life-changing status of things. I certainly wasn’t ready for elegy then. I think so much of the 90s these days—all that nostalgia that Gen has made me aware of, and, truth be told, my heart breaks (ah, elegy, tough to let go), as the aura of possibility then was more or less absolute. So hopeful I was, and perhaps that’s part of the reason I held this book at arm’s length. Ain’t nobody got time for that. That time will come. With all the threats at our door today, I do think the time has come. I need the intervention now, and I look forward to my “Tuesdays,” in the car, on audiobook, as I make my way to and fro to my classes in February 2025, my penultimate February of classes.

Letter to the Faculty of St. Norbert College

Explanatory Note: The entry below is another foray into the genre of the “unsent letter” (my welcome message last year to SXU President, Dr. Keith Elder, would be another example). The Internet allows distribution of messages far and wide that may or may not be picked up, so who knows, maybe this letter will be received somewhere? The writing is more of a “what if”—what would I say to …? More than influencing the actions and feelings of my audience, my goal is to bear witness to something true that has had a profound influence on me. My reflections attempt to make sense of my experience as a faculty member in a toxic, spiraling environment, and, possibly, to resonate with unknown colleagues. Ideally, I would offer, if only on a psychic level, solidarity and compassion.

February 7, 2025

I read Thomas Kunkel’s “Letter to the St Norbert College Board of Trustees” with both sadness and a strong sense of recognition. His questions and answers cover topics that are familiar to many of us at Saint Xavier University. I commend Dr. Kunkel for his approach, which was both objective and impassioned. In my past critiques of Dr. Joyner’s leadership, I too often lapsed into an emotional state. I find that happening even now, as I am, to be frank, triggered by the discussion. When Dr. Joyner was president of our university, I saw a pattern of behavior that was so extreme and damaging that, in pointing it out—and being ignored, or becoming a target myself—I often felt as though my head were exploding. I was shouting down a well. 

So many of my colleagues were fearful of getting things wrong, and not being a part of the solution. Prior to Dr. Joyner’s arrival, we had just emerged out of a financial crisis (or crises: 1. an initiative for a remote campus in Arizona; and 2. an ill-fated international students project; plus others), and there was strong feeling that we needed a new approach. Many—most, if not all—felt that Dr. Joyner deserved a chance to lead. Some chastised her critics as entrenched, resistant to change, protective of privilege, and hostile to innovation.

As matters devolved, our institutional culture fractured. More and more of Dr. Joyner’s critics left the institution, many with buyouts and non-disclosure agreements. There was massive turnover at all levels of the institution, and not just among faculty. Staff left or were fired, and positions were eliminated or combined; administrators left, and positions were eliminated, combined, left empty, or filled with interims (interim was the default, perhaps poetically so). Such dynamics, one might argue, characterize the flux inevitable in institutional life; such change might set up conditions for positive developments? At SXU, the developments were depressing. Morale worsened, and that word became a taboo subject. Shared governance became a slogan that was preached, but decisions were increasingly made by Elon-Musk-style individuals and committees fashioned from unelected groups and task forces serving at the pleasure of the president.

There were some constants in this time of upheaval: Responsibility for decisions was always located in underlings, never the president herself. Initiatives offered by deans and others did not originate with the parties making the suggestions (as we were informed by allies in the administration), but rather the president herself.  All throughout her tenure the drumbeat of crisis was pounded with intransigence: “Things might be bad now—or even kinda okay—but wait … the projections are dire. Enrollment will crash; without radical innovation and value added, our programs will be perceived as irrelevant.” Administrator-speak ran rampant, and on it went.

Dr. Joyner’s leadership was a wrecking ball at SXU. Things have intensified at SNC, if Dr. Kunkel’s fears and facts accurately characterize the state of things. His HLC worries are valid, but the thing about HLC and the degrading of reputations is they take some time to rear their heads and do their damage. At SXU, the cutting took some time to produce significant evisceration. The speed and efficiency of the dismantling are evidently more dramatic at SNC. The common thread is the increasing disregard for learning, scholarship, academic quality, mission, students, and, to a devastating degree, diversity, at least in our case, as our best faculty, both seasoned and early career, not to mention faculty of color and non-majority representation, left to seek out more hospitable environments. 

Dr. Joyner left SXU when her record reflected positively on the bottom line, but before the dire effects of extreme disinvestment could manifest their worst and inevitable effects. Fortunately, SXU’s current administration, now largely purged of the worst enablers of Dr. Joyner’s approach, has shown commitment to rebuilding. 

