white board

On the wall of my office in Armstrong Hall hangs a large white board. I didn’t ask for it, and at first I was not sure what to do with its shiny expanse (I don’t teach classes in my office!), but over time I’ve learnt to appreciate its invitation to scribble as a mode of thinking. Over the year my white board becomes a visual archive for spurts of brainstorming, as well as my external memory. Sometimes though it’s simply a prod to amusement, a place for odd thoughts and jocular messages. At the end of each year I clear the board and start anew.

On Monday I gave my office its annual deep cleaning, moving stacks of accumulated brochures and handouts and mail to recycling; moving some of the many items I receive as gifts and tokens on to new owners or Goodwill; placing stacks of books into bookshelves; wiping down a year of dust and detritus. This purge and cleansing helps me to enter the new year with a sense of possibility, of starting again. Before I wiped down the whiteboard, I took a picture with my iPhone to archive the year that has been.

You can see the image above, with some information blocked out since it is not about me and not mine to share. Fernando the Fox (at the top) is a cute little creature often seen sunning himself in the patio by Armstrong Hall, as well as in a tree by the Piper Center for Creative Writing. He once walked by me outdorrs, close and indifferent. A student shouted from nearby “Look at that baby coyote!” Various people call the fox various names, but I wrote Fernando down after an informal office vote decided that this would be, for us, his.

You can also see a Humanities Week frisbee hanging on a magnet, some of the copious swag we distribute during an annual October celebration of the humanities at ASU. The design is by the DC based artist MasPaz, who created the image to celebrate our home in the Sonoran desert. The frisbee states “Humanities Week” but this one was altered slightly by a friend to read “Humanities Hurts” after I accidentally hit a student while throwing it (I apologized to the student immediately and also told him he’d been chosen by the frisbee to become a Philosophy major; he seemed taken aback).

Other items on the board include a page ripped from a Dad Joke Calendar, a gift from a friend who knows that I admire the genre without being much good at its delivery. The Social Sciences line at the bottom initially read "Social Sciences Scentury" because someone in that division thought they could compete with our Humanities Week. I later changed the line to “Social Sciences Scecond” — and then in time to “Social Sciences Scircus” because, truth.

And the message about leading a good life? I wrote that last February when I was ruminating over various proposals to measure the worth of college degrees by the starting salaries of specific majors. Higher education has become so mired in a utility based argument that a college degree leads to a well-paying career that we have ended up asserting that college is about earning more than learning. Leading a good life -- a life that is satisfying, and a life that accomplishes good in the world -- is the truest measure of success. If education’s outcomes are measured by starting wage rather than expansion of horizons, enlargement of the world, art for the sake of art, then we have lost our way. Don’t get me wrong: every student who graduates from college should be well equipped to lead a life of financial security for themselves and their family. I’m an ardent believer in integrating career thinking into humanities degree — I designed and teach a course called “Your Degree in the World.,” after all. But I also believe that a sense of self agency, purpose, historical grounding and future-focused creativity derives directly from humanities study.

Happy 2026.