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It is only natural that a work with the length and complexity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would merit more than one post here on The Wall. This is the first, others may follow.
As Frodo prepares to leave Middle Earth to sail to The Havens with Bilbo, Gandalf and the great Elves of the now-ending Third Age of the World, he speaks to Sam of the nature of partings. He is, in his words, “stretched” between the world in which he has lived, but where he can no longer find his ease, and The Havens, a place that he has never seen but which promises peace and, my word, harmony. My thoughts about retirement bounce about in that conceptual space. Doing “phased retirement” in which one essentially becomes half a faculty member for two years seems sometimes an excellent idea. Other times it recalls the old saw - a uniquely appropriate noun - about cutting a dog’s tail off an inch at a time so that it doesn’t hurt so much.
I find myself in a situation that will become increasingly unique. I have worked in the same job, at the same place, for 37 years. And, depending on where you draw the lines, I will have been here 39 or 40 years when I become “really” retired. Teaching as I do about technology, media and communication, it has never really been the "same job." When I first came here we were teaching film and audio editing using razor blades and tape. Today audio and visual editing is an exercise of keyboard, mouse and screen, of hard drives and 4K resolution. A reality built around black mirrors in purse or pocket and speakers in your ears.
The “messages” of the early 80s were “programs" that would begin each fall, and show “reruns" in the summer. If you missed it, well, you missed it. Home video recorders lurked somewhere on the horizon for thousands of dollars. The idea of using critical methods cribbed from Sociology, English, and Philosophy to examine the cultural and social meanings embedded within those programs needed to be defended in professional journals. I wrote one of the first of those defenses for the 2nd edition of Critical Studies in Mass Communication back in 1985. It was called "Of Butterflies and Criticism,” and was seen, with the exception of a few like-minded renegades, as being every bit as flighty as the title might imply.
Today we post 300 hours of video to YouTube every minute, and independent entities like Netflix and Amazon create new video narratives that we can “binge on demand” for hours and hours. News programs give way to social media posts, rants and tweets. Further, any insightful analysis of this brave digital world without multiple references to dead French philosophers and their intellectual progeny is considered, if not completely passé, then at least in very poor taste. So, yes, I work in the same physical place, but not in the same intellectual or pragmatic space that I walked into those several decades ago. Like Frodo, I feel stretched.
Frodo had grown up in the Shire, a sun-kissed and bucolic land, lolling blissfully amidst gently revolving seasons, careless and carefree, and utterly oblivious to the encroaching dangers from which unseen hands did provide shelter. I do not mean to imply that my professional world in 1981 fit that gentle description. The aphorisms “fights in the academy are so vicious because the rewards are so small,” and “trying to lead a faculty is like trying to herd cats,” did not spring from some innocent Socratic world beneath shady oaks. Still the conflicts in those academic Shires seemed more polite, the politics less naked.
Yet now almost 4 decades later, “the shadow in the East,” as it was known in Middle Earth, has crept upon my academic landscape. The change is all the more ironic in that it is one we dearly sought, earnestly courted for years. You see, in the modern “research university” a department without a graduate program sits at the children’s table, separate from and irrelevant to the conversations of the adults at the big table. For a decade or so we have been able to offer both a Master’s and Doctorate degrees. So we now sit at the big table amidst the cut-crystal of research grants and funded-centers, while fawning graduate and research assistants wait table, hoping to be invited to port and cigars afterwards in the billiards room.
Frodo had gone to war. He had cast the ring into the fire. But upon returning home to the Shire, even after purging the remnants of the shadow, he could not find comfort in this land he had left behind. Were we to grab, for just a moment, another book off the shelf, and turn to a different wizard - Frodo had seen the man behind the curtain. After 40 plus years in the academy, here and elsewhere, there are few if any curtains behind which I have not peeked. Yet, the pipe-dream of a university that still beguiles me, and provides the hazy lenses through which I view my professional ideal, comes from the academy’s version of the Shire. From 1967 until 1971 I was a student at Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts college in Kalamazoo, Michigan - not unlike Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio where my father had taught when I was boy. I saw both those institutions as part of the academy’s "sun-kissed and bucolic lands, lolling blissfully amidst gently revolving seasons." They may have looked very different from within, from the front of the classroom. If so, I was willfully deceived, and have worn those comfortable blinders for 30 years.
Ah, you caught that discrepancy. I have been in front of the class for 40 years, but the blinders have served me for only 30. Try as I might, I have not been able to keep them in place this last decade. As we rushed to take our place at the adult table of graduate degrees, the gentle laughter of the children’s table - and yes, the occasional tomfoolery - got left behind. We began to take ourselves terribly seriously. We hired - sometimes under significant pressure from the big table - colleagues who delighted in taking themselves very seriously, who would parade around in invisible yet insistent robes of their own importance and reputation. We also hired, often of our own volition, bright and brittle young colleagues whose voluminous resumes cloaked aspirations to possess similar raiment. Their abilities were without question, their loyalty less so. I have watched them come and go this last decade and more, drawn away by bigger chairs at larger tables.
So dear Frodo, I too am stretched. We know we cannot return to those Shires of ours that once were but are no more. Tolkien has given you The Havens where the gentle folk of the Third Age of the World walk, and laugh, sing and talk amidst elvish trees of wondrous blossoms and matching fragrance. He leaves me no such solace. Friends whisper from the beguiling glades of retirement, “Come on over! It’s wonderful.” That may well be. Maybe the academic Shire I hold in my heart never actually existed. It surely exists no more in my waking and walk-about reality. Perhaps I would feel less stretched had I not so loved the illusion.
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