But what lies ahead? On a personal level, I long for healing of the wounds incurred over the years of struggle. I don’t want to demonize Dr. Joyner, and I care for her welfare as a human being. I always felt she had good intentions (Dr. Joyner’s stronger critics ridiculed me for being naïve and worse for this view). Misguided as her actions were, I always had the sense that Dr. Joyner was a “true believer” in the necessity or appropriateness of the approaches she took. She congratulates herself on Twitter because she and her consultants “get it” and are doing God’s work. 

Her fault lies in her convictions, which waft a faintly perceptible “ends justifies the means” putrefaction as she makes decisions. Like a caring parent, she “knows” and is committed to pursuing what’s good for the kids, despite the noise and resistance her tough decisions set in motion. I have heard other critiques, however, that are less charitable, and devolve into amateur diagnoses of psychological aberrations as the only explanation of her approach to leadership. One thing is certain: she does activate an intense response, in multiple directions, in those she leads.

Stepping back from the tumult of Dr. Joyner’s impact on the faculty in the institutions she has led, we are left with the question of whether those institutions will survive, and—broadening out further—whether the model of higher education typified by small, private, liberal arts institutions will have a place in the landscape of higher education in the future. Will the academy persevere as a significant constituent of American society? And beyond America, will the idea of a university be recognizable? I hope we can shift the discussion from Dr. Joyner (a shift that is slightly easier for me these days than for my colleagues at SNC). I look at the traditions of SXU and SNC, the financial potentialities (if we can sidestep the fearmongering), the efficacy of wisdom and sacrifice in the service of stewardship, and I’ve got to think that with just a little more balance and collaboration and grace, the old mission and the new realities can find their way to viability.

January 23, 2025

[Note to Reader: What follows is my first SSW (Sustained Silent Writing) entry from Spring Semester, 2025. The prompt for today was twofold: (1) a student Xavierite journalist had asked me to share some thoughts for an article she was writing about Meg Carroll, whose death last month had shocked and saddened the University community; and (2) January 23. The two topics pointed in different and similar directions, a happy/sad accident.]

Meg Carroll was one of “those” people—someone special, someone indescribable, someone widely recognized as a legend while she is alive, and someone puzzled over after she is dead: “Could she really have been all that she seemed to be? Why are there not more like her? How could she be gone?”

Meg was a friend and colleague in many and varied respects. At meetings, I often waited for her contribution, and when she spoke, I hung on every word. She threaded the needle of incisive criticism on the one hand, and constructive input on the other. She had historical context, and was able to trace out the past, often contradictory, practices and policies. That was the incisive part. But she was the ultimate team player, and always worked on practical solutions, usually volunteering to chair a committee or find student teaching placements in late December for January teaching assignments [this specific service being her last professional miracle, just days before succumbing to becoming an actual angel in heaven, rather than just a human approximation on earth].

Over the course of our decades working together, I came to know Meg in increasingly warm and affectionate ways, learning new things about her past—a past that was surprisingly connected to mine (as I discovered, just a few years ago, that we hung with the same crowd in college, even to the point that her first husband, unbeknownst to me at the time, was a classmate of mine in the seminary).

Meg was wise and talented, but most of all she was kind and generous. The love she drew to her from so many students and friends and family gave her an aura that was almost visible. She represents the soul of SXU in its best potential. She was one of a kind, but oddly, also, a simple incarnation of what one would expect of a professor and friend, if such things could be materialized from their ideal form.

We are left with the clichés, “The good die young”; “We won’t see the likes of her again”; “The world is a much smaller and lesser place without her”… and on it goes.

So today, January 23, is the start of a new writing notebook in Advanced Writing. As has happened the past few years, the start of the notebook experience coincides with Angelo’s cycle of January-February that dominates my psyche with increasing weightiness each passing year. This was to be my last year of notebook keeping, but now that I’ve delayed retirement an additional year, I still find myself in the flow of the old routines. Will I still keep a notebook after I retire in 2026? I should. I heard myself describing to my class the value and impact that the notebook experience has had on me, leaving me to ask of myself, my students, and everyone else: Why don’t we carve out regular sessions? Why is the 40-minute session such an unusual activity, especially if it brings all those advantages I spoke of?

