Another fine mess.

I had my moment of reality regarding generative AI in my chemistry and physics classes this past term.

I’ve always had the student frustration “I can’t Google your homework problems!” as a point of pride in my teaching. I’ve always authored my own homework problems as a scholarly outcome of my teaching, and used them for my own pedagogical needs within an open-source LMS rather than somebody else’s proprietary homework server. I’ve revised what I’ve assigned with student needs at the center, with my priority always giving students the kind of practice that would build their skills in the physical sciences and help generate a level of sophistication towards problem-solving that would serve them regardless of where their education directed them.

So I always would laugh with students who took multiple attempts to complete my homework sets or an exceptionally long time to work out one problem or another. “Do you think you’re threatening the record?” I’d jovially say, and tell tales of students gone by who would make their own attempts to game my system, submitting bull answers and getting the correct answers, reverse-engineering the correct solutions, and FINALLY getting right answers – and developing their problem-solving instinct all the while. 

The message was communicated and understood by the students – the effort put into understanding the homework, in whatever terms they chose to understand the homework, was always going to be worth it. And I held up my end of the bargain. The homework problems prepared students for questions that turned up on exams. The more practice the students got, the more prepared they were for the problem-solving they had to demonstrate proficiency in. Student evaluations of teaching aren’t perfect measures of satisfaction, but I got more compliments for my system than complaints. 

And this semester, all that collapsed. 

Many more solutions were submitted correctly on first attempt. Many of those attempts required minutes, even seconds, on the student’s part, rather than hours or days. Despite all my attempts to persuade and maintain status quo, I knew the gig was up when a student submitted correct answers to randomly generated percent yield and limiting reagent stoichiometry problems – the historic stumbling block in developing understanding – and submitted those correct answers 68 seconds after first seeing the problems. 

That student didn’t do the problems by themself, or even with the help of an expert tutor. Again, these chemical equations and mass amounts were randomly generated. Something technological had to be helping. 

And that’s how I used Chat-GPT for the first time myself, throwing my own ethical and moral concerns to the site, and input a randomly generated homework problem of my own to be solved. 

And I got an immaculate solution in return. 

The computers can do the students’ homework for them. And not just grammatically correct (if a bit nonsensical) essays, but conceptually rigorous problems in physics and chemistry. It amounts to a sea change in how I have to assume students are approaching work that they do outside of the classroom.

And if the rewards that students receive are at a certain level for using Chat-GPT rather than doing the work that historically has been necessary to build their problem-solving skill, then students – who have always been at least a little bit cynical in how they employ their efforts – are absolutely going to take the shortcut if they won’t be caught for taking it.

It undermines, fundamentally, the trust I need to have in my students in order to make my classroom environment work.  

And without that trust, what I do in the classroom just doesn’t work.

—

If it was any old technology that was undermining trust in this way, it would be bad enough. 

It’s not any old technology. Generative AI is an unethical technology in any way it is sliced. 

Ignore the implications for teaching and pedagogy for a moment. We already have multiple evidences that the environmental impact of generative AI usage is staggering, and there is an increasing consensus that generative AI usage is going to cause tech companies to junk their goals towards carbon-neutrality and might prove a tipping point towards missing climate change goals. It’s true that other technological usage requires the presence of data centers and also taxes the environment – and frankly, this moment might cause the reconsideration of that kind of technology usage as well. But specific generative AI activities, such as image generation, are genuinely oppressive. The prevalence of generative AI is a threat to the health of the planet. 

Not only is the training of generative AI natural resource-intensive, it is human resource-intensive, and human trainers have been consistently underpaid and discounted in the development of the quality of output. An Time exposé on Kenyan worker exploitation by OpenAI is now two years old, and has not been responded to in any sort of way that provides reparation. That exploitation fits into a pattern of abuse of labor in the developing world by American tech companies, exploitation that is termed by those captured in that work “modern-day slavery”. 

And this exploitation is of a piece with the respect for human labor that those who promote AI demonstrate. Generative AI is powered by large-language models and image libraries, and the text and images that allow generative AI to move forward are consistently used without permission of those who did the creative work in the first place – causing the very concept of copyright law to be under substantial question. And the tech companies that use them admit that they need copyrighted works in order to train their tools – in fact, they will freely argue in court that free access to copyrighted works is necessary to maintain the development of generative AI. 

Stolen intellectual property, abuse and exploitation of labor, and accelerating environmental damage. It should be abundantly clear that there isn’t an ethical case for using generative AI. Period. The harms that the development of this technology have perpetuated and continue to perpetuate, if they were known fully and discussed freely, would horrify. 

Those harms are not known fully, and they’re not discussed freely. We’ve been trained from very early ages, all of us, to be in awe of science and technology and to support its development. We’re encouraged to assume that tech lords like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos – and now, Sam Altman of OpenAI – have our best interests at heart, and the free implementation of new technology will always serve to improve day-to-day life. Damage to humans and damage to the environment is swept under the rug by people who have been trained to be respectful when the topic is technology – and, subtly, who have been trained to be unquestioning when the topic is technology.

We need to ask questions about how this technology got here. We need to ask questions about what this technology is doing to our world. 

And we need to ask questions about how this technology impacts our humanity. 

—

The thing that bothers me the most about generative AI is the impact it’s having on my student’s mentality. 

Some of those homework assignments that couldn’t be Googled were big things. They were not easy things for my students to accomplish. So when they were accomplished, there was celebration and satisfaction in the effort. I still keep a video a couple of students from a different place sent me after a 9 points out of 10 effort on a chemical nomenclature drill-and-kill exercise. They’d worked, and they’d built instinct for naming compounds. And they sang about it on video to me. There was real joy in the accomplishment.

I still saw some of that from upper-division biochemistry students as I went through this term, as they rebuilt their instinct for solution stoichiometry and buffering, topics that were never easy for me and that I know aren’t easy topics from them.

I got none of that satisfaction from my lower-division students this term. Homework assignments were quietly completed. I got very few moments from students feeling the satisfaction of accomplishing a difficult thing. And in many cases, I know that’s because they never had that satisfaction. They simply got points from submitting answers that ChatGPT gave them. 

When that belief that comes from accomplishing a big thing is realized, and internalized, it becomes self-sustaining motivation. What happens to that belief when the student realizes that a computer can solve the problem set so much more quickly and effectively than their first effort? Why do the exercise at all? What is being learned from it?

This isn’t an issue for one discipline or another, but for the entire academic enterprise. What happens to belief when a student can rely on Chat-GPT for a well-written essay? For a business plan? For a literature survey? 

(No, Chat-GPT can’t do all of these things. Yet. But the genie is escaping the bottle. I didn’t believe a year ago that Chat-GPT would reach the point where someone could credibly say that it was as good as, possibly better than, a well-written general chemistry solutions manual. If the technology moves forward without restriction, it may well be just a matter of time.)

