Today is my last day of work as associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Although my official date of separation from employment by the Commonwealth of Virginia is September 1, today is my Rikki Lee Jones Day, i.e., “is this the Real End?” Yes it is.

I started school in Mrs. Wills’ first grade class in the fall of 1963. I’ve been in school for sixty-one of the sixty-two years since that fateful first matriculation. Primary school student, secondary school student, undergraduate student, graduate student, graduate teaching assistant, visiting instructor, assistant professor, associate professor (first tenure: 1998), professor, associate professor (from teaching institution to research institution), and after today, retired faculty. Sixty-one years of of first being in school then, in the fullness of time, being school.

That missing year was the year I worked full-time as a radio announcer (what we used to call a disc jockey) at WFVA AM/FM, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Another story for another time, perhaps.

While I was not surprised to find myself in graduate school, I confess I was quite surprised to find that I not only greatly enjoyed teaching but was actually pretty good at it, if student testimony can be believed. I was told teachers needed the gift of patience, a gift I do not have, so I never really considered I’d end up in the classroom as well as the library, or lab, or some kind of school-adjacent location. But if I go back to that first discussion-group-leader experience in grad school, I’ve been teaching since the spring of 1981, with a hiatus from 1988-1990 while I worked to put my wife through library school–a welcome respite from my near-crippling dissertation anxiety.

In the fall of 1990, at last embarked upon serious, sustained dissertation-writing, I got a gig as a visiting instructor of English at the University of Richmond. Two years later my wife and our toddler moved to San Diego for my first tenure-track job as an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego. In 1994 we returned to Virginia for my job (same rank and role) at Mary Washington College. Aside from one brief and unhappy interlude in the fall of 2006 when I gave up faculty status to lead a teaching-learning technology center, I was at Mary Wash until 2008. Then on to Baylor University for 2 1/2 years, then to Virginia Tech for 2 1/2 years, then in 2013 to my appointment as associate professor of English and vice-provost for learning innovation and student success at VCU. The administrative role ended in April, 2016 and I’ve been full-time in the English department here since then. One day perhaps I will write my memoir, Professor: A Life In Higher Education. Or maybe I’ll just blog it all here. Or both.

I’ve saved a lot of things from that sixty-one year run. Well, my mother saved most of the early stuff, until I left home for college. I saved the undergraduate and graduate work I was most proud of. I saved all my graduate school notebooks (some of my undergrad notebooks too, I think–I haven’t cataloged everything). There are some things that saw print and I have copies of those of course. I have some presentations up on YouTube. And I saved most, perhaps all, of students’ evaluation of my teaching.

Here today, at one of the Real Ends, I record for posterity one of the earliest evaluations I received as a full-time faculty member. It’s from that first gig, the one at the University of Richmond. It’s not dated, but I believe it’s from that first semester of full-time teaching, in the fall of 1990.

The page is torn from a spiral-bound notebook and folded in half. On the outside, in large capital letters, the student, obviously concerned that the words not affect any grading, wrote DO NOT OPEN ‘TIS CHRISTMAS. (Editing is hard: I’d read TILL until just now.) Inside, the student wrote the following (note: English 251 was a one-semester survey of British Literature from Beowulf to Swift, or thereabouts):

Evaluation      English 251     Campbell

Brit Lit was really good. I learned alot.

I came to the class with no expectations. I was not disappointed.

Seriously, folks, 251 was one of the best classes I’ve had in my three years at UR. Campbell was amazing – it was like being taught by a whirlwind. He was gushing with energy, so mixing the metaphor, he was like a lawn sprinkler gone mad. Together with Rilling in the history department. Campbell was the best teacher I’ve ever had. He had the material cold, could think on his feet, and always was accepting of student input. This last attribute is important, for crushing a student causes all the others to clam up, ending debate.

If I could change the class, I’d get more discussion, as good as the lecture was. Also, my penmanship didn’t improve much during 251.

Anyway, thanks. Good class.

That’s obviously the kind of encouragement any teacher would love to get, especially from a student. At the same time, I can assure you that I have received student evaluations on the other end of the spectrum, some of them diagnosing my numerous shortcomings quite accurately. And of course sometimes there’s just a bad mismatch between teacher and student. Not every student responds well to whirlwinds or lawn sprinklers gone mad.

