I Bleed Orange

Today is graduation day at Syracuse University. I have been called upon from time to time to give remarks or thoughts to graduates. These follow some version of “you’re not done yet, keep learning,” or “change the world.”

Today’s ceremony will be different for me. In a very real way I am graduating. I will be graduating from an education that started 28 years ago as a freshman, through a masters, a doctorate, and through tenure and promotion. While I got paid for the last part, it was very much a continuation of my education. With my move to South Carolina, it is now time to truly implement what I have learned.

I have learned about the importance of a mission in your life that sustains you through international flights, shady motels, ad hominin tweets, and journal rejection letters. I have learned about the importance of colleagues, and that rank and title are in no way an indicator of value and importance. I have learned that all ideas improve when they are shared. I have learned that family is always first and that true scholarship is the seamless entanglement of research, teaching, service, and advocacy. I have learned that success is not a mountain to be climbed and summited, but rather a wayfinding exercise in the jungle of possibilities. And now I am learning the hardest lesson – sometimes you have to leave.

I have had the great privilege of sitting at the table with mentors and heroes and calling them friends. Syracuse has been for me, and for many, a special place that has indeed shaped the world we live in. I have seen scholarship in action where great scholars know that a study or an answer or a project is untested and incomplete without impact in the everyday lives of those you care about. I have had the great honor of working with students at all levels and ages who have shown me that a good professor is one who listens and learns as much as speaks and teaches. All of that is hard to leave.

The toughest question I get when I talk to librarians is about what to do when you realize the place you are is no longer the place you need or want to be. When a supervisor lacks vision, or a community becomes intransigent, or co-workers become hostile, or, as with me, you just need something different. Maybe it’s getting a degree, or taking up a leadership post, or moving to a bigger institution, but somehow you just feel it’s time.

My answer is normally a smattering of tactics and examples of changing the place you are, but in the end I always say, “sometimes none of that will work, and you will have to leave,” adding “and I realize that it is not that easy, because you have a house, and kids, and a paycheck.” And now I am taking my own advice and it is indeed hard.

It is hard because of the kids and the house and friends. It is hard because I am comfortable with where I am: I know the streets, and I the tricks for dealing with the snow. I am not just leaving a house, or a job, but in some ways I am leaving a scaffolding of place that I built up as part of my identity – part of me. Yes, I know in my head all those tactics and the mottos about an opportunity to rebuild and discover and to be challenged. But that scaffolding-sometimes creaky and teetering, sometimes cemented and robust-is still a part of me and building a new one will be work. Yet I have to. It is time.

To my new colleagues in Columbia I say thank you for being welcoming, and I look forward to working with you. But today I need to say thank you to my colleagues and friends in Syracuse. Thank you for helping me grow up. Thank you for the lessons, sometimes painful, that have shown me the way forward. Thank you for the laughs and the food and the jokes. Thank you for taking a chance on a young arrogant kid with skills, and seeing that in there was a scholar of worth. Thank you SU for the basketball games, the final fours, the strawberry festivals, and the frosted brownies in Schine. Thank you for bringing my wife and I together.

To my friends in Syracuse I say thank you for teaching me what a roof rake is, and for Wegmans and the State Fair. Thank you for helping to raise my sons. Thank you for apple orchards and cows, and Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

Thank you all. It is time for me to leave, because you all shared so much time with me while I was here.