A recent study by the Swiss academic Michael Gerlich from the journal Societies about the impacts of AI usage introduces the term cognitive offloading. The question begged by that phrase is simple: when people turn to generative AI to complete complex tasks, and thereby give over the work of those tasks to a computer, how does that impact their capacity to critically engage with the world around them?

That study built out the hypothesis that the more somebody uses AI tools, the weaker their critical thinking skills get. There was substantial evidence gathered in the study gathering information about participants’ use of AI tools and both self-assessed and systematically assessed critical thinking skills. All of the evidence gathered supported the idea that people used AI to intentionally give up tasks that required serious thought, and those people’s critical thinking suffered as a result. 

The thing that makes me worry is how much these people are giving up the very mental tasks that make them human. The feedback this study received from its participants brought forward observations that marveled at the time savings AI was providing them, and that actively worried about the loss of their capacity to respond to the world around them. Students worried that they were losing something very fundamental as well as they handed over their problem-solving to an algorithm.

It occurs to me that there are a lot of us in STEM fields who need to be thinking about our fields not as technical disciplines where problems need to be solved by any means at the students’ disposal, but as liberal arts where the path the student takes to the solution is as important as the solution itself. If only the answer matters, then absolutely we should be employing technology in any way we can. We need to take the attitude that it isn’t just the answer that matters. 

And the very nature of the technology itself is the evidence that the answer isn’t the important thing. How the answer is obtained, how much damage is done by the technology doing the answering, how much does the student lose by not exercising the tools they have to do the answering? 

When everything is said and done, what are we telling our students about their humanity? What messages do we send about how they are developing their minds to engage the world around them?

I wish I had every answer for this moment we find ourselves in. The work ahead of those of us in the education business isn’t going to be gentle or affirming. In the interest of affirming the humanity of the students who study with us, we’re going to have to take on some incredibly stiff headwinds – the headwinds of a technology industry, and increasingly headwinds in the broader culture, that say that resisting the advance of this technology is futile, and that the development of this technology will ultimately benefit the world as a whole. 

But I am wholly convinced that if a technology undermines my students’ humanity, that technology isn’t ethical to use, for any reason. And I believe generative AI undermines my students’ humanity.

It is beyond time to ask questions about how we’ve given into technology, and to be loud and forceful about those questions, for the benefit of all of us.

—

Thanks to Maha Bali for her framing of the harms of AI (see critique #5 in this blogpost); that framing turned out to be the framing I used in this specific argument. Maha’s blog is perpetually important reading (and reflecting!) on all kinds of issues surrounding technology and education, and I cannot recommend her work enough.

Thanks also to Autumm Caines for her influential writing, and to my colleagues Susan Monteleone and Walter Wimberly for helpful conversations.

The cover image comes from piqsels.com and – in case it needs to be said in 2025 – not from an AI image generator.

One of the lines you’ll find in advertisements for administrative positions in the academic life is the requirement that the successful candidate demonstrate “progressively responsible experience” in their work.

That line is a cue. It’s an expectation that the person hasn’t just taken on a responsibility and managed that responsibility consistently. It demands the person take additional steps forward when the time comes, take on new responsibilities, and extend themselves beyond a simple comfort zone of leadership. 

Gaining that experience is not simply a function of a person’s capabilities. As I’ve spent time in higher education, it has become plain that many talented people who have the capacity to gain leadership experience don’t get the corresponding opportunities, because of various mismatches between the person and the institution. 

Much of the story of the first two decades of my career was stories of those kinds of mismatches. Simple bull-headed failure to belong, to being pigeonholed as just a talented teacher who would be held back by administrative experience, to the various headwinds that have blown against all of us in higher education over the course of the past several years and that wound up causing one of my homes to run out of money. 

Even as I found a place that I would be eager to make a home, there were all kinds of imperfections that had to work themselves out when I got here, as much in me as anybody else. The mismatches were every bit as real here as they have been anywhere else. 

Gaining “progressively responsible experience” doesn’t just happen. It takes time for the needs of an institution to align with the needs of the person working there, and it’s not just hard work or talent that gets rewarded; sometimes, it’s luck, waiting out transitions in other places, and being in the right place at the right time. 

In the past several years, at Tusculum University, the right place and the right time have aligned for me. In the midst of COVID, upon the departure of the department’s longtime leader, I found myself in position to take the on the title of “Department Chair” for the natural science faculty of the institution. 

I had the mentality of a representative of the faculty at first, listening and communicating concerns as they needed to be. Being a leader and a direct report was entirely new to me in January 2021; I needed time to grow into the role. Three and a half years on, I’m still not entirely certain I have, but I’ve been able to take on additional tasks and own my responsibility to my faculty – my colleagues – as I ensure they’re best equipped to do the work that they excel at.

As I’ve worked to help the institution through a summer of transition and stress, I’ve felt trusted. I am always wary of that feeling; wiser people than I have emphasized again and again that the institution cannot love you. The institutional processes here are not remotely perfect, and don’t exist to relieve the drama that comes with change. I resist the “family” language that is in vogue around here knowing the difficulty in becoming too connected to what will always be first and foremost a job. But I also recognize that this institution is important, sustaining this institution is important, and the people in charge of this institution see my capacity to do a job for them.

Over the course of this month, I learned that my job title and job description would be changing. My dean is moving up the chain of command, into an assistant vice-president role with charge over all the academic divisions. The academic divisions have been shuffled; what once were four colleges are now six unique units. Natural sciences, computer science and math are now grouped together in a Division of Math and Science. 

I am the Assistant Dean in charge of that division.

The changes that lead to this role for me have happened quickly, perhaps too quickly for me to completely wrap my mind around them. Those changes remind me anew of what I continue to say about Tusculum University: this is not a perfect place, but this is an important place. And when I was hired here eight years ago, I committed to the institution as a means to return to Appalachia and feed into this region in the best way I knew how.

I’m indebted to several academic leaders – Craig Allee, Mark Roberts, Steve Robinson, and Heather Henson-Ramsey – for feeding into the model of leadership that I’m developing. I’ve been so supported in so many directions as I’ve taken one step at a time towards this progressively responsible role.

As classes being at this institution today, it is also impressed upon me that I have now been at this place longer than I have been at one institution in my entire career. I set a Real Professional Development Goal when I was first offered a job at this place. I’m ever closer to satisfying that goal. 

I’m walking into a whale of a semester. The challenges of circumstances within and without are legion. I’m going to be taxed this semester in teaching and administration as I’ve never been before. And I’m approaching the semester with a strange feeling for the circumstances:

Gratitude. 

