My doctoral robes just arrived this afternoon, and they're the most beauteous things you've ever seen, in one of my favorite shades of my favorite color. (Smart work on my part, attending a school whose colors are in such harmony with my own tastes.)

Most of my readers know what a complicated relationship I have with INRU, but I have to say that, laying out these robes, I got such a rush of affection for the institution that I almost teared up. Now, I'm not going to go crazy and start donating large sums of money, or even any money, any time soon--my alumni fund officer is a friend of mine, and each year I have to patiently remind her why I stopped giving to INRU--but it's funny what power the good memories have to overwhelm the bad ones, and how the viewbook version of the campus comes to seem like the one I actually inhabited, while the real one (the one in which we had mice in our freshman dorm, where the grass never grew over a large portion of the quad, and the radiators in some classrooms clanked so loudly that it was hard to hear the lecturers) recedes from view.

On my campus visit last week, one of the recent hires asked me, over dinner, whether I wanted to go back to INRU eventually--which is something I get asked all the damn time, presumably because I got all my degrees from the same place, and why would one do that if she didn't just love it?--and I said, well, certainly not any time in the next 15 years; junior faculty there don't have a very good life. And the fact is that I don't think I'd want to be a senior faculty member, either, at a place where the junior faculty were seen as so temporary that it really wasn't considered worthwhile to get to know them.

Sometimes I truly believe, with the partisanship of the alumna, that there's no better university on the planet. Other times I think that the place has permanently damaged me and warped my understanding of the profession.

Most often, I believe both to be true.