An excerpt from PIECES OF THE PLAINS, regarding undergraduate research in parasitology

An excerpt from PIECES OF THE PLAINS: MEMORIES AND PREDICTIONS FROM THE HEART OF AMERICA:

I’d like to tell you a story about The Firm, but without passing judgment on any of the people, the behaviors, the relationships, or the outcomes involved. What follows is absolutely true, from what I ordered for dinner one evening to what I was doing a few years later at my computer on a morning in April, 2009. The student’s name is also true: Shay Hampton; she worked as an undergraduate researcher in my laboratory for a couple of years before graduating in May, 2009. In this regard, she is no different from many others. There has been a long parade of students, both undergraduate and graduate, through our laboratory, and most of them have gone on to very interesting lives. Shay also is good one to talk about in some detail because she exemplifies the human resources that walk into every American university’s front door annually by the thousands. In addition, she illustrates the main lesson of research: the allegorical journey that has no direct bearing whatsoever on global human affairs but has every kind of bearing on our intellects, on the traits that drive our global human affairs.

Although she doesn’t know it, and wasn’t there, Shay’s story begins at the Outback Steakhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, several years ago. Karen and I were seated in a booth, one of those to the left of the bar as you walk in. She ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio and shrimp; I ordered Jack Daniels on the rocks and salmon. We were having a nice conversation, mostly me listening to whatever happened during her day at work, when four suits came in and sat in the booth behind me. There were three good-looking young-ish men and one good looking young-ish woman, all dressed nicely, obviously out-of-town professionals unwinding after an intense day doing something serious. They ordered drinks and proceeded to start talking about the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents. Naturally, I began to listen, and Karen also grew quiet, listening, now watching this group over my shoulder. 

From being employed by the University of Nebraska for decades, and being involved in a variety of university assignments, I knew several of the governing board members on a first name basis. One of them had been my dentist, usually stuffing my mouth full of cotton and clamps before asking how “things were going down at the University.” I was still sipping my Jack Daniels when the familiar names started drifting from the suits’ booth over into ours. One by one, members of the Board of Regents were being analyzed: their financial situation, their business connections, their voting records on various issues, whether they were conservative (most always are, sometimes seriously so), or liberal (few are, ever), where they lived, and most interestingly, what it would take to talk them into voting on an agenda item to be considered the next day: exclusive vending rights, including all University of Nebraska facilities statewide, at all campuses, and in all athletic venues. The four suits were from Pepsi Cola. History shows they handled the Board of Regents well and won the contract. You cannot buy Coca Cola products on our campus now, so like all other employees who so desire, I bring my own to school. But I will never forget that evening at Outback. Now fast forward a few years to the student named Shay Hampton.

In one of the more far-sighted actions my institution has carried out over the four-plus decades of my employment there, someone in the upper administration squeezed money out of Pepsi to support undergraduate research as part of the exclusive vending rights deal. The program is officially called UCARE (Undergraduate Creative and Research Experience), and through brief proposals, UNL students can apply for small grants to support their independent study under a faculty member’s tutelage. Thus Shay joined a small group of undergraduates working in my lab, taking advantage of Pepsi’s “generosity.” When student research is involved, especially undergraduate research, I always try to match personalities and material. Shay was not much different from other undergrads in the sense that she had many obligations, some of them conflicting, and all of them functioning to make time management her daily challenge. Nor was she different from our other undergraduate researchers in another respect: her project was to concern the biology of gregarines, obscure one-celled organisms that live mainly in the gut of insects and other invertebrates. 

We talked about various projects that might be done with these parasites. Many years ago, when it became obvious that undergraduates wanting to do research were to become a regular part of my professional life, I asked the question: how can undergraduates accomplish a true scientific exploration, given the demands on their lives, the time constraints, and the issue of money? The key to mentoring success in this case is possession; the student, not the prof, has to own his or her project. What are the easiest, most economical, legitimate research projects for a twenty-year old student to actually own? What can a college junior do in the next two years that accomplishes the same thing a faculty member has to do in those same two years: publish an original paper, a contribution to what’s called “the primary literature”? And finally, what question can this junior in college address that demands he or she take on all the logistical burdens of research that comes along with ownership—everything from washing glassware to maintaining cultures to statistical analysis? Many years ago I answered those questions in the most effective and economical way I could imagine: work on the most common, most diverse, most cooperative, and most beautiful of all parasites, the gregarines.