That said, I’ve always thought that the student at UR described my classroom temperament quite well and identified the strengths I wanted to have and hoped I might. (The student was also probably right that I needed to speak a little less. I’m not sure I improved much in that regard, alas.) In the thirty-five years since I taught that class, even at my lowest points I kept trying to improve my mastery of the material, to think on my feet more beneficially as I responded to student input, and turn my gushing energy into a shared experience of joy that would lift the classes’ spirits no matter what they thought about me or the course. School at its best was always a place of great joy for me and sharing that joy was always essential to my vocation as a professor.

Sometimes over the years I’d be asked about my teaching philosophy. I’d usually respond by quoting a line from Citizen Kane. Kane’s guardian asks him, “what do you know about running a newspaper?” Kane responds, “I don’t know anything about running a newspaper. I just try everything I can think of.” The answer is a little disingenuous: Kane clearly knew something about running a newspaper, and I think I retire knowing something about teaching. But trying everything I could think of seems a just description of how I made my way through this essential part of my life’s work.

My thanks to my family for loving and supporting this whirlwind, my colleagues for at least tolerating it, and my students for constantly inspiring me to think of new things to try. Adieu!

Postscript: courses taught

Graduate Courses

Virginia Commonwealth University: Form and Theory of Poetry; Studies in British Literature (Milton), Intertextuality. MA directed studies in weird fiction, Milton studies; directed study in form and theory of poetry; MATX Ph.D. directed study in film adaptations of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House

Virginia Tech: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet (cross-listed with Honors).

Undergraduate Courses

Upper Level (300-400 or equivalent)

Virginia Commonwealth University: Milton (ENGL 403), Form and Theory of Poetry (ENGL 445), Mythology and Folklore (ENGL/ANTH 364), Senior Seminar: Errol Morris (ENGL 499), Early Modern Literature (ENGL 325), The Rise of Social Media (ENGL 391. AMST 391, NEXT 383), Fiction into Film (ENGL 385).

Virginia Tech: Cognition, Learning, and the Internet (cross-listed as a graduate course, GRAD 5984); From Memex to YouTube: Introduction to New Media Studies (Honors Colloquium).

Baylor University: The Art of Film /Film, Text, and Culture.

Mary Washington College/University of Mary Washington:  From Memex to YouTube: Introduction to New Media Studies; Milton (seminar); Studies in Poetry (seminar); John Donne (seminar); Renaissance and Baroque Literature; Sixteenth-Century British Literature; Seventeenth-Century British Literature; Film, Text, and Culture; Shakespeare’s Early Plays; Shakespeare’s Late Plays; British Literature to 1800; individual study projects in digital film production and editing, Milton, Donne, Atom Egoyan, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and “neo-Hitchcockians,” Internet Writing, Screenwriting, and Film Editing: Theory and Practice.

Advanced Studies In England (Bath, UK): “The Lives, Times, and Works of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick” (2000); “Rock/Soul/Progressive: Transatlantic Currents in Popular Music, 1955-present” (2003).

University of San Diego: Milton, Survey of Shakespeare, Sixteenth-Century Studies, Seventeenth-Century Studies.

Lower Level (100-200 or equivalent)

Virginia Commonwealth University: Inquiry and the Craft of Argument (UNIV 200: special digital engagement pilot titled “Living the Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds”), Reading Film (ENGL 250), British Literature to 1800 (ENGL 203).

Baylor University: From Memex to YouTube: Introduction to New Media Studies (First-Year Honors Seminar).

Mary Washington College/University of Mary Washington:  Introduction to Literary Studies; Introduction to Poetry; Introduction to Film Studies; Narrative Form in Fiction and Film; Global Issues in Literature–International Science Fiction; The Art of Literature; Myth in Literature; Literature in Performance; Writing Workshop; Rock/Soul/Progressive: Transatlantic Crossings in Popular Music 1955-Present.

University of San Diego: American Fiction and Film; Freshman Composition; Poetry; British Literature to 1800.

University of Richmond: Introduction to Film; British Literature to 1800; Freshman Composition.

Smithsonian Institution Continuing Education Program

“The Literary Face of Evil,” six-lecture series, January 29-March 5, 2002. Lecture schedule included Beowulf, “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1984, and The Silence of the Lambs. (I got the gig in part because in my application I asked regarding Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, “why didn’t they just pull his teeth”)

Commonwealth Governor’s School (Spotsylvania and Stafford Counties, as well as Colonial Forge)

“Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.” Guest lecture, September 19, 2024.
“Reading Film.” Guest lecture, January 27, 2025
“Film Studies.” Guest lecture, January 29, 2024
“Film Studies.” Guest lecture, February 6, 2023
“Introduction to Film Studies,” Guest lecture, July 8-12, 2002
“Creative Expression Workshop” (writing, music, web authoring), July 9-13, 2001