I have been teaching a very long time, but the miracle is that I am enjoying it now as much as I ever did. I entered a Ph.D. program in order to get a college teaching job, and considered the dissertation mostly a barrier on the road to a career of teaching. I confess that I did not learn to enjoy writing (though I always enjoyed the research) until well into my teaching career, although writing has now become both pleasurable and significant for me. But teaching has been the constant since I taught my first class as a T.A. in the fall of 1957, and since I began full-time teaching in 1961. Like the firehorse responding to the bell, I get excited at the beginning of each term.

For a long time, however, I found the end of each term frustrating, since I never liked giving examinations. Although I finally thought of ways to test what I thought was genuinely important to the learning experience, it never seemed to me that I learned very much from reading examinations. Luckily, however, for many years now I have had the luxury of teaching fairly small courses, and I assign term papers in lieu of examinations, so I learn a great deal from and about my students at the term’s end.

This year is no exception. I have been teaching a graduate course called “Nonprofits, NGOs and Philanthropy” in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, a school of public policy. Our graduate students have almost all had work experience after college, and they are mostly dedicated to public service of some kind. Those who take my course have also usually worked for nonprofits or NGOs abroad, so they bring both rich life experience and passion for social change to the subjects we study together. I also admit undergraduates to the course. They are mostly undergraduates majoring in public policy, and almost all of them have had summer internships with the same sorts of organizations.

We spend the term learning about how the organizations work (or not), and the students typically write their research papers about either the kinds of problems or the types of institutions that they want to participate in after graduation. I learn a tremendous amount from them, and I know that I am privileged to have spectacularly able and committed students working with me.

So reading my term papers this week has been a great pleasure, not only because of their content, but because I can see in my mind’s eye how the class is going to put its knowledge to use. To be sure, there were one or two disappointments, but there were also two or three happy surprises, and that is not a bad batting average for a teacher. It makes me feel stimulated and useful, and extends the incredible network of former students with whom I keep in pretty regular contact. I heard yesterday from one of my favorites, now a very well-known academic, who was in the first freshman seminar I gave in 1961. When an academic life is as fortunate as mine has been, it is surely the gift that keeps giving. I hope many of my readers feel the same way at the end of term.