Today’s remembrance of Angelo goes back to 1986, his year of birth. In 1986, January 23 was on a Thursday too. That thought threw me back to Wednesday, January 22, 1986, when the labor pains started … early in the morning. Then, after the birth, nearly a day later (I’ve left out many details!), I left the hospital; I went to Walgreens to buy the $5 (a lot of money back then) Super Bowl preview/program; and then I actually went to my morning class with Dr. Mary Thale at UIC. The class was my Alexander Pope course. There were only three of us students in it; coming from a 2:30 AM birth, I guess I was kinda showing up the other two guys (who Dr. Thale thought were slackers in general). I was Dr. Thale’s favorite, since in those days I was a full-on scholar luxuriating in my nightshift security guard gig at the Wrigley Building. Never before or since have I ever been able to complete my reading and other assignments with such diligence (I think the magic of the marble walls and wrought brass elevator doors created a positively Burkean scene: act ratio of possibility). Ah scholarship. I was in the zone as a student—soon to be in the zone as a parent, Ph.D. candidate, home-owner, husband, and citizen. Ah, the 80’s and 90’s, a heady time for me in my thirties, as solutions and possibilities beckoned.

Before the seminar, I did let the group know that I had just come from the hospital. Such good news. Dr. Thale commented about a friend of hers who had shared his reaction with her upon seeing his first child, just after his birth. Her friend said, “I saw myself dead.” (That’s the kind of class it was.) I was taken aback, but she went on to explain, in a way, I suppose, that makes sense, about the circle of life, the coming of the new generation, and thus the eventual departure of the old generation. The comment was the kind of news Garrison Keillor might have brought from Lake Wobegon, which is part of the reason, I guess, it stuck with me.

I didn’t expect to be thinking of Dr. Thale this morning. Whenever I think of her, I think of how very old I thought she was at the time. Grey-haired, wiry frame, and bespectacled, she seemed an archetypal English professor. An archetypal, old English professor. An archetypal, old, female professor. I learned today, however, that back then, in 1986, she was only 62. I found that out because, in Google AI-ing her this morning, I found her obituary. She died in October of 2008 at the age of 84. RIP, dear Dr. Thale. These days, as I eye my own retirement (I am now 67, five years older than the ancient Thale)—and reflect on 1986, and the meaning of my time in graduate school, with professors like Dr. Thale, and my beloved Gene Ruoff (who I also just recently learned has died), my thoughts swirl and interconnect. What should I be aiming at? What is my legacy?

I’ve never looked upon Angelo (or any of my kids) with the result of me seeing myself dead. That’s all good. I wish I could look upon Angelo (and Mary Thale and Gene Ruoff) and not see them dead too. They all accomplished much, and there’s much to relish in each of them, and all the other loved ones I’ve lost, we’ve lost. I do look upon the whole of everything with sadness. What is the point? What lasts? In such thoughts, I recall the truisms I’ve come to rely on: just make the most of the time, while you have it; “Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may” [Insert great Pope quote here!! Would I, were I still the scholar I was in 1986.]

The memories are the thing … I hope they stay. Even in so trivial a memory as attending Dr. Thale’s Pope class, and showing up my fellow classmates in passive aggressive ways, as was my wont, there is joy that sustains. Angelo, I wish you were here. But I don’t know: In a sense, you weren’t really there in that first dramatic week of your life, with the Bears winning the Super Bowl at age 3 days, and the Challenger exploding on that following Tuesday at age 5 days. But you were part of it then in your infant seat in front of the TV, and you were part of today, too, when we had the cake and told stories during and after the movie we shared in your honor. The shadows of your presence are with us each day. And the deeper parts, the person you were, stay with us, and grow, if only faintly. It’s a little more work these days to keep you right there, and it’s also just as easy to do so as ever. It’s a mystery. Happy Birthday, Ang!

“Of Course We Lost…”

November 14, 2024

One week into the new regime, and we’re all still here. So there’s that.

I have found my friends helpful in maintaining my equilibrium, so I want to be helpful to them. I worry about how hard some are taking it. 

Today’s help comes from a likely source, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi. He told the story of his father’s defeat in an election in 1981, and the lesson Velshi learned as an 11-year-old at that time. The story, in part, is that of a father providing support for a son experiencing a trauma. In response to Young Velshi’s incredulity at the loss, the father said with a comforting smile, “Of course we lost; we were never going to win…” And in the explanation, he contextualized the nature of struggle and responsibility and purpose. The lessons speak of kindness, maturity, resolve—and how a loving authority figure can make everything right, or at least bearable, in the face of a devastating outcome.

But there’s devastation and devastation. What’s different now seems to be the stakes involved, the way the world seems to be at a precipice. It’s not just an “inflection point” as Joe Biden has liked to say. What has been called into question is the very possibility of “futurity,” the future of democracy, at least. It’s hard to talk of “setbacks” and “rebounding” when the stakes are framed in such existential terms.

