What are you going to do when you retire?

Next year, I’m going to teach a course each term. I also have three students who will write their senior theses with me. I’m looking forward to it— they’re very good students. And I was asked by some of the trustees to continue, at least next year, staffing and administering the Board’s Excellence Award program. I’m going to continue to work with the President’s Fellows, which I invented back in 1974—I’ve attended every meeting of that group in 33 or 34 years, except two! I’m also going to continue to have some involvement with the Presidential Scholars, those students who get merit scholarships. And there may be an occasional special project that comes along. The other thing I plan to do, if I can possibly pull it off, is not come in on Saturday or Sunday anymore. And if I do, it will be to see something at Austin Arts on Saturday night or something like that!

That’s not much of a retirement!

Yeah, well. My wife says, “You ought not to go in on Friday, either!” I don’t know if I can break myself of the habit of working on Fridays, but Saturday and Sunday, I’m going to try to stay away from this place.

I tell my students that I’m good at predicting the future, but that as an historian, all the futures I can predict are in the past. The historical actors couldn’t see what was going to happen. Well, likewise, I’ll just have to see where life goes from here.