Let’s begin with personality. Shay Hampton appeared on the roster of my Field Parasitology class, BIOS 487, during the summer between her freshman and sophomore year, at the Cedar Point Biological Station (CPBS) north of Ogallala, Nebraska. To quote from the several hundred letters of recommendation I’ve written for former CPBS students: “Field Parasitology at CPBS is a very demanding course that requires laboratory and field exercises, a collection, daily exams, daily written assignments, an independent research project, and regular oral and written presentations. In addition, CPBS is an in-residence program, so we do get to know the students very well and watch them interact with their fellow students.” Shay’s appearance in this class was unusual, especially without being personally recruited by me because of previous classroom performance. She’d obviously made a decision to stretch out, intellectually, and seek a challenge not many of her cohorts would welcome. She’d also obviously acted counter to advice commonly dished out by professional advisers, who typically tell students to “wait until you’re ready for this challenge,” whatever “ready” means to people like professional advisers who have never been to a field program. Her appearance in Cedar Point’s Goodall Lodge on the Sunday evening prior to the start of classes is thus a key to her personality: she’s not afraid of much. In fact, after watching her work for two years, I’d say she’s probably not afraid of anything.

At Cedar Point, Shay jumped on a class project involving gregarine parasites of damselflies. I say “jumped on” because the first day of class we’d done an exercise with these parasites as an excuse to learn entomology, dissection and measurement techniques, identification (both of the parasites and their insect hosts), spreadsheet design, data analysis, and presentation, all in the space of fourteen hours. Shay and her partner, Kacie Meyers, another fearless first-year student, immediately picked up on a number of interesting questions that could be addressed using the numerical information provided by this host-parasite system. Where most students saw something they needed to learn, Shay and her partner saw something that gave them the power to conduct a formal inquiry, something to do, which in the doing would give them transferable skills. Three weeks later Shay and Kacie stood up in front of the class to present their results and data interpretation, conceding, in the process, that we were pretending to hold a real scientific society meeting by role-playing. They’d worked hard on their PowerPoint images, the sequence of statements and ideas, the rationale behind their project, the hypotheses to be tested, the methods, the data, and finally, their conclusions about what it all meant. Now it was time to put on a show, and they knew it.

Was Shay a “real” scientist after only three weeks in the field? I answer the question “yes,” although many, if not most, of my colleagues would claim “no.” Why the difference of opinion? My answer to this question is: when a sequence of mental acts characterizes your approach to a problem, no matter how seemingly trivial that problem, then you have become defined by the discipline. When you begin thinking like an historian then you’ve stepped over the line that separates historians from non-historians, perhaps not very far over the line, but over, nevertheless. The same statement can be made about the line between artists and non-artists, musicians and non-musicians, and scientists and non-scientists. Once this mental transformation occurs, the rest is easy. Why might my colleagues deny such assertions? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that the Shay Hamptons of the world tend to walk into my lab and not theirs, as the real Shay Hampton did a few weeks after her summer’s Cedar Point experience.

I was sitting at my microscope doing some biology; I don’t know exactly what kind of biology, but most of mine involves microscopes (see chapter 4, “Through a Lens”). Shay came in, sat down at the table across from me, and said:

“May I work in your lab?”

