Higher education is often likened to the beginning of a lifetime journey of discovery. This sense of journey and its great potential is never more strongly felt on a university campus than in the fall when students and their faculty set about the business of higher learning in earnest and with a spirit of renewal and great optimism. For me and most of my colleagues who teach, research, and serve in the university, this idea of a lifetime of learning is what energizes our work.
But what of the beginnings of such journeys? And what of the milestones? Observing the sweaty move-in-day at Fairmount Towers, participating in the excitement of the convocation event, and settling in with the faculty leadership to begin the work of another academic year, gave me pause to reflect on my own journey.
A celestial observer would not have given me much of a chance on that brilliant fall day in 1972 when my parents dropped me off for my freshman year at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I showed up in Williamsburg with a vague and unfocused interest in science and math, virtually no experience outside my little hometown of Dayton, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the West Virginia state line, and no idea that higher education was about anything except my parents’ strong feelings that I should have one.
Today, the most intense generalized memory of my first days at college, besides the living habits of my roommate who went on to become a huge success — go figure — is the strange mixture of exhilaration and abject fear associated with my newfound freedom, the utility of which I was given to question after I ate a dozen doughnuts for breakfast one morning simply because I could. My journey had begun, with a whale of a stomach ache.
Rather than a lifetime of learning, my first experiences in class suggested a journey’s end, and not a triumphant one. At Turner Ashby High School (named after a little known Confederate general who was shot by his own men as he returned to camp after a night on the town), I had excelled in the college prep curriculum, played sports, written for the school newspaper, held office, and had a steady girlfriend (who went to Virginia Tech and dumped me before mid-term exams).
But none of this was apparently designed to have any relationship to college. The professor in my Spanish class entered the room on the first day, took a sip from his coffee cup, and began to speak in Spanish, uttering not a word of English for the next fifteen weeks. My biology professor covered all of the things I had learned in high school in four days. And, even though the calculus book was the same one we had used in high school, the college professor apparently had a completely different understanding of it than did Mr. Riner back at old TA High. If not ended, the journey was certainly going to be an uphill climb.
But there was that one professor, an historian — a Jefferson scholar I think — a shabby-haired aging beatnik with steel blue eyes and a black Labrador retriever that followed him to class and slept noisily on the cool tile floor. That one strange man, that man who hooked me with his ability to connect the past and the present with humor and good sense and deep understanding. His class was a bear. Pages of reading, a quiz every day and, of course, the dreaded term paper, fifteen pages on a manual typewriter. I crawled into mid-term with a low C average but a desperate desire to be an historian.
I don’t remember his name. What I remember are the hours that I spent studying and, most especially, the intensity with which I threw myself at that term paper, perhaps my first real scholarly effort. I remember the long wait to have the paper graded and returned, to learn if I could stand in the same circle with this professor who had captured my imagination.
I learned that enthusiasm was not enough. I did not have what it takes to be an historian. But I still have the paper. On it he wrote: Relatively high level of discourse, B-. I have never forgotten this simple encouragement extended by an eminent scholar to an excited student who needed to understand his potential while continuing his search for how to apply that potential. It was enough to set me on my way — and what a journey it has been.
I do not know much about how the journeys begin for each of the students who joined us this fall. But I am confident that no matter how halting the beginning, there will be, like there was for me, that one professor who because of the depth of her excitement and because of her absolute commitment to her own life of learning, will spark an imagination and set a journey right.
Go Shocks.
