Printer FriendlyThe following lecture was presented by Professor John Ogasapian on Monday, April 8, 2002, at a series entitled: “If This Were The Last Lecture I Would Give, What Would I Say?”, organized by the Multi-faith Council of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
I want to thank Imogene for inviting me today. I must confess that when she first asked me, I begged off, pleading the press of a busy semester. For whatever reason, I changed my mind; but I'm still reminded of Abraham Lincoln's story about the man tarred and feathered and being ridden out of town on a rail, who when asked how he felt, replied, “Well, if it weren't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather not.” So I suppose I'm really thanking Imogene for inviting me to contemplate something that, if it weren't for the honor, I'd rather not.
Here beginneth this meditation on my retirement lecture. Something like meditating on your own obituary; it makes you thoughtful, a bit sentimental, and a bit self-indulgent. Since I'm not one for long obituaries, it's also brief—or relatively so.
Retirement. For me at my age, it's more than an academic question. I max out on pension and benefits as of October of 2002. As they say, `Where have the years gone?' Let me be clear about it; I have no intention of retiring for quite a while. But the future lies not too far ahead, to coin a clich and I glumly acknowledge that someday sooner rather than later I shall have to contemplate that last lecture.
Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic and author, says he'll never retire, and he's well over 70—or at least he was when last I looked. Bloom says that he's told the president of Yale they'll have to carry him out of the classroom, and he'll still be teaching as they do. I can almost believe it. Bloom is still sharp, creative and productive, so his is in some ways an attitude worth applauding, though not necessarily emulating. I sympathize with Bloom and wish him well; but I also hope when my time comes I go gracefully, before they have to carry me out, teaching or not.
On that day, I shall try not to waste time moralizing, or ladling out advice: musty morsels of senescent wisdom. It wouldn't do any good anyway, for nobody will listen. Nor should they. As some sage somewhere––I forget who at the moment—observed, the great tragedy of life is that it can only be lived forward, yet it can only be understood backward.
My time at Lowell stretches back to the days of Lowell State and Lowell Tech. I was appointed in 1965, so my early years coincided with the martyrdom of Dr. King, Viet Nam and that climactic spring of 1970—the year I was tenured—when finals and commencement were cancelled just about everywhere. I've professed through the dynamic 60s and disco 70s, the selfish 80s and cynical 90s. So I suppose I will be tempted to digress into accumulated memories; but I promise to resist that urge with all my might.
Above all, I shall try not to ramble on about students from thirty or forty years ago––your parents' and grandparents' generation; and I shall certainly not babble away about how much nicer and smarter they were. Take it from me, they were no nicer and no smarter than you are. I was there; I know. But also remember that you are no nicer or smarter than your children will be.
Without a doubt, I shall recount how I've taught music history over the past 40 years to majors and non-majors: from freshman and sophomore lectures of a hundred or more to graduate seminars of three or four. I've loved every minute of it, and I still do. I love my subject, I love my research; and I love my students, every one of them: the brilliant ones, the not-so-brilliant ones and all the ones along that continuum in between. I hope I've helped them gain some of their maturity; and I know they've helped me keep some of my youth. For that I'll thank them. I think it was Henry Rosovsky, a former dean of the Harvard faculty, who wrote that teaching college students keeps one young well into late middle age. Amen to that. It's been wonderful, and I know for certain that if I could begin again, I would in a heartbeat, and I wouldn't change a thing. Lucky man, to be able to say such a thing about a life and career and mean it.
It's no secret that this university, like other research universities, endorses a Publish or Perish line for its faculty and hews to that line, more or less. A comfortable fit for me, since I like to write: five books thus far, about 40 articles and more invited reviews that I should probably admit to. At the moment I'm happily working along on my sixth book, contract and advance in hand, and I like to think I have another couple or three in me. In fact, I try to tell myself that when at last I retire, I'll have even more time to do research and write.
Brave words. But sometimes I wonder if I WILL keep thinking and writing. It has always been my students who have started the ideas flowing; just as it's been my research and writing that has kept my classes interesting—to me at least, and I hope to my students as well. Not that I fault those who concentrate on their teaching rather than research and writing. I just couldn't have done it that way. Nor, for that matter, would I have wanted a research professorship where I never saw the inside of a classroom. I need both teaching and research. They are the yin and yang of my intellectual equilibrium.
I shall surely tell my students—those who are still paying attention to the old man's last mumbled musings—how great a privilege it has been to teach them and their predecessors over the years; how fortunate I am to have had a role in the ongoing succession of educated men and women who have graduated from this university; to have helped them learn not only how to make a living, but how to live meaningfully; to have given them in some measure what even antiquity and the Middle Ages knew were the most important skills for an educated person: the ability to think clearly, to speak clearly and to write clearly.
And what of my own specialty, music history? I'll remind them that the subject matter is important; but at some level, it's ephemeral, like all the other elements of professional training. That is what distinguishes a university from a vocational school. As someone far wiser than I once said, `Your education is what's left after you forget all that you learned.' Maybe I should use that as my exit line.
Anyway, I've confessed some fear about drying up intellectually without my students around. But what I REALLY dread is that my last class will indeed BE a lecture. You see, my final sessions are always freewheeling critiques of the course and the way I taught it. The students take a long, hard-nosed and brutally honest look at everything; and I take notes. I reassure them that I need their perspective and that they can feel comfortable about being candid and holding nothing back, and my sense is they don't. During the summer, with their comments close at hand, I tear the course down and rebuild it accordingly, hoping to get it right this time. Of course, when fall rolls around, I enter my classroom yet again, proclaim anew the truth, and invariably realize as the weeks go by that I haven't gotten it right yet, after all. Final session, critique yet again and back to the woodshed next summer, and so the cycle goes.
I hate the thought of seeing my students for the last time—the brilliant ones and not-so-brilliant and all the ones in between. I fear not being able to write those three or four books without young minds around to get my own intellectual stream flowing; but most of all, I dread that final session in which I lecture because there is no need for the usual hard-nosed critique, because there's no need for me to redo my courses that summer; and I STILL won't have gotten it right.
And with that cheerful thought, here endeth this meditation on my retirement lecture. Amen.
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At the time of this presentation, John Ogasapian was a professor in the Music Department, University of Massachusetts Lowell.