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Just because you have a degree in music does not mean that
there is any money in it. So direct from the
University
of Alabama I went off
to graduate school in
Memphis
and studied Greek.
When I finished, I discovered that there was not exactly a
lot of money in Greek, either. So for the next two years I worked as a
campus minister at the
University
of North Alabama
and as director of Christian education at a local church. Both
of these positions were ephemeral. The joke you crack to help
you get through the dismissals is that anyway, you knew
something was up when they put your name on your office door on
a blackboard with an eraser hanging by it.
The next job stuck. Here is how it came about.
When I was in campus ministry, one of the guys I hung out
with was a staff psychologist at the university. When a new private college was getting started in town, someone came to this friend of mine and asked him if he would
teach a course in philosophy. He said something like this:
“Well, no. My field is psychology—Oh, don’t think twice about
it. Lots of people get it mixed up. Both start with p and end
with that ology kind of thing. No, I can’t teach philosophy, but
I know someone who can.”
So he gave them my name. They came around to me, and of
course I thought I could do anything, so I agreed to teach
philosophy for them.
I held the position for seventeen years. It was a small
college, and we started with almost nothing. In the early years,
it really was the kind of place where you had a teacher on one
end of a log and a student on the other.
Because we were small, we sometimes had to teach outside our
field. Besides teaching Greek and philosophy, I taught world
literature, too. After a few years I decided that if I learned
Hebrew, I could teach it. So that is what started me on my
second master’s degree.
What I loved about my work was the students. As time passed,
I was given more and more administrative responsibility. But the
pleasure I took in my job was always the students. I never felt
like I was actually teaching them anything. It was more like I
was looking on while they learned.
Our students were capable of wonderful things. I will always
remember the time when Scotty Harris recited John Donne’s
sonnet, “Death, be not proud.” Or when Bobby Valentine was the
first amateur astronomer in our area to observe Halley’s Comet.
Or the chapel service when the singing was so intense, so
beautiful, that I cried like a child.
I do not wish to make things sound more perfect than they
were. Not everything was ideal about the way we conducted our
college. What is, in this world? In a perfect world, a faculty
meeting would have an agenda and result in decisions. The
mission of a college would be to educate, not to sustain itself
financially. And education would be a little bit dangerous,
instead of always taking the safe route.
But all in all, those were good years, and I am grateful that
I was able to do so many things I loved.
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