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Editor's Column
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e remember them as kids. They shuffle through our classes in bluejeans, baseball caps, sweatshirts, jogging suits, in what looks like P.E. gear when they haven’t had time to get the laundry done, in shorts and tank tops when the Coleman Hall air conditioning won’t work, in spiffy windbreakers sometimes when they are pledging a fraternity or sorority, with pony-tails pulled back through the cap and a new scrunchy. In discussions they mope, dawdle, stammer, always giving too much or too little, filling up clause after clause with um and ya know and like and kind of, but then suddenly, more rarely, casting aside the constraints of Peer-Decreed Inarticulateness (that iron code!) in a flight of ill-advised vehemence that yearns to be eloquence. And all the while those lithe quick movements, those faces clear as unlined paper, that ready laughter, that speech so quick and easy whenever they’re not thinking about it. What is charming about them, always, is their diffidence: their seeming utter confusion about their own strengths and weaknesses, the way they teeter between eagerness to excel and despair that they can manage it, the way they want you to straighten it out for them, the way they long for your approval, seeming to believe—incredibly, preposterously—that you have some of the answers in life. Experience, over the years, whispers that they are not really here for you, but for each other, for the experience, the place, the time, for jobs afterwards. But never mind. Sometimes they really are listening, and to no one but you. Whether anything we have planned for their four-year visit really works, God knows. We all have our theories, we all do our best, but in the end education is so complex, so irreducibly mysterious, that no one can really tell you how a student gets from A to B. What is it that changes the gawky mumbler making a hash of her assigned report to the self-possessed Vice President of Operations, wowing the board room a decade later? Did the ideas and facts we harped on, the papers we so dutifully assigned and graded, have anything to do with it? Somehow it happens, and that is all we know. After a century of extensively funded research, debates over curriculum still recall the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, and pedagogy, for the most part, remains obstinately a matter of faith rather than measurement. But one day they come back, and that is always a treat. Their clothes are pressed and they finish their sentences. They seem to have grown taller. They speak credibly of jobs mastered, trips taken, degrees received, of families and businesses and projects and all the great world beyond Charleston. The sensation, as I finally realize now that my kids are grown, is very much like a visit from your own children. You just can’t get enough of them. Everything you have tried, everything you have planned for them, seems to have succeeded beyond your hopes. You were right all the time. Right there in front of you is a straight-A report card, in a semester when you were only expecting to pull a 3.5. Sometimes, in fact, your returning former students are simply too good. They tell jokes with an aplomb you envy. They drive cars you could not afford. They have run marathons or opened restaurants. Cruelest of all, they have written poems, essays, stories, or whole books that you could not have written. With that, a kind of sinking vertigo sets in. How did they get so smart, so soon? Where was all this wit and talent and sure judgment, back in the days when they were bumbling through your classes, deferential to a fault, with their panicky yes sirs and no sirs and Professors? Was it all some kind of act? An elaborate con game with an object that, even now, you cannot guess? Did they never really need you at all? For a moment there descends over you the bleak certainty that, somehow, you have been had. But
then comes a thought that saves everything: they paid you;
they, and their parents, and the government. They really did. Not
much of course, but by cracky you got paid—paid!—for their
transformation from ducklings to swans, from tyros to savants. Apparently
nearly everyone subscribes to the mad notion that you, somehow, were
responsible for making it happen. This last Agora of Volume 28 is a kind of cyber-literary Homecoming, bringing together seven EIU English Department alumni, all of whom have gone on from the stuffy seminar rooms of Coleman to become publishing authors in the great world beyond. (Jay Prefontaine’s award-winning short story didn’t fit the concept, but was simply too good not to snap up when we could get it. Besides, it doesn’t hurt to show that the faculty still has a trick or two up its sleeve.) Gathering and arranging all this excellent work has been a great pleasure, albeit a strenuous one, because the collective bounty makes this, by a considerable margin, the longest Agora ever. Of the alumni authors, all but Jeff Vande Zande were my students at some point, and yet it has been a continuous astonishment to read their recent work, to see just how good they have become. How it has happened I can’t begin to guess. If you want to give me some of the credit, though, go right ahead—and take some for yourself. Enjoy, everyone, and come back from your summer vacations with pictures. We’ll put them in News and Views in September. —J.K.
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