Usually when I get asked such questions, by such students, I try to remain relatively calm and professorly rather than jump up and down screaming “YES!!” That simple question—May I work in your lab?—is the ultimate reward of a scientist. Nor do I remember why we settled on the particular insects she decided to study for the next two years, except that we had these two beetle species growing in culture, and no one had looked at their parasites, at least not with a great deal of care. Unexplored territory is a powerful lure, and not just for the Roy Chapman Andrews’ of the world; college sophomores like Shay also tend to be fascinated with the unknown, even if the wilderness is inside an insect instead of out on the Gobi Desert. Furthermore, the beetles we were rearing—Cryptolestes pusillus and Latheticus oryzae—are notorious stored products pests. There is an outside chance you’ve eaten some of these insects, or their parts, because they infest flour, cereals, and grains around the world, and cereal grain products, especially if stored for any length of time, are rarely free of insects and mites. The beetles’ scientific names reflect their physical stature and secret lives: “crypto-” means “hidden,” “pusillus” means “very small,” and “oryzae” refers to rice. If crawling upon a dime, one adult Cryptolestes pusillus could sit easily on the tip of Franklin Roosevelt’s nose and an adult Latheticus oryzae could fit in his ear with plenty of room to spare.

The ultimate problem with hosts and parasites is a co-evolutionary one, an explanation of why certain parasites occur in certain hosts. This problem is found throughout areas such as human and veterinary medicine, disease ecology, global movement of pathogens, diagnosis and diagnostic techniques, immunology and vaccine development, and budgetary planning for disease control. The terms “swine flu” and “bird flu,” for example, reveal the movement of infectious agents into places—a human’s respiratory system, for example—where they did not originally evolve.

Shay’s project thus was a small model of a very large phenomenon. Her material came in the form of two small plastic jars containing whole wheat flour, wheat germ, wheat bran, and yeast, all in magic proportions, and . . . beetles living happily and reproducing like crazy. Each jar was a simple model for an economy with a public health problem: organisms, most of which were infected, seeking and finding nutritional needs, perhaps competing with one another for mates, reproducing, and eventually dying. In the lab, C. pusillus and L. oryzae (whose Latin names are certainly no odder than names in the Lincoln, NE, telephone book!) were separated, but in nature they could, and probably should, occur together. So Shay’s simple question became: do these stored grain pests share parasite species, and if not, why not? But before she could do anything else with the parasites in these insects, she still had to answer biology’s most pervasive and enduring question: What is it? 

This question, of course, refers to the beetles’ parasites. If you can’t distinguish letter X from letter Y, then you don’t know whether they occur in the same word. If you can’t distinguish Parasite A from Parasite B, then you can never answer fundamental questions such as: are they restricted to their respective host species or can they invade other host species? The problem of cross-infection is a fairly important one, and not just for influenza virus. For example, a roundworm named Baylisascaris procyonis, that occurs naturally in raccoons, can invade humans, especially young children, and end up in the nervous system, causing severe meningoencephalitis and subsequent neurological disorders. Cats, including family pets, can harbor Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan capable of invading fetal nervous systems, resulting in tragic and fatal hydrocephaly in newborn infants. And the last time you went to the blood bank as a donor, you were asked whether you had Chagas’ disease, caused by a notorious zoonotic parasite, a flagellate sustained largely in wild mammals throughout much of Latin America but that easily infects humans who are bitten by the carriers, which are large blood-sucking insects (“kissing bugs”). 

So Shay decided to ask this same question about her model system consisting of two tiny beetle species: can their parasites infect the opposite hosts, and if not, why not? But first, as always in unexplored regions, whether they are the Gobi Desert or insect intestines, we must solve the problem of what we’ve actually discovered. In Shay’s case, the discovery was of two kinds of truly beautiful and mysterious cell-organisms, both unknown to science. She was thus faced with a task that has challenged all biological explorers from Aristotle, Linnaeus, and Darwin to modern explorers, deep in tropical jungles trying to discover exactly what it is we Third Millennium humans are destroying at a mass-extinction rate. This task is, on the surface, a simple one: describe what you’ve found. But in practice the task is anything but simple. Indeed, the description of an hitherto unknown species is one of the most highly educational of all biologists’ options, primarily because the word “description” is a technical one, meaning a published paper that fulfills stringent criteria of measurement, illustration, and justification, and also passes anonymous peer review.