(Credit to Tusculum’s own Jim Wozniak for the picture of me and the inimitable Charlie Taylor, deep in conversation over a poster.)

Seeing this statement in print is absolutely surreal:

I didn’t set out in this gig to be distinguished anything. There’s only one goal I’ve ever had in doing this stuff that I do at the college level: I want students to be as excited about chemistry and physics as I am, and I want to give them the language to be able to communicate that excitement to others. Anything else is gravy.

And my career isn’t a career that has taken any kind of proper path. I’ve left places repeatedly, for reasons understandable and mystifying, sometimes both at the same time. Somebody check the record books: I am certain I am the only person ever to receive an endowed professorship who has five different full-time faculty jobs on his CV, none of them research-driven, all of them – and let’s be absolutely direct about this – all of them one flavor or another of grunt teacher of chemistry and physics.

People like me don’t get calls from their dean saying “the institution has an endowed professorship, and we want you to hold the title.”

And yet here I am, with a job at this place that calls me “distinguished professor.”

That tells you something about the place.

I’ve said before that I work at a very important place, a place embedded in the Appalachian Mountains, a place that puts its focus on how undergraduates are taught. It’s now twice in a calendar year that this institution has communicated to me, in real and tangible ways, that the things I value are the things that it values – one time when I was promoted to full professor, and now with this endowment of my position.

Places that put the undergraduate student at the center of their mission and support the education of that undergraduate in tangible ways are rare and are becoming rarer. When exploring my options at the point when I applied for this job, the positions that I could find at four-year institutions that didn’t demand some sort of publishable scholarship and that devalued the teaching role of the professor were few and far between. Undergraduate research is important – my colleague in chemistry is an expert at that – but it doesn’t overtake the importance of the work in the classroom.

Choosing somebody with my record and my practice in education sends a message. It’s not enough – it’s not even entirely necessary – to have a robust publication record to be successful at this place. Being successful at this place means doing the work in front of students, day in and day out, and being seriously reflective on the successes and the failures that come with doing that work so that we all can continue to improve at the art and practice of instruction – the very thing that we should be primarily equipped to do at these institutions.

(The press release mentions my work in quizbowl, too! I’m very grateful to be at a place that makes this particular passion of mine not only part of its programming, but part of how I’m valued and something that they can value as well.)

Endowments don’t just fall from the sky. Someone caught the vision to make the substantial sum of money available to feed into the continued success of the institution. In this case, that person was Verna June Meen. Her gift to Tusculum in honor of her husband, who was quite the chemist in his own right, isn’t just responsible for the funding of the position reflected in my title, but the building where I work – the Meen Center for Science and Mathematics. It’s a spectacular facility, the best facility I’ve been able to call a workplace in my career. Frankly, everything about science education at this place is the best kept secret in Tennessee, and I’d like for it to be a little bit less of a secret.

The Meen family will long be remembered at this place for all they’ve done to make a fundamental transformation of science education possible. I taught in that great legacy science building, Tredway Hall, at the start of my time at Tusculum – but there’s only so much modern science that a building constructed in 1928 can support. The Meen funding that made the building possible also supports this endowment and, in turn, will support the maintenance of laboratory equipment in the building and further undergraduate research in chemistry that will go forward. The funding is not just for me; the foresight of how the money is being apportioned means it is for all of us, and that is something that satisfies me deeply.

Between the Meen funding and the USDA and Appalachian Regional Commission support in addition to other private funding that supplemented the costs of construction and the outfitting of the building with lab equipment, we’re confident we can be on the cutting edge of science education – education that isn’t merely rigorous and effective, but accessible, meeting the students of this region at the point of their need.

Accepting this title is a spectacular honor – but it’s also a profound responsibility. I have a little bit more of a bully pulpit than I had before, and I feel a very real obligation to communicate anew the importance of constructing our institutions in ways that allow everybody who comes across our path – particularly those who come across our path wanting to study the sciences – the opportunity to succeed, to realize their dreams, and surpass them.

For six and a half years I have been supported in ways large and small by this campus community, by people who have since moved on, by people who have come onto campus, and by people who have stayed. That support has been doubled and redoubled over the course of this brutally difficult year, where professional successes have been wedded with the worst heartache.

The realization strikes me that there are people who are working overtime to make sure that my “Real Professional Development Goal” of April 2016 comes to fruition.

I’m grateful, so grateful to the people who have made Tusculum University my home.

(Thanks to April Lane for the photo.)

I wish I had coherent thoughts to share on the awful anniversary of losing A.

This is a thing that reshapes the calendar. Instead of the arbitrary end of year that we define, now there’s this very definite thing, and here’s one month since this thing, six months since this thing, one year since this thing that totally upended our lives.

I hope you’ll allow me to just share some notes, observations on the year gone by and the realities that have come with it.

What you will never be ready for is the waves.

There was an analogy for grief that I was familiar with even before December 4, 2021. It compared grief to wandering around in a box. Every time you touched the walls of the box, there was searing, unrelenting pain. When the loss first happens, the box is very small, and you can’t help but run into one of the walls. As you get further and further away from the loss, the box expands. The pain is no worse when you run into the wall, but the walls get further and further away, and you have more room to get around without the pain.

The analogy is fair, and it describes life well – except nothing can prepare you for what that pain is like.

The sadness from losing a child is unlike anything you could possibly ever know. It’s unfair even to call it sadness, or melancholy, or any other word. It is this gaping, painful hole, and there is nothing you can do to ever fill it. You can get through some of life without triggering the pain, but there will always be something to trigger it.

Maybe it’s a song that A. loved. Maybe it’s the realization that I haven’t played a game in a year because that was the game A. and I played. Maybe it’s a candy that A. made.

And maybe it’s just the stars at night.

The last night A. was with Kristin, the stars were exceptionally bright. They lingered under the stars, marveled at the beauty of the night sky. It is so odd – I’m the physicist of the family, but I’ve never been able to appreciate the night sky anywhere near like how A. was able to. I lament the experiences we could have shared, and did share in fleeting moments, and never will again.

Any of those experiences, and any of many others, starts the pain.

And when the pain comes, it comes in waves. It’s not one moment of pain, and then it’s gone. It’s surging pain, rising and falling many times in succession, each that follows worse than the last. You can’t bear to stand under the weight. You can simply sit or lie, and lament.

What we miss.

What we have lost, never to return.

What could have been, and never will be.

Sometimes you are able to feel the waves fade while you’re awake, and you can feel other things again. But sometimes the waves just crash and crash and crash, and you just have to be swallowed by them, hope that sleep relieves the pain somehow.

