Chronicle Higher Ed Teaching Copy

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CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Chronicle CareersTuesday, November 12, 2002

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Emeritus

By Robert Michael

2002 by Robert Michael

A few months ago, I wrote about becoming an emeritus professor,and standing in front of my old office, key in hand, mulling my

career. Well, I've got a new key now and a new office andofficemate -- the man who hired me 30 years ago. I'm still at theUniversity of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, teaching part time.Now I realize how alone I was for all those years in that large one-person office I fought for like a tiger and won. A Pyrrhic victory.

I love to arrive at 7:30 a.m., before the businesslike chaos ofuniversity life begins. I made a wise choice in refusing my owntelephone extension. The department secretary takes my callsand leaves notes in my mailbox. Instead of answering my calls, I

talk over the headlines with my colleague, a lover of Latin poetryand an avid reader of The Boston Globe. I rely on him to fill me inon world events, assuage them, massage them, play them to mesoftly, insulate me against my feelings about them. I've stoppedreading newspapers because I can't bear it; human beingsharming each other. I've got solutions, but only my studentslisten to me.

No more department meetings, praise the lord. My experiencesthere were like those of an airline pilot, hundreds of hours of

boredom punctuated by profound emergencies. Some of mycolleagues could rhapsodize for almost an hour on whether tooffer a course in the fall instead of the spring semester. Othertimes, we had crises: lawsuits and cutbacks, shouting matchesand hurt feelings. Once a colleague accused us all of lying abouthim and insisted on recording the meeting, but only his ownwords. Thank God my attendance is no longer de rigueur.


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Watching how my retired colleagues were treated frightened me.Most of the full-time faculty members ignored or patronizedthem. True, many stayed around too long and seemed feeble,physically or mentally. But others, still vital, were dismissed, I

thought, because they carried no weight in the department. Thatis, they no longer attended department meetings to vote oncontract extensions, tenure, faculty evaluations, pay raises, andchair elections. So far, my colleagues treat me with respect eventhough I no longer have the capability of axing them in a secretballot.

Now I concentrate on the important pre-class stuff. I don't meanreviewing my notes. I prepare for class by doing tai chi exercisesin the hallway. Without this moving meditation, I'm an ancient

wreck. Just mastered recently, it limbers me, body and mind. Iwish I'd been doing it for 30 years, not three months. Just theother day, as I was tai chi-ing in the main corridor of thedepartment offices, a young female faculty member in Englishturned the corner, saw me, and froze like a rabbit confronting acobra. Interrupting the cloud-hands portion of my tai chi formwith a new move, I beckoned with both hands, signaling her topass by. She scurried past, probably wondering whether I wasmad. She's a representative on the Humanities Council that voteson promotions and tenure. I don't care anymore.

I've committed all my notes, well, almost all, to memory.Sometimes I can't remember a name or date, but then I cast myeyes upward, to God or to Clio, the muse of history, andmiraculously, the concealed fact is revealed. I bring my notes toclass out of habit, for the comfort of having these old friends bymy side or in front of me on the lectern. They're a professor'ssecurity blanket, like the huge worn leather briefcase I carried toclass for years even though I had decided I needed only one thinfile folder to keep me company.

The corruption of language is one of my specialties, or used tobe. Last year I published a lexicon of the euphemisms that theNazis employed to disguise their crimes from the outside world.

Thousands of words. But the Nazis also used their new languageto hide their evil from the good part of themselves so that theywould not feel the most profound kind of guilt.


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Without the pressure of annual faculty evaluations, I'm lessfearful of false steps when it comes to my research. Beginningwith my 60th birthday and continuing for six years (historians arenotorious late bloomers), I've had a half-dozen historical books

published, along with a play, a novel, and poetry.

Just recently -- watch out when a historian says that: If he'stalking about his lifetime, he means within the last dozen years; ifhe's talking history, it could be centuries -- I've taken to using asword in class. Not a real one. A wooden representation of aRoman gladius that someone gave me as a reminder that I'm aretired gladiator. I use it lots while I lecture, flourishing it, holdingit up to my eye like a rifle, or smacking it on my leg aspunctuation. When I do so, the students know this point will

surely show up on the exam.

I don't care if my colleagues and students think the sword is nuts.After hundreds of faculty evaluations (in my department, eachmember judges all of his or her colleagues every year), afternearly 10,000 student evaluations, thank God almighty, I'm freeat last.

Most colleagues and students were more than generous in theirreviews. Students liked my teaching even during my disaster

semester, when my father died and I got divorced. I rememberone day when the most senior member of my department calledme into his office to admit he was "the shittiest teacher in theuniversity." I felt faint and gulped for air. Then he asked me how Ireceived such good evaluations. "I suppose I try to be myself,relax, joke around, educate by challenging the students in theweirdest way I can imagine. This keeps their interest and, I guess,they appreciate it and even learn from it," I told him, resting mybearded chin in my hand. He then shocked me further byreplying, "Sometimes, I feel it's all beyond me."

I'm now teaching in a different lecture hall, one I'd never taughtin before. It's a flat room on the second floor, in a building wheremost of the classrooms offer stadium seating only. In my newroom, while the students face me, I face a family of pigeons.Outside the windows of this classroom, the pigeons put on a sexshow, for me alone. So in the middle of my lecture, I shake my


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head, No, I just can't go on with these pigeons having "wiolentzex," as a German colleague put it when I told her the story. Theproblem is, when I stop to tell the students, "look at what they'redoing now!" they turn to see the feathered little devils instantlydisengaged and dancing around the roof like, well, pigeons. But I

don't care, I'm emeritus.

How could I be flummoxed by this, after all those strangeclassroom experiences: helping students with low blood sugar offthe floor, a student asking that I inject her in the buttocks with avial of revivifying liquid if she fainted (anyone in class a nursingstudent? I asked in vain), one guy shouting "bullshit" at me in themiddle of my Freud lecture, one forgetting to take his thorazineand screaming hysterically at every historical tragedy Idescribed? Even a young neo-Nazi who demanded I lecture on

Stalin and "forget about saying bad things about Hitler."

Sometimes I feel the pull of an invisible but palpable harness.This weekend, my faculty federation -- I'm still a member byvirture of my status as part-time visiting professor -- is planningon a public protest in an attempt to end the chaotic cuts in ouruniversity's budget. I'll be there, still a member of the universityand of its history department, holding up my picket sign as I haveseveral times in the past, holding up my end of the implicitcontract I still feel with my colleagues.

I've been wondering when to stop. When is enough, enough? Acolleague in French literature has invited me to guest lecture.Another invitation comes from the business school to talk aboutprejudice. Next week I'm to lecture to the university's retirees'group on Nazi-Deutsch.

I hope to guest lecture and teach part time until something goesdrastically wrong with my mind or body. Then this emeritus willturn in his key and hang up for good his wooden sword.

Robert Michael is professor emeritus of European history at theUniversity of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. One of the recipientsof the American Historical Association's James Harvey RobinsonPrize for the "most outstanding contribution to the teaching andlearning of history" (1997), he has published more than 50articles and several books on the Holocaust and the history of


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anti-Semitism.

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