It has been a year since I left the halls of Albertson College, saying good-bye to stacks of composition papers, faculty assemblies, classrooms echoing with cell-phone melodies, and a salary.

Some of Albertson College I don’t miss a bit. Gone are the nightmares where I realized I had somehow forgotten to teach one of my classes for a whole semester. Gone were the wide-awake four a.m. sessions of paranoia that had me convinced some colleagues were evil space aliens, who betrayed their true identities by raising time-wasting points of order in faculty meetings when they weren’t out stomping invasion instructions into local wheat fields. Gone are the 75 or so emails that waited for me every morning, pushing my thoughts through the dark doorways of promotion evaluations, grade reports, faculty handbooks, student stalkers, graduation requirements, cheap Viagra/Vicodin/Valium, and urgent requests for my account information from banks I never heard of.

Some of Albertson College I miss a lot. Gone is the sense of being a part of a good small college. Gone are colleagues who brightened my life and who, by their presence, continued my education into my late adulthood. Gone are students who astonished me with their courage, intelligence, hard work, humor, and virtue. Gone is the intoxicating sense of fighting for truth and beauty and the Liberal Arts against ignorance, superstition, envy, sloth, lust for power, greed, and vanity.

Now when I return to the campus in Caldwell, I note that just one year out I know far less than half the students I see, and after a couple years more I won’t know any at all. New folks are in the administrative offices. New people are in Campus Safety uniforms, driving little golf carts up and down the sidewalks, sending pedestrians diving into the bushes for safety. They give me the wary once-over that security people on college campuses give silvertipped old men who may or may not be there visiting their granddaughters.

Only my former colleagues seem not to have changed. Seeing them on campus or in the hallways as they talk to students reminds me that for faculty, time is circular. One occupational hazard of teaching college is that your habits, mannerisms, speech patterns, tics, and the deathless contents of your intellect can get trapped forever in amber, and it’s only the shockingly youthful pictures in a decade-old yearbook remind you that time has a linear dimension as well. Put another way, faculty members are like those mythical Sibyls who successfully bargained with the gods for eternal life but forgot to include eternal youth in the deal.

“Even the faces on the students begin to repeat themselves,” an older colleague once told me. His students had graduated and gone away and had children and those children had ended up back in his classes, so there was a genetic basis for his remark.

No children of former students showed up in my classes, possibly because I kept telling my students how expensive children could be and all the nice things they could buy and do if they didn’t have kids. I did begin to notice that the same students kept showing up in my classes long after I thought they had graduated.

“What are you doing back here?” I would ask them. Some of them had missed graduating and were back for a last few credits. But others would tell me that they were in their first semester, and I would realize I’d taught enough classes that virtually any new student had a passing resemblance to someone who had been assimilated into the Borg-cube of my memory.