What is at once relieving and frustrating is how little outwardly I’m able to show the signs of this. Depression has been a theme of my life, and I’ve put together tactics to manage the physical symptoms of depression. Those tactics reached the point of second nature in the months before A.‘s death. These have been new sensations, but the time-developed tactics for managing them have worked. I was able to resume functioning in the day-to-day relatively quickly.

But managing isn’t the same as going without feeling. When the waves hit, the pain is no less severe. And there are times when the response is simply the need to stop.

And there is damage that’s been done, in ways that I am only starting to account for. But taking stock of that damage is probably for another time.

One of the ways I have recognized that I manage the pain that comes with grief and depression is simply to continue doing, no matter how difficult that doing feels.

There is always academic work that needs to be done. I was a year into my appointment as department chair when this reality took hold. We’ve moved through this year as positively as we could. I can’t express enough gratitude to my department, my fellow chairs in Science, Technology and Mathematics, and to my academic administration for the support they’ve given me as this year has moved forward.

I’ve been the best professor I could be while dealing with the weight. I always have my own standards for my work in the classroom and in the lab, and what actually winds up happening as the term goes forward is never good enough compared to those standards. Somehow I wind up building connection with students anyway, and I’m able to have some positive influence in their lives. I’m grateful to those students.

But, inevitably, I find other things to stuff my days full with. And that’s where the conversation turns to quizbowl.

With the easing of the pandemic conditions, as we’ve moved into the fall, we’ve been in position to restart face-to-face competition in the places I care about the most. I can’t talk about quizbowl without talking about the faithfulness of friends in East Tennessee, including Dren Rollins, who was literally at my side the instant I heard the news about A. Many of us who care about academic competition in East Tennessee have been working to rebuild a competitive circuit almost from scratch, and we’ve run a couple of tournaments in the fall and look to run a regional championship as a prototype come the spring. I look forward to the fruition of the quizbowl game in the place I call home.

But I dove most heavily into high school quizbowl when I started at Virginia Intermont, and the schools of Southwest Virginia still hold my heart.

This fall’s restart of the Southwest Virginia Academic Team Alliance (SWATA) circuit is the quizbowl outreach work I’m proudest of. With those schools, the coaches had a clear vision of what kind of competitive structure they needed, and they were able to communicate that to me; I’ve spent much of my time this fall implementing their vision and rebuilding with them the competition we had before the pandemic hit.

There were online competitions in the state scholastic bowl format that ran during the pandemic – one of our SWATA schools won a state championship online, even – but online competition has a very real disconnection, and we lose the community that is generated when our small, rural schools can come together in one place and celebrate the excellence in learning they’ve achieved.

I’ve found that I’ve missed that community throughout the pandemic, and I’ve needed that community now more than ever.

The day before this one year anniversary, I spent in Castlewood, VA helping their small high school run their first ever Saturday tournament. I spent it with the high school teachers, students, and families that I care about most in this region, taking the next steps in establishing and developing this community. I spent it getting very real support, in ways visible and invisible, possibly in ways that the people feeding into me weren’t even aware of.

I can’t emphasize enough how grateful I am to SWATA for letting me support them in building their competitive community, and how much I’ve needed them caring for me this fall. They have honestly become my church family, in all the ways I need a church family. I can’t list all the people who deserve thanks for their consistent fellowship.

All the support of all the people who have fed me the good things in this year can’t fill the hole, and can’t keep the pain from showing up when it is expected and when it is least expected.

The magnitude of the loss in our family can’t be overstated. I’ve mentioned before that A. was our stabilizing force. At times when others were hard to talk to, A. was always very easy to talk to, and the snark that inevitably turned up was forever good-natured and made the conversations inevitably funny. The image that will stick with me from the last days of A.’s life will be the child and their mother seated on the loveseat, trading library stories and commiserating on the difficulty that comes with working with the public. We miss those conversations more than we can bear.

A. had her own means of support – with cooking, with decorating, with all kinds of little actions that made a holiday even more alive. I will confess to not sharing A.’s affinity for Halloween, and taking the joy from the spooky. But A. found ways to bring joy to every holiday. It was very easy to decorate a Christmas tree with A. around. It’s obviously not the same now.

There are very few traditions in our family that are meaningful now; without A. around, the weight of the missing person dwarfs any benefit that we might get from continuing the same thing. I never really understood why the holidays were so difficult for the grieving before going through this. But the holidays can bring reminders everywhere, and the waves begin to crash anew.

Today, as much as any day this year, I really felt an obligation to write through the waves. I’m grateful for A.’s life, and I’m grateful for all that A. created in this world. But as I find a way to navigate a world without A. – as surreal a thought as that still remains, one year on – I’m finding gratitude for all the family, friends, and loved ones who help me navigate.

Gratitude doesn’t change how much I despise navigating this path.

I did a DuckDuckGo search this morning about the big news in my universe, the coming availability of the McMurry Organic Chemistry textbook as an open educational resource.

It’s really telling what the hits were.

Obviously the first hit is going to be an ad. The internet in 2022, even when you use a privacy-first search engine.

But look at the hits that follow.

The very first hit isn’t from Cengage, the current publisher of McMurry, or from OpenStax, the open educational resource (OER) powerhouse that’s negotiated the right to publish the text. It’s not a news article from a journalist about what is a ground-breaking agreement to provide OER in a traditionally cost-heavy discipline.

The link from an ed-tech company, Aktiv.

This company – formerly 101edu – has tools it swears by for the generation of organic structure and mechanism, the types of tools that are potential killer apps for automated homework submission in the discipline. In the context of the publication of any old new edition of a quality textbook, this really makes perfect sense.

But trumpeting the release of a resource that eliminates one cost for students by appealing for professors to have their students to pay a different cost – what that cost exactly is, the website doesn’t say, but one campus bookstore lists it at $61.25 – well, that’s certainly a choice.

And Aktiv’s trumpeting of their new relationship with McMurry’s OER goes beyond their own release. The third link on the page is from Marketwatch, the fourth is from PRNewsWire. Scroll down the page, and the sixth is from Business Insider. It’s an all-out PR blitz, using the name of this groundbreaking OER effort, from…an ed-tech company.

So I’m not sitting in this chair looking at the release of this new OER as an unambiguous good.

We do have to look at the situation with clear eyes. The cost situation surrounding the teaching of organic chemistry has been disastrous, and it’s been disastrous for some time. The costs for an organic chemistry course can be overwhelming.

McMurry Organic Chemistry going to OpenStax changes all that. That core cost – and the cost of several student ancillaries, including the all-helpful solutions manual – are going to be OER by Fall 2023. Openly licensed. Free of cost for electronic versions. A vastly reduced cost for print versions. That part of the news is an unambiguous good. So much of that initial cost of the organic course is going away, and not a moment too soon.

