My Last Day at my Last Full-time Job

Two years ago, I would be settling into what I thought would be a regular day as campus president at the Hollywood campus of City College--no, not that City College, not the famous, respected one in New York City, but the one that trained students for medical and medical adjacent careers.  Think medical assistants, vet techs, EMTs, that sort of thing.  I would settle in to my job, not realizing it was going to be my last day on the job.

I must confess, it wasn't a complete surprise.  The campus was being remodeled, and all the pressure for me to move my files and supplies into the president's office stopped two weeks before I was let go. I pushed back on the plan to combine the library and the medical assisting lab just two days before I was let go.   And for a year and a half before the end of the job, there was much reorganizing and then undoing and then reorganizing again.

Almost nobody with whom I worked remains there; we've all been let go or left of our own volition. Almost all of the campuses have closed.  Most puzzling was the Miami campus, which was moved to a different facility and underwent what looked like very expensive renovations to me, was open for a year, give or take three months, and then abruptly shuttered.  Most of the programs that were part of the school when I came to the campus are no longer in existence.  I have no idea how or if the campuses that remain are making money, but there is still a web presence.

I am not sorry I lost that job.  In fact, lately I've been feeling sorrow that I stayed in administration as long as I did.  I have administrator skills, which not everyone does, but those tasks do not bring me joy.  And my goodness, the toxic and broken people who are in administration!  It's a job hazard that I never considered.  I may be extraordinarily lucky, but in all my time in a variety of schools across several states, I've never seen faculty/librarians/staff who are as broken and toxic as some of the administrators and corporate types that don't teach.

Because of that job loss, other doors have opened, and I've been able to walk through them.  I've had the experience of living on a seminary campus, and we now have a paid for house in the North Carolina mountains--both of those are dreams come true.  I've been able to be a part-time minister, a job that has been even more rewarding than I expected, and I expected it to be rewarding.  I've gotten a part-time job teaching English classes at Spartanburg Methodist College--at last, I'm at the small, liberal arts college that was my career goal when I went to grad school.

On Thursday, I helped a student with an essay which was about navigating high school during the Covid years.  For a brief moment, I was staggered by all the losses contained in those years.  Instead of weeping, I said to the student, "Be sure to keep this essay.  Some day, you'll have grandchildren or grandnieces and grandnephews who will want to know this history, and you won't remember.  But you'll have it written down."

For much the same reason, I write about the upheavals in my life.  It's good to remember.  And it's good to feel gratitude, even in the midst of loss and upheaval.