Ghosts - The View from Drexel Hall

Well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? My apologies for not posting more often in recent time, but this past month has been difficult. Just this last week, at Saint Joseph’s College, my employer, the class of 2018 would have started their last year, and the class of 2021 would have stepped onto the grounds to begin their journey. Due to the College’s suspension of operations in May, though, none of that has happened.

Academic lives have a rhythm where the feel of late July and early August conjures the premonitions of the year to come: creating syllabi, freshman moving in, imagining the first lectures, and overall feeling the energy build for the coming Fall, winter, and spring. Though the cicadas and katydids sang in the evening and the humid mists of dusk and morning came as they should this year, their advent heralded only the changing of the seasons. There were no crowds of students, no lectures, no meetings between colleagues in the halls. It’s like the melody to which my life was tuned suddenly stopped. It’s like a part of me is missing.

As many might know, not long after the May graduation, I was asked to join a small team called the “Phoenix Group” charged with rebuilding and reviving the school. We’re located in Drexel Hall, a building across the street from the main campus.

Besides a very early blog post, I haven’t really spoken about what it’s been like emotionally this summer, much less what it's like to be part of the Phoenix team, and, to be very, very clear, nothing I say here should be construed as reflecting anyone’s perspective save my own. But, to me at least, the physical and psychic location has been eerie: we are close enough to see the buildings and hear the chapel bells, but besides exceptional circumstances, we can’t go over there. This is the institution where I visited my father as a child, attended concerts and plays and games as a teenager, learned my calling in life as a student, met a beautiful, intelligent woman as the Student Association President, and then married her in the College chapel as a young man. Earning a PhD after a herculean academic struggle, it seemed like a “happy-ever-after” moment when the SJC hiring committee chose me to join the faculty in 2011. I still remember hanging up the phone, walking into the living room of our apartment, telling my wife that I’d gotten the job, and feeling her jump into my arms and cry. 

Little did we know what lay ahead.

Now, these memories sometimes drift across the road like restless ghosts, haunting me all the while as I try to help find paths ahead. On a ninety-degree day, I shiver, surrounded by the specters of what was lost. On February third, after the announcement, I went home and cried with my wife, this time for a different reason. On February sixth, ten minutes before my Core 8 lecture, I broke down again in my office. It’s been like that, even after I was invited to be part of the Phoenix Group, even after the initial rush of excitement for having the chance to forge and salvage something out of the College. Saint Joe changed my life and I want to give future generations of students the same opportunity.

What about my friends and colleagues? Survivor guilt is a real thing. Why me and not someone else? Why was I chosen to fight this battle and not someone else? And make no mistake, it has been a battle. There have been absurd rumors and conspiracy theories that would make even students of the JFK assassination blush: the College was closed to make way for a high school, Indiana University is buying the campus for five million dollars, every building will be bulldozed, dorms were refitted so that Chinese investors could buy the campus, and on and on. There have been scattershot social media posts about how evil our group is from people who would never have the courage to come see us face to face. The comments are all over the map, so it’s hard to keep them straight: we’re moving too slow, we’re moving too fast. Which is it? (Remember, it took decades for the College to decline into its ruinous financial state, so maybe it would be a good idea for us to take more than three months to carefully develop some plans to move forward?) We’ve either had secret plans all along, or we have no plans. Which is it? Then there’s been the hate mail (of all kinds) in my inbox. I won’t delve into all of it, but the most puzzling one is that, by joining this team, I am not a “true Puma.” As an academic, when someone says you are not a “true [whatever],” I can recognize this for what it is: a political/rhetorical strategy to dehumanize the one you are attacking as not really “one of us” and thereby deserving of the abuse that will follow. It is a tactic born of pain, of which there has been an abundance. And I know how it feels, because I was there. They're angry and they want someone to pay and to bleed, even if it's the very people who are doing everything they can to try to bring the school back.

That's how I can see it as an academic. How I see it as a flesh and blood person is another matter. It stings and it hurts. I wish it didn’t, but it does. When messages go unreturned or colleagues I have known since I was a student turn away or pretend not to recognize me in public, it isn’t easy.

Strangely, at those moments, the lowest moments, when it feels as though I am in a pit all alone, I know why I was picked for this task: I love the College. I know and love Core. I’m creative. I’m smart as hell. And I’m also a stubborn son of a bitch who won’t give up, even when there are people not just refusing to help, but actively rooting for our failure. They needn’t expend the energy. We won’t fail. We won’t let that happen.

Not when all these ghosts are watching us.

Since there’s so much to do, I can’t guarantee regular blog posts for a while. But I will try to be more consistent, and also return the tone to lighter fare. Until then, good luck with all the trials all of you are undoubtedly dealing with, whatever they may be, and please take care.

“Tell the Devil he can go back from where he came.

His fiery arrows drew their bead in vain.

When the hardest part is over, we’ll still be here,

And our dreams will break the boundaries of our fear.”

                                                --Brandon Flowers, “Crossfire”