McMurry’s own motivations for the transition are laudable – he recognizes the burden of textbook cost, and he wants to help with that burden, in memory of a son. McMurry’s donating his licensing fee from the textbook to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, out of gratitude for the life of his son Peter, who suffered from the disease. “If I can take the most popular organic book and publish it for free, then there will be no competition, and even more people will read the book…And I like the thought that everyone who reads it will see Peter.”

So McMurry approaching OpenStax to make the textbook available freely seems like a win-win. McMurry gets to do something large to make an impact for a host of students, and OpenStax claims what is a top-flight textbook author to gain new impact for the OER movement broadly. And the hole that what becomes OpenStax Organic Chemistry fills was glaring – OpenStax had OER available in so many biology disciplines, and in introductory chemistry and physics disciplines, but nothing for that pivotal course on the pre-medical path. There were other organic chemistry efforts (LibreTexts is always reliable for OER on the gamut of chemistry disciplines) but none that were organized and comprehensive, and that could gain the trust of a wide variety of faculty. McMurry has that trust immediately.

But in order for OpenStax to get access to McMurry Organic Chemistry, it had to negotiate with Cengage – the for-profit competition. And that’s where I start to have my moments of pause.

The quote from Cengage’s, ahem, Senior Vice President for Academic Product is laughable on its face. “We are fully committed to providing affordable, high-quality learning solutions for students…We are excited to think openly and collaboratively with key partners like OpenStax to ensure that we, and our authors, are able to reach as many students as possible in new and highly accessible ways.” I can’t imagine for a second that one of the core companies responsible for the textbook affordability disaster that OpenStax is providing a corrective to is “fully committed” to textbook affordability. Oh, just for fun, here’s my DuckDuckGo search for “cengage webassign per semester cost”:

(If you haven’t done so before, browsing SPARC‘s website about the real costs of inclusive access programs is must-view stuff. You should ask real questions about what costs your university has handed over to textbook publishers – and passed on to students.)

My feelings are very mixed as I recognize the game that’s afoot. OpenStax and Cengage need to come to agreements if OpenStax is going to get the massive OER win that its acquisition of McMurry Organic Chemistry is. OpenStax needs to deal with Cengage.

But Cengage is not a fair player in this market. McMurry Organic Chemistry will still be provided by Cengage, in its inclusive access program – despite the fact that it’s an open textbook and charging for access to that textbook won’t be necessary. It’s not in Cengage’s interest to trumpet McMurry’s OER status to students – only in press releases when it can claim it’s interested in “affordable, high-quality learning solutions for students” that they’d prefer to charge $125 per semester for.

It is really down to faculty to call things as they are, and to make sure they’re making the best solutions for their courses available at the best possible prices – and when possible, making those prices zero.

Much of my summer has been spent writing chemistry problems within Moodle.

I’m trying to code an online homework system for general chemistry, for my own students, in my own way, to take the final step towards driving their textbook costs to zero. We’ve already got OpenStax Chemistry: Atoms First. We’ve got the laboratories I’ve written for our own interactive lab manual in Moodle. Putting the homework on Moodle as well cuts out packages like Aktiv and WebAssign and – while it’s not quite of the quality that the for-profit providers can bring – it’s still something appropriate for my classroom, at no cost.

It’s not necessary for me to do this work if I want free homework systems for students. LibreTexts is actively developing their ADAPT homework system, and their next step is getting the tools in place for organic structure and mechanism. There is an organic chemistry homework system in place and available for professors right now free of charge – OpenOChem, a project primarily out of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with collaboration from St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Centre College.

And, of course, there are old-school solutions, like pencil and paper homework, with the professor writing novel problem sets and grading them in novel ways.

If we’re really serious about learning resource costs for our students, we need to be aggressive in our attack. We don’t just need to keep ownership of a new OER for organic chemistry in the hands of the major publisher who will just find new ways to extract costs from students, or hand over the OER to an ed-tech firm who PR-blitzes their way to sales of a new product on the back of the OER. We need to make sure we free students from costs any way we can, and make knowledge accessible to as many students as possible.

You may have the money to put down on the online homework and lab resources. But I’m in the central Appalachians. I will have those conversations with students one-on-one after the class is gone about how they’re going to be able to afford the $40 for the one online homework system I’m asking them to purchase – not even the $500-$600 that comes from purchasing everything new. You may not think $40, or $80, or $125 is an undue burden if you’re serious about learning STEM. You don’t know my students. I’m telling you it is mammoth, and if we can clear those costs, we retain those students better.

That’s why I see the open organic chemistry textbook being advertised by an ed-tech company and I stop to wonder if we’re really looking out for students here, or just PR wins.

Again: the big story is good. Thanks to John McMurry for putting his textbook into the open. Bully to OpenStax for negotiating the availability of the text for us all.

But we can’t think for a second that one major textbook becoming openly licensed is the end of the learning affordability battle.

Not quite eight years ago, Alan Jacobs wrote an important short letter to Christians who were struggling to come to grips with the reality of our cultural acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals and relationships that fell outside the bounds of what so many of us have heard describe as “traditional marriage”. It started with the raw reality:

Many Christian organizations, as they think about their treatment of gays and lesbians, and their theology of sexuality more generally, are “evolving,” or “in process,” or “on the journey.” And make no mistake, this is a journey on a one-way street: no Christian group is moving from greater to less tolerance of same-sex relationships.

Increasingly, I am recognizing that I took my first irreversible steps on that journey a decade ago, when I made the decision to leave a tenured post at Shorter University.

At the time, I did everything I could to frame it as an aspirational move, something that was for my best benefit and something I was doing with my best hopes for the institution I was leaving behind.

But very quietly, I was deeply fearful that I was approaching a moment when I would have a document placed in front of me, and I would either have to sign or not sign, and by making that choice, I was going to reject one group of people for another.

One group was the traditional Southern Baptists I had moved to Shorter to serve. I went to Shorter in 2003 very intentionally, and with the deepest of gratitude for the Baptists of my youth that had built my picture of salvation. The faith that I had come to, after all, wasn’t something that I had entered into casually. It was something I interrogated seriously during my freshman year of college, talked through and prayed through (and occasionally fought through) thoroughly with my loved ones through the subsequent years, and built a deliberate foundation of integration with my academic life as I went through graduate school. I’d taken the position and worked through to tenure at Shorter as a culmination of that path.

But I also had come to know several gay and lesbian individuals in those eight years at Shorter, and had seen how difficult navigating the climate of Christian education was for them. I’d even had a couple of students come out to me in the deepest of confidence, and trust me to the point of spitting out descriptions of themselves they had always prayed weren’t true. I’d listened, mentored, accepted them in student groups, even seen them perform. A couple of those students didn’t just become friends, they became people I could trust in return.

