This is my last day in front of students at Bemidji State University. End of what I had expected would be a "career" teaching there. I'm not done teaching. Next year I'll be working at Saint Paul College while I work to get my direct-to-learner content off the ground. I have a whole year to ramp that up, so it will either happen or it won't in 2024-5. I don't think I'm really going to miss teaching at BSU that much. There were occasional bright moments when I got to guide talented History majors, but BSU attracted just a tiny number of students who wanted to pursue History, so these opportunities were sparser than they might have been. It's not at all clear to me that BSU even ought to have a History major. Seems like the system would be well advised to start encouraging its universities to focus on areas of particular expertise or geographic advantage and rely on sister institutions for the things they don't do particularly well. That might mean first identifying what students want to study and then divvying up those subjects to the universities. Might mean, however, that the number of universities in the Minnesota State system we have isn't the number we need.
It has been a long road from receiving the notification that I was losing my job at BSU in this retrenchment to today. My official employment isn't quite done yet; that will happen in a week or so. But this seems like the coda. For the first couple of months of this "lame duck" academic year, I was a bit angry and focused on things the university's administration had screwed up that led to the school's financial disaster. There were plenty of things to complain about, as the people managing BSU were remarkably inept and self-satisfied. But after a while, I lost interest. There's a lot more that could be said, but I'll leave it to someone who cares.
And in any case, along the way it occurred to me that in the journey of my own life, this is a minor event. And that chance is...just chance. I got this job when a tenured professor was unable to return from her sabbatical due to illness (I've been unable to locate an obituary, so I hope retirement improved her health!). I'm quite lucky that I'm ending my career here in good health and not leaving because I can't continue working! Furthermore, let's just say (to avoid superstition) "Luck gives, and Luck takes away". I can't exactly complain about the latter when I was all too happy to take the former. And finally, neither is a reflection on my value. Both were just luck.
Last Day at BSU