After two years of measurement, making permanent slides, analyzing digital images, collecting beetles feces for cysts, experimenting with methods for ensuring cysts actually developed into “spores” whose structure she needed for her formal description, digging into the depths of ancient and arcane literature, much of it in foreign languages, studying the electron microscope screen for the perfect images, and talking constantly with her lab mates about the criteria for distinguishing species, Shay finally pulled a piece of antique equipment from a drawer and attached it to a microscope. This equipment was a camera lucida, a device that splits a light beam and allows you to trace an image with your pencil, even though that image is of a structurally complex cell 1/3000 of an inch long. Wikipedia’s contributor on the subject claims “The camera lucida is still available today through art-supply channels, but is not well-known or widely used.” In this case Wikipedia’s authors are right on target: camera lucidas are often considered antiques, and some of the ones in our lab certainly are. But they are essential instruments for describing nature because they allow a person to draw pictures that have the correct proportions. Those pictures, with structural details you cannot capture with a photograph, are essential features of any new species description. 

Thus Shay learned the pleasures of working with a camera lucida, the challenge of making large-scale ink drawings, and the satisfaction of arranging those drawings into a plate worthy of publication. Then to fulfill her obligations to Pepsi, she took all the information from her two years worth of labor: all the methods, hundreds of measurements, data and statistical analysis, digital photomicrographs, electron micrographs, others’ published descriptions (often decades old and in obscure journals), information about the beetles, rationale for doing the project, and conclusions, and made a poster for presentation at a scientific meeting. “Made a poster” is code for “now, instead of a scientist, you’re a marketing and PR person.” Shay Hampton’s intellectual journey may have started with the most pervasive and enduring question in biology—What is it?—but as is the case with all scientists, her journey ended with a writer’s and artist’s dilemma: tell a true story, to a public that knows nothing, and probably cares nothing, about your subject, through the use of skillfully, and thoughtfully, assembled words and pictures, and tell that story in a way that makes the public understand, and appreciate, what you’ve accomplished. 

Shay Hampton’s poster is now tacked to the wall across from my laboratory door. Every day I look at it and am reminded of The Firm’s essential lesson: years of intellectual endeavor end with a seemingly minor accomplishment that can be buried in an obscure journal or summarized on a 30” x 48” sheet of slick-finished paper. But the real product of this endeavor walks away to a summer job, carrying the experience in her brain. The reputation mongers look at Shay’s poster and think: hmmm, just another species description. Why hasn’t she cured cancer? The answer to that last questions is: well some day she might; but for the moment, she’s a walking, talking, example of The Firm’s raison d’etre: that allegorical journey during which one develops a deep appreciation for the fundamental nature of inquiry. And even though she was an undergraduate, her basic experience is the same as that lived by every scholar, including every faculty member, no matter the discipline, no matter how much money is involved, or how much technology, who embarks on that allegorical journey.

The future of Nebraska football

Here is an excerpt from TUSKERS; the book is science fiction. Aside from backstory, all the action takes place on the day of the OU vs. Nebraska football game, November 25, 2090; i.e., it's far into the future, OU has joined the Big Ten, and the Rose Bowl has been destroyed by an earthquake, so the national championship game again gets played in the Orange Bowl. However, to get to this game, Nebraska must beat OU. To complicate matters, Nebraska has not lost a football game in 10 years, but OU has developed some secret weapons. Thanks to the molecular biologists, the former Cornhuskers are now the TUSKERS, and their mascot is a wooly mammoth, yes, a real, live, mammoth resurrected from a frozen carcass, who could have no other name than Archie. In this scene, the Cornhuskers have yet to become the powerhouse TUSKERS, Nebraska is in the depths of a string of losing seasons, and Archie the wooly mammoth has been fixed up with a blind date who stands him up. Suzi, who will become one of the book's heroes, is still a college student.

