Another Day, Another Lecture

I was lucky to find the intellectual love of my life at nineteen when I enrolled in Ancient Greek in college which led me into a career of teaching the Classics.  I had lost my faith in the Christian religion at sixteen, so my studies not only refreshed my intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities, it brought me into a new understanding of my universe.  After a rocky start teaching students who for the most part were uninterested in the ancient world, mostly because they were simply intellectually not awake, I began teaching at Stanford some of the brightest, most intellectually alert and inquiring that one could imagine.  It was the beginning of the sixties and American youth seemed to be waking up in many ways.  My love affair with my students continued for years until I was fifty, as I recall, by which time I was back east teaching the new phenomenon, suburban kids, raised between a 7 Eleven and a mall, far from the cultural, social, intellectual stimulation of cities and towns which the earlier generation had fed on.  These students for the most part were indifferent to what charm my teaching had once upon a time commanded, and I was no longer desperate for the spiritual nourishment which rejecting Redemption and taking up The Tragic Sense of Life has brought to me.  But at fifty I was too young to quit, so I soldiered on.  Luckily a very different kind of teaching position suddenly became available, rendered my life vibrant with possibilities, but I knew by the time I was in my early sixties that I was getting too old, too out of date, and those men and women before me, needed another point of view. (One could argue that the various critical theories emanating from Paris during these latter years and now mostly repudiated suggested that I was not out of date in any real sense of the word). I taught my last class shortly after I turned sixty five, and the central administration could scarcely conceal their joy at the thought that the enormous salary I commanded could be quartered to provide four new entry level teaching positions.  I wish that more of my colleagues would do this, if only for the benefit of the next generation of scholars.  It saddens me that there is a federal law prohibiting mandatory retirement, at least for college professors.  We are a strange breed, solo performers with next to no supervision, mostly prima donnas of one sort or another, and unlike the theater audience which can respond with boos, jeers, and catcalls, our student audiences know that we hand out their very much needed grades, so they sit through any kind of shit in silence.  Luckily for them nowadays they may bring their laptops to class, and as has been documented, a great number are busily entertaining themselves in a variety of ways as they sit before the teacher.  I have a friend who at nearly eighty no longer recognized one student from another, and was finally with infinite patience removed from teaching, but several years later still thinks he is on sabbatical.  A former colleague of mine, again eighty, used to stink of urine so strongly you could smell him coming into the library stacks.  Imagine what he must have been like in a small class!  These two, and a host of others, had once made notable contributions to the scholarship of the profession, and they were still teaching what they had thought up fifty years earlier.  Pathetic.  In a way for these old timers it is like the marathon dancer in "They Shoot Horses Don't They?" only it's not dancing for the money, but teaching for that fragile sense of self, desperate for that audience every day of their lives.  On an ironic note: I am volunteer teaching in a senior learning program for eight meetings on the subject of Greek Tragedy starting next week.