This Is Why

This is why you do this job.

This is why you fight with the technology that doesn’t want to let you log in, refuses to get students registered, and insists on optimizing all of the things that already work just fine until they are shiny slabs of award-winning uselessness.

This is why you fill out the forms and collect the documentation and work your way through the bureaucracy hoping for an appeal to be granted here or a decision to go your way over there.

This is why you lower your head and persevere through the toxic right-wing politics that are forever seeking to undermine education and turn your campus into a corporate training center or an indoctrination camp.

This is why you answer emails at strange hours and grade essays on weekends.

This is why you keep a box of tissues on your table and an extra mug for tea and a stash of snacks in the drawers of your desk for those who need them to get through the day.

This is why.

It was commencement night down at Home Campus, and the graduates were recognized for their achievements. They sat through a brief but generally happy ceremony and walked across the stage to collect their diploma cases (they’ll get the actual diplomas mailed to them since the semester officially ended today at noon and you can’t print those things up that quickly if you want them to look nice). They wrote their names on little cards to hand to the person announcing them as they came up – because this is an achievement and they should have their names announced – and a lot of them took the chance to thank those who helped them: friends, family, professors, advisors. I even got a couple of shout-outs, which pretty much made my night right there.

They earned those degrees. They put in the work. They overcame the obstacles their lives put in front of them – and the next time some dingbat cable news talking head starts bloviating about coddled college kids I swear I will go ballistic – and they succeeded, often in the face of all sorts of national statistics that said they wouldn’t. Sometimes you have to stand up to the norms and do well anyway. They should be proud. The faculty and staff up there on stage applauding them certainly were.

I’ve been an advisor for six and a half years now – roughly a fifth of the time I’ve been teaching at one level or another. You get to know students better as an advisor, I find. You hear the background stories behind the things that they say (or don’t say) to their professors. You follow them through the ins and outs of their lives across semesters and across years. You want them to succeed.

Not all of them do. But enough.

This was the first in-person graduation ceremony held down at Home Campus since 2019, before the pandemic scrambled everything. The students who marched today mostly started their careers online, pixels on a screen from the depths of lockdown, and today they were able to shake hands on stage with the top administrator and have their friends and family cheer from the stands.

This is why you do this job.

Congratulations, graduates. May the world treat you well.