Academic

The Cardinal Lawyer: Memories and musings on a manic Monday

The image at right was posted on Facebook by Randy Blazak, a college classmate of mine who is now a member of a the sociology faculty at Portland State University. The picture is almost exactly a quarter-century old. It comes from the 1984-85 school year, when Randy was a senior and I was a sophomore at Emory University. The picture shows us recruiting on behalf of The Wheel, the campus newspaper. Among other things, I represented The Wheel at the 1984 meeting of College Media Advisers and the Intercollegiate Press Association. That meeting gave me my first (and quite obviously not my last) opportunity to visit Louisville.

Seeing Randy post that old picture, quite surprisingly, made me smile. I say surprisingly because I have long viewed virtually all of my student days, including those I spent at Harvard and definitely the days I spent at Emory, with a distinct lack of nostalgia, let alone genuine pleasure. If anything, I have thought about my student days in terms I draw from Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man (1915):

And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope . . . .

What accounted for the sudden shift in sentiment?

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Full post as published by University of Louisville Law Faculty on April 05, 2009 (boomark / email).