Teaching in the Twilight

T oward the end of last semester, I shared with my class in “Deep Reporting” an example of my work that had appeared in The Washington Post years earlier. It exposed the existence of a top-secret bunker where Congress was to go in the event of an impending nuclear attack. The site was buried beneath the luxurious Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

When class was over, one of my students approached me and uttered these memorable words, doubtless intended as a compliment: “Professor Gup,” she said, “I didn’t realize you were interesting.”

I took that to mean that she hadn’t realized I’d had a life. And no, self-awareness was not her strong suit. But I owe her a debt, for she reminded me that one can’t assume that merely being cogent, upright, and organized is enough to persuade the young of your vibrant personal and professional history and the value of your experience.

When you reach a certain age as a professor — as of this writing, I am a wizened if not wiser 66 — the students begin to regard you less as a human being and more as a fossil. In her eyes, I was the Iceman, the frozen mummy from 5,000 years ago discovered in the Italian Alps, my fur hat and flints intact.

I might be partly to blame for that perception because over the course of 30-plus years in the classroom, fearing an unseemly eruption of ego or a descent into antediluvian anecdotes, I have tried to avoid indulging in show-and-tell, preferring to focus on the writings and techniques of others. But you can go too far in concealing your own chops, obscuring that the principles you teach were absorbed in part through your own endeavors. In that sense, you might be shortchanging the very students you seek to shield from too much First Person Pronoun. It’s all about balance.

M y fear of the appearance, never mind the reality, of obsolescence is heightened right now because I am among the Undead, my term for “phased retirement.” I have another year on my contract before I surrender tenure, and am then — after a glass of Chablis, a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, and a card full of signatures — politely shown the door, feeling the collective sigh of relief from the junior faculty warming the back of my neck as I exit.

Of course, I have plans for myself. I intend to continue to write books, publish articles, and teach elsewhere as long as I am able. By “able,” I do not mean still standing, I mean effective. And that student who approached me after class was a hint that the metrics of effectiveness may change over time, that what served me well in my earlier decades as a virile young professor may not serve me so well in these later chapters. Once upon a time they could identify with me, my rising career, my surprise at events that elders recognized as cyclical, my foreshortened horizons that mimicked their own.

That makes sense. Students have changed, and, unmistakably, so have I.

Still, I am not ready to play the Yoda of the department. I remember William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Scholars,” and that line — “Bald heads, forgetful of their sins.” Not I. I cherish the memory of my sins and hope to add to them.

The one strength that seems to continually grow is the capacity for self-deception. I know I do not see myself as my students see me — if I did I might place myself on an ice floe and quietly disappear with the prevailing current.

But if my body is less agile, my mind is more so, and the concise clarity of youth has been replaced with muddier but more reliable truths reconciled to uncertainty and contradiction. The role of the press in our democracy, the superficiality of much of today’s reporting, the complex symbiotic relationship between those in power and those who cover them — all this makes for a less uplifting but more informed vision of the press. The Manichaean simplicity of the world I imagined in youth has yielded to a more realistic rendering of reality. And it was not until I was long in the tooth that I understood the indispensable place of failure in the curing of both career and character. These too are worth sharing with my young charges, for though they may ignore my life lessons, those lessons may nonetheless burrow in and years later, like a case of Lyme disease, express themselves in maturity. I know that my own exposure to elders in the classroom irritated my psyche sufficiently to demand an intellectual accounting even decades later.

When I was 21, I had the privilege of taking a course with the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson. He was then 75 and had retired from Harvard five years earlier. The course was on structuralism in Shakespeare’s sonnets. But as provocative and stimulating as the subject matter was, it was Jakobson himself that was the true subject. Daily he demonstrated that passion need not be extinguished by the years, that intellect can burn fierce deep into age, and that there is an unmatched beauty in witnessing someone truly possessed of a love for the life of the mind. I kept my notes, but it was the vision of him before the class, his arms waving, his unruly shock of white hair, his Slavic accent embossing itself on the sonnets, the very animation of his being, that is most unforgettable. I took that with me, as did my classmates.

Of course, at 21 I was prematurely old — Terence Brown, a professor of mine at Trinity in Dublin, once told me that I would never again be as old as when I was 21 — and already unknowingly preparing myself for today. As an English and classics major, I read my Cicero and his “Cato Maior de Senectute,” on aging and death, my Tennyson “Ulysses,” and a host of other works that gave me a glimpse over the horizon. Perhaps that too is a part of my role now, to demonstrate that one can bank the fires and keep the logs going deep into the night and well into the next morning.

I recently read a study that showed that two-thirds of those over 65 are retired. That means that I am already in the minority who press on not because my account needs padding but because of the profound pleasure of engaging young minds, of showing them an old man can still turn a phrase, provoke a fresh thought, and challenge a stereotype. The decrepitude of age that I so fear is the lassitude that comes with self-satisfaction, the ennui that blooms amid an inventory of past accomplishments. I prefer to chafe against unrealized ambitions, to suggest by example to my students that the pursuit of wisdom need not diminish, that the past is no more fictive, and no less crucial to understanding, than their teeming present or the future that glitters before them, as mine once did for me.

Ted Gup is a professor of journalism at Emerson College and a visiting lecturer at Brown University. His books include Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life (Doubleday, 2007).