In October of 2016, four members of the music faculty, including me, were told their positions were being eliminated, effective at the beginning of the next academic year. We were called in for a morning meeting, the president announced the decision, and we were sent on our way. I remember two of my colleagues went home after the meeting. I chose to stay and teach my classes. It was, to say the least, a difficult afternoon.
The next seven months were a time of reflection and coming to terms with the end of a long career in higher education. Fortunately, I worked with many wonderful students and taught several productive classes that year. So, while I would have preferred to teach a few more years, all in all it was not a bad send-off.
There was nothing to be gained by getting angry or fighting the decision. The university was clearly in financial trouble, and demographics had begun to catch up with questionable decisions made a decade or two before I left. All that remained was for me to be as professional as possible and to do my best to educate my students.
About a week after I learned my position was ending; I was scheduled to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at an outdoor function near the main administration building. The president saw me there and told me he didn’t expect me to play. I simply said something like, “Well, I try to keep my commitments.” And so it went for the rest of the year.
It was a bittersweet day when I cleared out my office. 37 years of books, scores, recordings, teaching aids, and memorabilia had to go. It was a matter of “throw away, give away, or take home.” When I was done, I took a photo of my empty office and closed the door on a large part of my life. I still feel a mix of emotions whenever I look at that photo. Gratitude, nostalgia, satisfaction, disappointment, joy, sadness, and a tinge of regret over the students I could not reach.
Lately I’ve been thinking about The Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Whenever someone displeased her, she shouted, “Off with his head!” Curiously, nobody’s head rolled. It seems to me the petulant queen represents our outrage when things don’t go our way. I admit I sometimes get the feeling the world would run better if only everyone did things my way.
How many times per day are we tempted to become incensed over some mangled version of reality? The internet even calls it “rage bait.” How many times would we shout, “Off with their heads!” if we had the power? But what would that solve? All the annoying heads being off, what would we do if the same problems remained? Maybe the only question worth asking is, “what should we do when things don’t happen our way?”
Like Lewis Carroll, we are aware of people in high places who are agents of chaos. Carroll described The Queen of Hearts as “a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury.” The Queen oversaw a game of croquet in which the rules made no sense and were subject to whimsical change, to make sure she would win. We have a reality TV star, a would-be king, who spreads confusion and division and is obsessed with winning. When the rules don’t suit him, he changes them. He demands absolute loyalty. Whenever anyone crosses him, or doesn’t treat him “nicely,” he brands them an enemy of the state and demands that they be prosecuted. While he “thanks” us for our “attention,” he constantly proclaims his authority. And his actions often remind us how little control we have over what happens to us.
All we can do in this situation is what Alice did: Call out the “nonsense” and try to be the best people we can be. This is how Alice defied The Queen of Hearts. There are times when we all need to defy unreasonable authority. I’m reminded of the words of Epictetus:
“We cannot control the things that happen to us, but we can control our reactions to them.”
MurrayWorks 