     So, one of the guys from the Beef Lab took Archie to the game. There were very few people around, and most of them were dressed in purple, not red. Even the Kansas State fans wouldn't travel to watch such a boring game. Archie didn't see anybody in red except the band and he knew that after his performance in the parade nobody in the band would go out with him. Finally two people wearing red showed up, but they were both male. Another person, the only female not dressed in purple or in the band, had on jeans and a brown leather vest. It was Suzi on her way to the museum and art gallery.
     When Suzi saw Archie she stopped and stared. Even though Archie was six years old and seven feet tall, and Suzi had watched the mammoths from the public viewing area, she'd never been this close to one. By this time Archie was feeling pretty depressed, sad, and abandoned. Maybe Nancy doesn't like me because I'm big and hairy, he thought. If she only knew how intelligent and sensitive I am, she'd like me. The guy from the Beef Lab said “don't cry, Archie.” But Archie began to cry anyway, hanging his head, letting the tip of his trunk drag on the concrete, and blinking out tears that hit the sidewalk like water balloons.
     Suzi was devastated. She could never have imagined the power that a crying mammoth could have over her deepest emotions. She walked up to Archie's handler and asked what was wrong. The man said “he was supposed to have a blind date but she stood him up because he's so big and hairy. Now he's all depressed.”
     To which Suzi replied, “he's no worse than some of the football players.”
     This wisecrack made Archie cry all the more, his massive body heaving with gigantic sobs and three feet of snot gurgling in his trunk. Suzi had insulted him terribly; he thought football players were barbarians. Then Suzi said “When I get depressed I usually kick the shit out of something. Usually something big. That makes me feel better.”
     “Uh-oh,” said the guy from the Beef Lab. The only big thing around to kick was the Kansas State team bus, a superslick black-windowed silver coach with an abstract purple wildcat on the side. Archie's ears perked up. Then he raised his head, wiped a tear with his trunk, blew out three or four gallons of snot, reared up on his hind legs and smashed the KSU bus. Metal and glass went everywhere. The two guys in red shirts stood off to the side. One of them said
     “Wow! Tusker power!”
     The other said “that's cute; Tusker power.”
     The first guy yelled “ Tus-ker! ”
     The second guy yelled “ Pow-er! ”
     The two students looked at one another. Something out of their distant past, maybe something acquired by their grandparents, bubbled to the surface, as they began to chant: Tus-ker! Pow-er! Tus-ker! Pow-er!

(TUSKERS is available on amazon and smashwords in e-book and paperback, the latter a perfect gift for a Nebraska football fan in 2018.)

Response to a friend who asked if I missed being a prof

Back to school

John Janovy, Jr.

In the fall of 1941, at the age of four and a half, I started to kindergarten, walking a block to Eliot Elementary School, 1442 East 36^th Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma. I retired as a prof from academia on June 30, 2011. So that’s 70 years of life organized around the school calendar—actually only 69 if you subtract my six months active duty as a reserve artillery officer, but I spent half of those months in school and the other half in a different kind of school. Maybe more on that later. Two things happened when I retired: first, a good friend, Otis Young, also recently retired, told me to get up and get out of the house every day; second, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln gave me a small office to replace the two large labs in which I’d labored since the late 70s. So you can guess what happened in the fall of 2011: I started getting up and going to that small office. Every working day.

The post-retirement writing activity ranged from National Novel Writing Month projects—the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series, a five-book essay on scientific illiteracy—to a professional biography of a close friend, a man who’s trained prison staff in seventy different nations over a fifty-year period. My first published book was Keith County Journal, 1978, and it was written mostly in the early mornings. After that publication, I started going to a coffee house near campus, either before or after class, and writing for an hour, until that place was torn down, whereupon I moved to the UNL Student Union. Eighteen books later, I’m sitting in that same student union, writing, and reflecting on the plusses and minuses of being retired. And why am I doing this reflection? Because my friend, Gary Hill, the subject of this book on prisons, asked me if I “missed it.” “It”, of course, meant teaching biology to hundreds of first-year students and everything that teaching entailed. My instant reaction at the time was “no!” But the more I thought about that answer, the more nuanced it became, so I decided to lay out those plusses and minuses—the miss its and don’t miss its—of being a biology prof at a large university in the late Second and early Third Millennia.

