A farewell note…
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
I woke this morning to the news that the recently-retired president of my university died. If I were just an employee at this school, it would have been sad. But this is my alma mater, and I knew Jon Wallace as a student, then as a journalist covering the school, and finally as a professor here.
Jon was the final stop in the process that brought me to APU’s English department , though we never had the face-to-face interview I was supposed to. I'm still disappointed that meeting didn't happen. I genuinely liked the man and wanted to see his expression when he realized I was *that* Mike.
We never really talked in the years since I returned. The couple brief moments we shared were not extremely personal, something I didn't take personally. When I left the school as a student, APU was a small place. When I returned, it was a regional universtity bigger than I could have imagined as a 18-year-old freshman bouncing around campus.
Jon, too, had grown to feel responsible for it all. I didn't expect him to remember the time we shared in the mid-90s, even as he did for so many people over the years. Jon truly impacted thousands of lives during his 40+ years at APU and could bring to memory so many of them (as the countless tributes I've seen on social media attest). I was just one of those thousands.
A note before I finish up here: this post is about the kind of influence I learned to hope I'd have from the one Jon had on my life. One I never took the opportunity to tell him about, much to my sadness even as I know he received so many similar sentiments while he was alive.
But I can draw a direct line between my becoming a professor and something Jon did for me without even knowing he’d done it. As an undergrad, I worked on the student newspaper and he had become the heir apparent to replace the president at the time whenever he decided to retire.
In the course of reporting a story, I learned that he had worked as a custodian at APU early in his life-long career here. This was just one part of the lore. He'd been a student, an athlete, a residence life staff member among other things.
But a custodian. This spoke to me. I'd been a janitor as a teenager. Did landscaping and construction work. Hell, I made most of the money I needed to buy food and pay the bills in college in the cafeteria's dish room. Finding out the guy who would be president had done the same kind of work opened a window I didn't know was closed in me.
To be clear, I have never wanted to be a university president. But the idea that I could be taken seriously on a college campus despite my background...or maybe because of it...that shifted things in me. Made space for a weird hope, one that would take a decade and a half to become a reality.
I'm not sure I would have entertained the concept of being a professor without Jon's example, something he was not even aware had helped me. And that has become one of my goals as an educator, to try to help cultivate hope in the students I work with. Hope they maybe didn't know they deserved to have.
So thank you, Jon, and rest well. I'll try to keep paying it forward.