I didn’t want to be forced to decide between them. So, in so many words, I ran, and prayed that I was wrong to run. And, sometime in late October of 2011, all the fears I had carried were realized.

But the words of the prophet continue to be true: if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

I don’t merely accept Jacobs’ description for organizations. I have seen it playing out for me personally. The reality of those students’ stories – and the realities for so many students I have seen take similar paths since – forces me to reject the idea that they have chosen a path for themselves, and they could simply choose to be straight if they just wanted to. Listening to the “Side B” Christians tell their stories (stories like Wesley Hill’s have been especially influential to me) are especially persuasive; these are people who are committed to traditional Christian disciplines, deliberate about the self-control of celibacy, and who still describe a gay identity that is not chosen or malleable. This may not be every believer’s tale (Jackie Hill Perry’s testimony stands as a counterpoint) but increasingly those counterpoints appear to me to be exceptions that prove the rule.

The more I engage with LGBTQ+ individuals in my scholarly circles, the more I value their contributions; the more important they become to me. And the more that my failure to decide in 2011 continues to haunt me.

Because the truth of the matter is simple. I really have no reason to worry for the fate of the young Southern Baptist. He is in a position of power. He will have advocates. He will be quite fine. The young gay man or lesbian woman – or, as I would come to understand later, the closeted trans individual – was living in a place of fear, and those fears were put into tangible words in October 2011. Those people needed people to act on their behalf – even if that action was to simply say that a new president and a new board were asking things of them that were simply unacceptable.

If I had been forced to choose, I would not have been able to sign a lifestyle agreement that would have forced me to disown my LGBTQ+ friends and family.

I may yet have done the right thing by leaving before I had to make that statement publicly. I don’t know. But the decision still casts a pall on the end of eight amazing years.

As the years go on, what happened at Shorter feels like the first wedge of many that have been driven between me and my heritage as an evangelical Christian.

Perhaps the most significant wedge was driven on November 8, 2016.

The rejection that I felt that day as so many friends and neighbors celebrated the election outcome was overwhelming. And it was rejection. In retrospect, the result of that day completed the process of stealing the term “evangelical” from me and believers like me. Instead of how I’d identified with the term for most of my life as a Christian – in the context of the Great Commission – it was now irrevocably a political identity, a white Protestant (and not even necessarily someone who had a “born-again” experience) who wanted to “make America great again” by slashing taxes and defending borders, who felt a measure more freedom to speak suspicions against those whose culture didn’t line up with someone who was properly obedient to authority.

I was asked to accept as one of my own a man who was vulgar, callous, verbally abusive, and obsessed with his own celebrity. I was told he was a “baby Christian” and he was yet chosen for us in this time, and anyway he certainly wasn’t that corrupt enemy who had never stopped campaigning for the Presidency since her husband first took office.

I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m still appalled that I was even asked, by men who surely knew better.

With every passing day it becomes more and more obvious that the good Southern Baptist men will be quite all right. They have power. They have advocates.

As much as I love the Southern Baptist Convention, and care deeply for its people, I am not a good Southern Baptist, nor have I ever been. I may have been born into the United Methodist Church, and I may attend a United Methodist church now, but I am not a good Methodist. I am not a good evangelical, or a good Protestant, or even a good Christian.

And it is long since time I stopped pretending to be.

And then I am reminded that I was never asked to be a good Christian.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are…

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

The person of Jesus Christ has never let me down. He’s never spoken to me out of a place of anything but love. When he’s used his harshest words, he’s reserved them for those who would pretend to be pious and holy but who find ways to keep people shut out and weighed down. And when he’s given me commands that have anything that to do with personal holiness, those commands are for private consumption, with the assurance that while others may look at outward appearances, God sees the heart. The essentials of the Law, through the voice of Jesus Christ, have far more to do with loving my neighbor wherever I might find them, even if my neighbor looks nothing like what I expect.

Alan Jacobs, at the end of his essay, asks a simple question:

Either throughout your history or at some significant point in your history you let your views on a massively important issue be shaped largely by what was acceptable in the cultural circles within which you hoped to be welcome. How do you plan to keep that from happening again?

And, increasingly, it seems to me that the answer is simply “by loving our neighbor as ourselves.”

In a year when I have been the recipient of radical and generous welcome and love from people who I would have least expected to receive that welcome from as a born-again believer in 1990, the least I can do to be consistent in the practice of my faith is extend that same welcome I have received in return, to declare once and for all to my LGBTQ+ friends and neighbors that I love them for who they are, and I accept them as they are, without condition, without apology.

After all, this isn’t the first moment in our history when we’ve allowed the culture to shape what we see as acceptable.

In 2017, people within conservative evangelicalism, particularly those centered around the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention felt the need to make a statement on human sexuality and gender roles to add to their doctrinal positions. That was the genesis of the Nashville Statement, a statement of doctrine that attracted support from a wide variety of  conservatives, including people who have found themselves on opposite sides of positions since.

As I read the words of the Nashville Statement on August 29th, 2017, I slowly realized that the same decision I had no desire to make in 2011 was in front of me again.

Article 10:

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

That reads like an even more explicit demand than the demand that was made of me in 2011. It reads as a demand to place rejection of LGBTQ+ individuals – rejection of their very identities – as an essential of the Christian faith.

I cannot. This statement is one I cannot elevate to a place alongside the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I had to dismiss the Nashville Statement, out of hand. It does not represent the practice of my Christian faith.

And as I did that, I realized that the journey I started on six years previous was complete.

The majority of the text above this was written in 2017, at that point of realization.

I revisited my thoughts multiple times over the course of the intervening four years. I was nervous about making that statement of my path on this journey public. I knew how many bridges I could be burning by making that statement.

Ultimately, it stayed private because I didn’t want to burn those bridges. Even as I made that realization that I had to choose between two sides I cared about deeply, I couldn’t bring myself to take that final step of declaring my choice.

And I resisted taking that step as I was well into the final stages of raising a queer child myself.

The regrets I have over my relationship with A. are few. My youngest child knew how deeply she was loved and cared for. Our final exchange was words of love spoken, freely and without reservation. But we simply did not have many conversations about sexuality or gender identity, and the theory I was turning over in my mind didn’t turn up in our relationship. The work I’d done to become LGBTQ+ affirming was locked down in WordPress, not part of the actual conversation we had. It should have been. I didn’t make clear that given the choice between the two sides, I was absolutely siding with my child and peers like her. I should have.

Steps to make the world better might be fueled by regret, but they shouldn’t dwell on regret. What is necessary now is to make clear that I am a Christian, even an evangelical Christian, and that I affirm those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer – as they are, without condition. There are those who say I cannot be both Christian and affirming. I reject that as a false separation.

