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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Emeritus

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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 and officemate -- the man who hired me 30 years ago. I'm still at the University 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 of university life begins. I made a wise choice in refusing my own telephone extension. The department secretary takes my calls and leaves notes in my mailbox. Instead of answering my calls, I talk over the headlines with my colleague, a lover of Latin poetry and an avid reader of The Boston Globe. I rely on him to fill me in on world events, assuage them, massage them, play them to me softly, insulate me against my feelings about them. I've stopped reading newspapers because I can't bear it; human beings harming each other. I've got solutions, but only my students listen to me.

No more department meetings, praise the lord. My experiences there were like those of an airline pilot, hundreds of hours of boredom punctuated by profound emergencies. Some of my colleagues could rhapsodize for almost an hour on whether to offer a course in the fall instead of the spring semester. Other times, we had crises: lawsuits and cutbacks, shouting matches and hurt feelings. Once a colleague accused us all of lying about him and insisted on recording the meeting, but only his own words. Thank God my attendance is no longer de rigueur.

Watching how my retired colleagues were treated frightened me. Most of the full-time faculty members ignored or patronized them. 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. That is, they no longer attended department meetings to vote on contract extensions, tenure, faculty evaluations, pay raises, and chair elections. So far, my colleagues treat me with respect even though I no longer have the capability of axing them in a secret ballot.

Now I concentrate on the important pre-class stuff. I don't mean reviewing my notes. I prepare for class by doing tai chi exercises in the hallway. Without this moving meditation, I'm an ancient wreck. Just mastered recently, it limbers me, body and mind. I wish I'd been doing it for 30 years, not three months. Just the other day, as I was tai chi-ing in the main corridor of the department offices, a young female faculty member in English turned the corner, saw me, and froze like a rabbit confronting a cobra. Interrupting the cloud-hands portion of my tai chi form with a new move, I beckoned with both hands, signaling her to pass by. She scurried past, probably wondering whether I was mad. She's a representative on the Humanities Council that votes on 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 my eyes upward, to God or to Clio, the muse of history, and miraculously, the concealed fact is revealed. I bring my notes to class out of habit, for the comfort of having these old friends by my side or in front of me on the lectern. They're a professor's security blanket, like the huge worn leather briefcase I carried to class for years even though I had decided I needed only one thin file folder to keep me company.

The corruption of language is one of my specialties, or used to be. Last year I published a lexicon of the euphemisms that the Nazis employed to disguise their crimes from the outside world. Thousands of words. But the Nazis also used their new language to hide their evil from the good part of themselves so that they would not feel the most profound kind of guilt.

Without the pressure of annual faculty evaluations, I'm less fearful of false steps when it comes to my research. Beginning with my 60th birthday and continuing for six years (historians are notorious 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's talking about his lifetime, he means within the last dozen years; if he's talking history, it could be centuries -- I've taken to using a sword in class. Not a real one. A wooden representation of a Roman gladius that someone gave me as a reminder that I'm a retired gladiator. I use it lots while I lecture, flourishing it, holding it up to my eye like a rifle, or smacking it on my leg as punctuation. 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, each member judges all of his or her colleagues every year), after nearly 10,000 student evaluations, thank God almighty, I'm free at last.

Most colleagues and students were more than generous in their reviews. Students liked my teaching even during my disaster semester, when my father died and I got divorced. I remember one day when the most senior member of my department called me into his office to admit he was "the shittiest teacher in the university." I felt faint and gulped for air. Then he asked me how I received such good evaluations. "I suppose I try to be myself, relax, joke around, educate by challenging the students in the weirdest way I can imagine. This keeps their interest and, I guess, they appreciate it and even learn from it," I told him, resting my bearded chin in my hand. He then shocked me further by replying, "Sometimes, I feel it's all beyond me."

I'm now teaching in a different lecture hall, one I'd never taught in before. It's a flat room on the second floor, in a building where most of the classrooms offer stadium seating only. In my new room, while the students face me, I face a family of pigeons. Outside the windows of this classroom, the pigeons put on a sex show, for me alone. So in the middle of my lecture, I shake my head, No, I just can't go on with these pigeons having "wiolent zex," as a German colleague put it when I told her the story. The problem is, when I stop to tell the students, "look at what they're doing now!" they turn to see the feathered little devils instantly disengaged 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 strange classroom experiences: helping students with low blood sugar off the floor, a student asking that I inject her in the buttocks with a vial of revivifying liquid if she fainted (anyone in class a nursing student? I asked in vain), one guy shouting "bullshit" at me in the middle of my Freud lecture, one forgetting to take his thorazine and screaming hysterically at every historical tragedy I described? 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 by virture of my status as part-time visiting professor -- is planning on a public protest in an attempt to end the chaotic cuts in our university's budget. I'll be there, still a member of the university and of its history department, holding up my picket sign as I have several times in the past, holding up my end of the implicit contract I still feel with my colleagues.

I've been wondering when to stop. When is enough, enough? A colleague in French literature has invited me to guest lecture. Another invitation comes from the business school to talk about prejudice. 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 goes drastically wrong with my mind or body. Then this emeritus will turn in his key and hang up for good his wooden sword.