“Nothing is written in stone,” says the old Irish adage. “The future is yours to create with your own hands.” When the sun comes up on the next day, if the adage is true, we get a second chance. The same is true of a new semester. No matter what happened last fall, spring offers Read More
Murray State becomes a whirlwind of activity in the spring. Many students survive the experience, some find their grades in shambles and some missed the whole thing. I weep for this last group. Look at the spring: the close of basketball season, Campus Lights, step show, Spring Break, Miss MSU, All-Campus Sing, dance concert, baseball, Read More
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. An excerpt of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (1922) “I, The Burial of the Dead” I don’t know what T. S. Eliot was so upset about. April might not be the greatest Read More
There is time enough to learn more before you graduate college in May, especially if it’s not May of 2014. As we mentioned in this space last week, you also have time to unlearn some things. For instance, earlier this year a young man of my acquaintance proudly announced that he had given up the Read More
There is time enough to learn more before you graduate in May, especially if it’s not May of 2014. There’s also time to unlearn some things. That’s right: as much as we come to college to learn things, as we hit the interview trail seeking the job of a lifetime, there are a couple of Read More
Spring Break has come and gone. We enter now into a season of the year that is not quite spring and decidedly not winter. We are either refreshed or exhausted, depending upon how we spent our precious Spring Break, and we have returned to the job of pushing back the frontiers of ignorance. Sometimes, as Read More
Spring Break has come. This long-standing seasonal phenomenon is actually a relatively new arrival on the long list of university traditions. We rarely pause to think about its origins, so happy are we to hit the snow-lined trail to the Tennessee border and points south. Very, very south. In fact, paleolithic man (and woman) did Read More
Slowly but surely, a language virus of the most virulent kind has worked its way east from the valleys of California, carried on the air by television and radio, until almost no one under 40 years of age is able to express any sentiment that is less than “total.” I noticed it a few years Read More