I’m still going to be more conservative overall. I value self-denial, as part of the holiness approach to faith that is my Wesleyan heritage. For that reason, I have a strong affinity towards the “Side B” approach towards sexual ethics that the likes of Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet practice.

However, part of the reality within evangelicalism in this era, as I’ve argued, is not just concern about sexual ethics but a rejection of any sexual or gender identity that isn’t traditional – even if the person claiming that identity holds to traditional Christian ethics. Further, it’s incredibly presumptuous for me to make ethical claims about a person who holds a sexual or gender identity different from mine. It’s far more important to welcome and listen to all people of all sexual identities and gender identities, and to hear their approach to their ethical being. Hence: affirming all who identify as LGBTQ+, as they are, without condition.

The experience of my last month tips me over the edge. As part of my Upward Bound teaching that has forged new relationships between me and a large group of students, I’ve dealt with many students who have had some kind of trans or non-binary identity. The use of pronouns has been a part of the practice of teaching these students, and some of those students asked for me to be aware of their pronouns on the survey I had them fill out on day one, without prompting. (A line for pronouns will be part of those forms going forward, based on that experience.)

Almost without fail, the kindest, most compassionate of the students I taught – you might even say the most Christlike – were the LGBTQ+ students. Far from being indoctrinated in any one worldview, they were the ones open to experience and developing enthusiasm for things they hadn’t thought before. I have reason to worry that we’re shutting those students out of a natural spiritual home for them, following a man of sorrows that society rejected, because they don’t see the person of Jesus Christ in the people who claim his name who are ascendant in the American culture at this moment.

That failure of recognition, more than anything else, drives my concern and my response to publicly proclaim that I’m affirming of these identities. At the end of all my reasoning, I still believe Jesus Christ desires relationship with all people, where they stand. In the name of pursuing cultural dominance, Christians have effectively made conforming to traditional sexual ethics, in discipline and in identity,  part of the terms of approaching Jesus – an extra condition that I don’t believe stands up on study of scripture.

In that regard, I don’t merely believe it’s appropriate for me, as an evangelical Christian, to offer welcome to people who don’t conform to traditional sexual or gender identity, without condition.

I believe it’s necessary.

In April 2016, after clinching a job offer to join the faculty of what was then Tusculum College, I wrote the following introductory words:

I have written entirely too many of these things, because I have moved my family around entirely too many times.

Real Professional Development Goal, August 2016-forever: make this the last of these things I ever write.

Well, I’m on my way to succeeding at that goal.

When I arrived at Tusculum in August 2016, I set a more formal goal for myself: to put together the accomplishments necessary to be promoted to full professor within eight years. On scanning the faculty handbook, I thought that was the most realistic time frame to accomplish the tasks necessary to earn the promotion. So much of the circumstances surrounding the doctrinal situation at Shorter (despite the “tenure” that I earned there) and the financial situation at Virginia Intermont had kept me from thinking about the long term in the positions I held between 2003 and 2014, and the position I took at Tennessee Tech in the aftermath of Virginia Intermont’s closure was temporary by its very nature. I took the position at Tusculum with the long term in mind.

When I looked at the position I found myself in at the start of this academic year, and as I was talking to other colleagues about their standing and reviewing the faculty handbook, I realized I had the teaching accomplishments and the service experience, if not the breadth of scholarship, that I needed to take a shot at that promotion a couple of years earlier than I had planned, and so I decided in October 2021 to submit a promotion portfolio.

Forget 2016 to 2022; my life has changed a lot between October 2021 and February 2022.

The news of a successful promotion application is a lot more hollow now than it would have been then; celebrating anything is not appropriate in the aftermath of December 4.

But I need to take a moment and reflect on where I am, and on this successful step towards making this the last stop in my career.

I’m not at a perfect place. I was warned away from Tusculum, externally and internally, before I accepted this job, and over the course of my first year at Tusculum, the reasons I was warned away did come very clear. Not only did we struggle to retain students in our program, we struggled to retain faculty, and the original vision I was hired under in 2016 almost immediately dissolved into the necessity of my work in chemistry to maintain a shell of a program. It speaks to the widespread instability that, six short years later, I’m the senior faculty in the department and I’m working overtime to maintain connection to the institutional memory.

This is not a promotion that comes with tenure, because no position at this institution comes with tenure. I will enter academic 2022-2023 on a five-year contract; that is the closest thing to academic security that I can get here. That by itself is a foundation for the concerns many have had about me making a career out of this place, and I understand them.

As Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued in many forms of late, this institution cannot love me. I don’t even have to go back 48 hours to identify the last move the institution made that I fundamentally disagree with. The person who took the very photo attached to this post, who had her role in recruiting me to Tusculum, is no longer at the institution, and I’ve never gotten over that.

This community cannot love me, either. Coming face to face with the people who supported the change our country went through in November 2016 was bitterly painful, and the reverberations from that change strike me anew daily. The damage we’ve taken from living here, directly and indirectly, is much to bear.

This is a broken place to live and work.

That is true alongside this statement: I have never been at a place where I have received so much professional and personal support. From day one, people went to work to clear a path for me to establish novel scholarly work, to teach courses across the sciences with excellence, and to serve the educational community outside of the campus. The love I’ve received from the students of this place has been real and substantial, and they put trust in me that makes every goofy stunt I pull in the classroom work. There have been key points in the past six years where deans, faculty peers and administrators have gone to bat for me personally to make plain that I belonged on this campus, that the work I was doing for this campus was good, and that I would benefit the campus over the long haul. I’ve been supported, my program has been supported, and my college has been supported.

And of course, in the awful aftermath of December 4, the outpouring of support from this campus community has been incredibly tangible and sustaining.

This is a broken place to live and work. I love this place and am fully invested in it.

I am not satisfied with the work I’ve done to reach this point at Tusculum University. My scholarship still isn’t fully realized, and I’ve learned entirely too well to allow that scholarship to take a back seat to the teaching needs or service needs that exist on campus. I’m grateful that the work I’ve put into the campus has been seen and recognized, but that doesn’t change the fact that I still have a lot to do in order to be the kind of scholar I envisioned myself becoming in August 2016. The successful work I’ve put in to the General Chemistry and General Physics sequences only serves to underline how much more work there is still to do to make those courses as robust and as legible as they need to be. I’m still a weak upper-division professor at best, and I need to equip students emerging from physical chemistry with more tools to be successful at the discipline – and to gain a love for the discipline at the same time.

But I have spent most of my time in academia being my own worst critic, and setting standards that go beyond anything the institution will ask of me. That pattern will continue through the end of my career here, I fear. What I’ve just received – from my dean, from my faculty affairs committee, from my provost, from my president, and from my board of trustees – is the kind of affirmation of my work that I’m incredibly fortunate to have, and I do not take that affirmation for granted in the slightest.

