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Farewell by James Ballowe

I have been asked to write a word or two on my forty-four years of teaching, including, of course, my thirty-six year career at Bradley. Counting the years of college students by fours, I am asked to sum up a career that has spanned nine to eleven generations. The grandchildren of my first students have come and gone, and my own grandson is a sophomore in college. My son is retired. My daughter is herself approaching her third decade of teaching. And so it goes or went. But for me the generations of students are not a ghostly procession. I find among my oldest friends several of my former students. The other day the daughter of a friend I talk with weekly, herself ready to enter college, asked somewhat incredulously whether I really did teach her dad. She is as intellectually curious as her dad ever was, and she wants to understand our friendship that long ago transcended the student-teacher relationship. She does not yet know that deeply embedded in our friendship is the fact that her father and I continue to take pleasure in sharing our discovery of a well-wrought line. While literature does many things, it does nothing unless, as Nabokov says, it gives "a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm." That cannot be taught. It has to be shared. On such an understanding, friendship comes naturally.

Bradley's Department of English has been a special place to be. I came here in 1963 when faculty had little time from teaching loads to develop and refresh themselves by means of their own reading and writing. The Department of English epitomized the administration's proud but self-misunderstood claim that Bradley was a teaching institution. The school year was endless and relentless, and neither the body nor the intellect could be refreshed before the start of a new year. However, a few colleagues stubbornly stole time to read and against heavy odds communicated their passion for good writing. Some of those former colleagues would be pleased to know that the English faculty now, though still underpaid in this university, have gained some respite from the labors of five courses per semester (four of which were composition) and an obligatory five-week course in the summer. Today's faculty do have time to think and to grow in their understanding of their profession. In other words, they have time to do what they ask of students. Other than living in what my sixty-five year-old eyes see as a surreal world -- a world characterized as much by the way it disports itself as by the way it affects high seriousness --, the students do not differ in intelligence or talent from those of the sixties. But their culture is not a culture that allows margin to love learning for its own sake. Today's students are easily distracted by "stuff" (a term made famous by George Carlin). Like many of those in the "real world" they intend to enter, they do not know what occupies their time. It is certainly not literature. Literature requires time and focus

But I do not despair. Students like my friend and former student do exceptionally well in the "real world" according to the "real world's" standards. Given the examples of those students I have known who love literature and writing, I have no difficulty in advising intelligent students to major in English and to develop some margin for reading and writing during their undergraduate years. Even in business careers they will succeed as well as if they had majored in business. I have had a good career at Bradley. I am now going to read and to write, and I will be doing some teaching at the Morton Arboretum and the Field Museum in Chicago where I already teach short courses. Among my students in Chicago have been an oncologist, a professor, a minister, a surveyor, an engineer, a politician. All could have been students in my first university classes over four decades ago. They have one thing in common: they are interested in reading and writing, for they know that the one helps satisfy their immense curiosity and the other helps them to better understand and to communicate what they know. Each of these classes I now teach is like teaching a class of friends. It will not be much different from what I have done at Bradley for almost four decades.