Month: February 2025

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.