Velshi’s personal story about his father was framed in terms of other moments of American history where people in conflict had no guarantees of success. He cited many “starts”: The start of the Revolutionary War, the start of the Civil War, the storming of the beaches of Normandy, and more. All these undertakings were entered into with no “clear path forward” (the title of Velshi’s essay was “The Path Forward”). In each of these examples, the people fighting for freedom did not possess the certainty of defeat that Velshi’s father had, but they might reasonably have felt hopeless, given the odds. They certainly lacked of context of just how much would be won by success—the motivation they might have accrued from seeing the benefits and possibilities of their victory, something, from our perspective in history, we can see so clearly. In the current environment, all we see are the monumental stakes of loss. We need to step back from that a bit, before full paralysis sets in.

Velshi’s guest was the historian John Meacham, and he, after complimenting Velshi for more than “setting up” the discussion, advanced the idea that “history is not reassuring” . . . but “it is inspiring.” So many of our past struggles resulted in victory and advancement towards the lofty goals of our founding fathers and documents. But the freedom fighters acted without a lot of certainties in place. These agents were not really better than us. The endpoints arrived at were not endpoints once and for all. And so, the process they engaged in continues under the watch of successors. The setbacks have been with us in every iteration of past struggles.

One of my stumbling blocks in accepting this election is my thought—my bias—that some progress had become baked in, settled once and for all. My bias comes, in part, by way of Isaac Newton who said, with pride and possibility: “We see so far, because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” Progress is like that, right? But now, when racism wins, when criminality prevails, when sleaze is embraced—by so many and so readily, how can we see anything clearly ever again? 

But, as Meacham says, “despair is a sin.” We’re all in this unending process, and, all things considered, the setbacks are not as bad as they might have been; they are not as bad as what we have already experienced; they are not as demoralizing as what prior generations have suffered. We must not be too impatient in finding our way back to the top of the giants’ shoulders. We got there once, and we can get there again.

The briefest look at the struggles of the past informs us of our heightened current position. Our giants may be in quicksand, and sinking, but we’re still a high way up, and there are routes of escape from the quagmire. Our giants are really, really tall, too. We need Velshi’s father looking at us, with a smile, and an assurance that we can go on—that our expectations must be tuned to some harsher realities—but not debilitatingly so.

As I look forward to the future—with so much more education available—or at least information—I see possibilities for seeing farther and farther, and from higher and higher perches. Those loftier resting places may not have solidity beneath, but they may still be functional. There is reason to hope.

In that spirit, I will hold onto an old personal hope of mine, first experienced in 1993 at UIC, in the library, when I first caught a glimpse of the World Wide Web. I had just finished my dissertation, and felt free and unleashed for the first time in many years. As I walked among the desks of patrons, I saw the computers displaying Web pages—text and images displayed in ways that inspired marvel at the newness and possibility. Who were these people, and what were they looking at, and in living color? The Internet had been around a bit in my consciousness prior to that, but a qualitative shift struck me in a revelatory flash, as though in a religious rapture. The reach and transformative potential of the medium registered fully. I saw the connection of minds and the spread of knowledge and the democratic ethos undergirding the whole platform—all of it a game changer in the arc of human interconnection and community and knowledge.

The Internet (we now know all too well) is not a panacea, but it does unleash untold powers of communication, access to information, and yes, even education. The genie is out of the bottle. As we go through the growing pains of conspiracy thinking, the spread of misinformation, the hurt over lost privilege, the hardships of evolving economies, and more, we have opportunities for all the salubrious effects of communion and shared purpose—something, one hopes, that is always a promise in communication systems, beginning in that first and foremost one, prayer. Censorship can only go so far, and is doomed to failure in a digital world. As our communities experience more contact, the things that bind us as humans will be given more opportunities to be seen and known. The shrinking of the world and the infusion of information and the processing of our growing pains—all pave the way to possibilities of compassion and empathy and unity.

A digital shoulder may be less stable than a real giant’s—but all this shoulder talk is merely playing with metaphors anyway. 

I pride myself in recalling that Aristotle claimed that the ability to use metaphors was a sign of genius. But in closing, I prefer to let the metaphor speak more to our hearts than our heads, and so I’ll leave with an imagined image of Young Velshi on his father’s shoulders. And his father’s implied comment: “We’ve been set to win all along…” [Or did he say, “Love conquers all”?]