I moved back to the Central Appalachians in August 2016 intentionally, out of a real love for this region and well aware of all the realities that came with it, with the intention of putting in the work necessary to make this place a home.

I have the most complete support possible from this institution that brought me here.

And my youngest child is buried here.

The past two decades of my career have had many twists and turns, and I would be a fool to speak in absolutes. But it will take a very, very strong wind to blow us away from here now.

Remarks made during the celebration of life of my youngest daughter, December 10, 2021.

Anna would have wanted you to know that she is gay. “EXTREMELY gay”, she said to us once or twice. That wasn’t an identity she took on out of any sort of rebellion, and Anna could have kept that quiet from us if she had wanted. There was never a partner; I never met a girlfriend. 

But queerness was part of the core of who she was. Anna cared about queer lives; she was surrounded by art and popular culture informed by queer identity, and aspired to create some of that art of her own. 

Anna had nonbinary identity that detached herself from female gender. Anna used “they/them” pronouns alongside “she/her” pronouns. Again; this was without demonstrative insistence; you’ll notice that I’m using female pronouns here, and Anna didn’t correct us on our use of pronouns or name once, despite the fact that it became obvious later that she really did prefer the minimalist “A.” Anna clearly identified with the trans community, and that identity should be celebrated as her life is celebrated. 

So many of you know A. from her student work in film at ETSU, and from her leadership of Buc Films. That was the turn in identity that was most surprising to me. We knew a shy, homeschooled child who had ambitions but very little in the way of flesh and bones to apply to those ambitions. Attending the local regional university was a small surprise to me there; I was expecting her to choose someplace smaller. Getting as deeply involved so quickly in a student organization was a bigger surprise still. But caring so much for the organization that she took on the mantle of leadership? I’m still amazed at that growth, and I still have the greatest admiration of it. 

I say this to take nothing away from the many talented artists and media professionals who educated Anna. But Anna’s greatest education came from Buc Films itself, from the experiences working on the machinery of filmmaking outside of the classroom, from the engagement with other filmmakers and actors who made the creation of films possible, from the practice of leadership in good times and difficult times – and COVID provided the most difficult times. If you had even the smallest role in Buc Films over the last four years, thank you for everything you gave and thank you for the ways you fed into my child. So much of who she became as an artist is because of you.

Obviously work as a dedicated filmmaker is difficult to come by, and it turned out that Anna has good librarian genes. First in Bristol, then in Johnson City, Anna was able to help a library as that library had need, and was in short order able to help for pay. The job at Johnson City Public Library was a constant throughout Anna’s final years at school, and when the college years were done, the full-time job at JCPL was hard-won. 

Every account of A’s work at JCPL is uniform: dedicated, passionate about the work done the right way, reliable, willing to do whatever was needed. It was never Anna’s intention for JCPL to be a permanent job; there were still goals and filmmaking ambitions that spanned the country, the type of ambitions a simple library job could not support. But if it had been necessary, there’s no doubt A could have stayed at JCPL for as long as she wanted, and eventually have led. 

I do need to make sure that I emphasize one more aspect of identity, one defined not by the name Anna or A., but the name “Dubba” – double-A, Aunt Anna. We have agreed as a family that as much as she might have loved all of us, she loved no-one as much as she loved niece Wendy. When you looked at the slide show, you saw the greatest joy in the time spent with that precious granddaughter of ours. 

(I’m sorry if I’m being a stereotypical father about this, but I have to mention the baking sometime, and this is as good a time as any! Anna was so good with creativity and inventiveness – I have a crocheted quiz bowl buzzer set, for crying out loud! – and nowhere did this express itself more vividly for me than with what Anna created in the kitchen. So many of you know A for the sauces she created. I selfishly appreciated Anna’s invention of the buckeye pie – peanut butter pie with chocolate topping around the edges, so the product resembled the top of a buckeye. And the cinnamon rolls! As big as your head! Anna took such pride in those cinnamon rolls.)

Dubba was the most stabilizing force in our family. Even from the youngest of ages, the child had an even temper and a measured response to every situation. Very slow to anger, very quick to hug. The conversations on the loveseat between Dubba and Kristin were too many to mention, especially after Anna started working at the library. Dubba’s presence in Johnson City made sibling Catherine’s life easier in so many ways, especially when an extra pair of hands was needed for Wendy. And Wendy had just started to figure out how to call Dubba by name. 

This is what we’re missing the most right now. This moment calls for stability, steadiness in the face of the ultimate grief. There was one in our family who we could count upon to be a rock, a steady and sure friend to rely upon. For that to be the hole in our family now is unspeakably cruel. 

—-

There are words of comfort that are usually spoken at the end of these services. Those of us who claim the faith that is so common in this part of the world will talk about the hope they have in this moment. I hold on to that hope. I’ll talk to you about it if you want. 

But I also know that talking about hope in a time like this is incredibly hollow for many. This death was the most senseless, the circumstances the most horrific. And I can feel the tension in between my daughter and me even now as I try to put words of hope into place. 

I believe firmly it’s important to recognize who A had become as an adult and try to order our world to be better, as A was striving to make the world better. I think that’s the best way to remember A and carry A along with us. 

Do good work, first and foremost. Whatever you do, even if it’s not at the station of life you aspire to for the long haul, do your best and make the greatest impact you can. 

Care about the art in your world. Find talented people and support them, both with words and with money, and empower them to make the art that is most fully themselves. 

If you have any motivation, any at all, create. Make your own art, on your own terms. It doesn’t have to be something big or grandiose, although if you have the desire and the means, you should. But as big as a film or as small as a cinnamon roll, make a thing. 

Give to the A. Pearson Fund at ETSU in any event (by mail at ETSU Foundation, PO Box 70721, Johnson City, TN 37614; on-line at etsu.edu/give; select College of Arts & Sciences and note A. Pearson Fund). That will support local creators as they move forward with their education in radio, TV and film – especially film.

Love your people – fiercely, and without compromise. Be steady for them. Be someone who is reliable and trustworthy in good times and bad. 

I will take this one additional point of privilege. No matter the circumstances of this death, it has driven home for me anew how short the life expectancy of queer people is compared to the general population. Funerals for the LGBTQ community happen too often at this age, and too many of those deaths are deaths of despair. Too many people who hold my Christian faith hold queer people at arm’s length, worried about sexual practice or changing personal identities rather than simple welcome. I have been guilty of that arm’s length treatment before myself. I’m recommitting myself to welcome of all people, especially queer people, without judgement or condemnation. I hope you will too. Love should be extended in every direction, without condition, without reserve. 

I pray you’ll leave this place empowered to do your best work, your most creative work, and to support others to the best of your capability. 

Let it be so.