The “miss its” are pretty easy to list:

(1) The challenge of trying to learn at least a hundred new names and faces, out of an introductory biology class of 260. It took me about a week after walking into my first teaching assignment—7:30 AM, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, in Love Auditorium, 362 students, fall semester, 1966—to figure out that among that mass of young humanity was the future of my nation and my life. In the subsequent years, our large auditoriums were re-modeled so that class size was capped at about 260, much to the frustration of the administration, which would like for first-year science students to be packed into the football stadium and lectured to by a temporary instructor (without benefits) on the end zone screen. From the stage of that auditorium, I could tell which students were engaged and attentive. By the end of that first week, the responsibility of intellectual leadership was also evident, as was the idealism accompanying a faculty position. My job was not to certify that 362 students had actually taken a course entitled “Zoology 1.” No, my job was to make the nation a better place for all to live, and to accomplish that feat from the stage of Love Auditorium. In retrospect, that feeling of responsibility was probably a natural result of power, a product of standing in front of an audience that had actually paid money to listen to me talk and to copy down the pictures I’d chosen to put up on the overhead projector. So I miss that combination of idealism and the feeling that I had at least some chance to change the world into a better place for all to live.

(2) I really miss watching the intellectual development of the few students who came out of those large introductory classes and wanted to do independent research in my lab. I miss watching that intellectual development because it reinforced, so strongly, my sense of what it meant to be a biologist. For most of my career, at least since about 1980, the organisms involved were not ones that had a major health or economic impact on humanity. Although they were parasites, technically, many of these organisms lived in the guts of tiny beetles. The good news was that the study of these parasites, called “gregarines,” depended more on patience, insight, creative thinking, discipline, and microscopy skills than on high-end technology like DNA sequencing, etc. In other words, if, as a sophomore in college, you decided to budget a few hours a week to solving some problem involving the lives of gregarines, two or three years later you would have in your possession, ready for use in the big, bad, world, some exceedingly valuable transferable skills. Those skills would be most valuable when you had to again deal with tiny, dumb, uncooperative organisms, e.g., your co-workers or your bosses.

(3) I truly miss the summers teaching Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station. That experience was somewhat diminished in quality when the summer courses were changed from five weeks long, with classes two days a week, to three weeks long, with class every day. I won’t go into the reasons why that schedule was changed, except to say that it was a truly stupid move that ended up significantly diminishing the intellectual impact that the field station experience had on students, and greatly inhibited the ability of faculty members to do research on organisms available at CPBS while also serving as intellectual role models for these young scientists. It also diminished the potential impact of the CPBS experience on University of Nebraska Foundation gifts decades into the future, although it was never obvious that people making those decisions understood what organismic biology in the field can do to a person’s emotions and mindset. Nevertheless, the field station years were remarkable ones, especially for me, and for our family, too.

(4) I miss doing the research that was an expected part of being a science teacher at a large public university. No matter what the subject area, faculty research is the equivalent of athletic team practice; you do it every day and you do it because it keeps you in shape intellectually. Administrators view faculty research as a source of money and reputation. So the reasons you’re expected to do it as part of your job, and also to seek money to support it, have little or no relationship to the reasons you want to do research. No university scientist ever said: I want to study microscopic organisms so I can get a grant off which administration skims money. Instead, university scientists become aware of some part of the universe that they find interesting and then decide to pursue that interest.  

(5) I truly miss Friday coffee with the students who worked in my lab. Every Friday afternoon about 3:30, we would adjourn to a local coffee house and talk Big Talk—science, art, politics, professionalism, behavior of faculty members, problem children in the labs they were teaching, etc. Nothing was off limits. I honestly felt that this weekly discussion, initiated by Ben Hanelt, one of my doctoral students in the 90s, was a vitally important part of the professional development of everyone who had decided to join our research operation. Even first and second year students were included. Seniors and grad students talked about their work, revealing a long list of workplace problems and ways to solve them. Conversely, that talk put these older students into a mentoring mode, an experience that paid off for them later. 

The “don’t miss its” are also pretty easy to list:

(1) I don’t miss the battle with information technology, the obsession with that little screen in their little hands. During the last couple of years of my time lecturing in Henzlik Hall Auditorium (260 student capacity), I tried every possible trick to win this battle, mostly to no avail. The trick list is pretty long; I won’t bore you with it here, although some of it is hidden in the course design and assignments mentioned on my web site and in that book Teaching in Eden (2003). The day I decided I’d lost the battle, and in fact the war, was the day that I realized those dozen or so students who straggled in late were not late because they’d been having a deep intellectual conversation with some liberal English prof. No, they came in late, quietly slipped in, sat down behind the last row of seats, hiding, and spent the rest of my lecture completely fixed to, and engaged with, that little screen on their smart phones. I discovered this fact by just walking down the aisle one day.

(2) I don’t miss students’ obsession with the correct answer. A couple of years ago one of our grad students came to parasitology seminar with an observation. She was a teaching assistant, working on her PhD, so she’d been a TA for three or four years. She was shaking her head, and commenting that this fall was the first year in which all of her students had, from the time they entered school, been subjected to No Child Left Behind, that dumb Republican idea, from one of the (but not the) dumbest presidents in my memory, that was, in essence, a combination of high stakes testing and punishment. In my opinion, NCLB is an almost Biblical construct: get the right answers or get punished. The culmination of this pressure associated with the right answer culminated with three students who came to my office to complain about their grades. I felt at the time that I had to keep them in conversation until I was convinced they were not self-destructive. All three of those cases were in my last month of a 46-year teaching career. All three were doing okay in the course.

(3) I don’t miss the administrative ignorance of what education really is, as well as the administrative obsession with money and certification. One time, late in my career, I spent three years as chair of the General Education Committee, a group of faculty members assembled for the purpose of developing a set of across-the-board requirements, ones that every student at the University of Nebraska had to fulfill, the intent and impact of which could be “assessed.” The jargon is something like “assessable learning outcomes.” We had a distinguished outside expert who came to UNL and gave a speech in which she made the point that the real product of a college education was, or at least should be, a set of transferable skills. So the education vs. certification issue involves content: what it is, as opposed to what you do with it. For example, there may be ten people in the world, yes, ten out of seven or eight billion, who really care about the one-celled organisms that live inside grasshopper guts, i.e., one example of “what it is.” However, if you, as a twenty-year-old undergrad looking for an honors thesis topic, a study of these organisms could easily prepare you for a position of leadership in a major corporation, i.e., the “what you do with it.” Administrators never understand this distinction; true teachers understand it instinctively.  

There is also a short “miss it, sort of, but maybe not really” list:

(1) I miss the academic politics, sort of, and watching the interplay between personality types and behaviors in a system where the currency is reputation. Academia attracts, and sustains, some strange individuals, but in general, as a population, they are no stranger than members of white supremacist groups, religious cults, elected officials, climate-change deniers, and Republicans. And I will admit that my colleagues have supplied some of the characters in my fiction. Our oldest daughter, a journalist and exceedingly successful writer and editor, calls this practice “revenge fantasy.” When she told me that, I assumed she was passing along some professional argot. The good news is that I don’t have to sit through faculty meetings to collect this material because current political discourse provides all of the wacko stupidity and truly dangerous behavior that a writer needs. The bad news is that current political discourse provides all of the wacko stupidity and truly dangerous behavior that a writer needs.

(2) I miss the interaction with faculty members from other departments, especially in the arts and humanities, sort of. I still interact with such people, but mostly outside of an academic setting. The academic interactions were not always comfortable, but they were all enlightening and sometimes enriching. Particularly pleasant, and rewarding, was service on doctoral committees in the English Department. Reading those dissertations and sitting in a small room listening to poets grill an embryonic scholar always left me feeling fulfilled in some undefinable way. The uncomfortable interactions involved business such as that conducted by the General Education Committee mentioned above. The fact that this business was a product of an administration determined to head off legislative scrutiny meant that in certain places on campus our work would be seen as threatening, and in other places it would be seen as inconsequential.