By Dr. John Mark Reynolds

At eighty-seven Dad will not, in all probability, win a race, arm wrestle as well as he could, or put in the long days he used to clock as a pastor. He is merely wise with the hard wisdom that comes from having lived a consistently good life.

Dad has been a wise guy for some time, like Dad I can practice dad-humor, but now he is a wiseman. The young wit can crack wise, but the wiseman brings gifts of gold and sweet perfume in his very worlds. 

There is a place for both. We need the swashbuckling intellectual gifts of the young. Many of our greatest discoveries in philosophy and science are made by those who are very young. Twenty-three-year-old Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation, Madison was in his thirties when became a youngish father of the US Constitution. Twenty-two-year-old Disney founded the Walt Disney Company after several earlier failures. Youth is not wasted if it finds a larger cultural framework that can harness the energy. 

A good college or lower school must find these abilities and give them space to create. A great faculty will have younglings, or at least new people, challenging all the old ways! Oddly, as Newton, Madison, and even Disney demonstrate, the young men in motion can stiffen and fail to bring on the next generation of young men. 

And yet there is also a place for the man who is ripe and therefore ready to act. Winston Churchill was asked to beat the Nazis as prime minister of the United Kingdom starting at age sixty-five. Ben Franklin brought a calm wisdom to the Constitutional Convention at eighty-one. Harland (Colonel) Sanders started KFC at sixty-five. If we have seen recent leaders who did not know when to quit, pushing past prudence, recall that in the year of his death at eighty-seven, Franklin founded an abolition society and petitioned Congress to end slavery.

The US should have listened to the wise old man. 

A good academic community will find a place for all ages and the gifts they bring. A weakness of many Christian schools is that they cannot retain faculty for many years due to a business model that does not support a living wage. A good academic community receives the gifts of every era. 

What gifts of wisdom has Dear Old Dad been passing on to me lately? 

First, Dad has consistently pressed the need for kindness, but a kindness that is not merely nice. Kindness is the oil that makes smooth the hard work of learning. To be kind in an academic community is to recognize that we all make mistakes, and that mistakes are not sins! We can learn from every error. As we saw, that young Disney did learn from his early business failures. However, Dad cautions to be kind but “no Mr. Nice Guy.” 

What?

The kind sees reality and pour in oil. The merely “nice” clog things up with sticky sugar. Reality demands recognition that the merely nice might miss. Walt had to learn why he failed to keep control of his popular money-making character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. His brother Roy was kind to Walt by sticking by him in those hard times, but he did not dole out the syrup of niceness.

The Disney company needed a new character, not a feel-good session. Walt gave Roy a new character that they kept for one hundred years: Mickey Mouse. Success came with kindness. 

A good academic community will be kind, something cutthroat academics rarely are, but never allow kindness to degenerate into niceness. 

Second, Dad is thankful. He is thankful to be home just now and not in other places. He is thankful for a new chair and for the hard work done by my brother Daniel for the family. Dad is grateful, and so can be happy, even in times when pain and inconvenience tempt one to be querulous. 

Churchill endured as a political leader, in part, because he was thankful for the gifts of his motherland. Churchill constantly served his country, because he was thankful. Where many born into the aristocracy might have maundered around or wished for more, as so many of his generation did, Churchill served and was thankful. He was calm and carried on because he loved and was thankful for all he had been given. 

The Nazis never stood a chance.

So it is with any good academic community awash in the texts and artifacts we have received from the past. We cannot even read all the great books, let alone watch all the great films! Culturally we were born on third base, so we must never think we hit a triple! A sound academic community begins in gratitude and thankfulness, and then with vigor looks to round our way to home: the eternal City where education never ends. 

That is what I hear Dad saying: some wisdom to which I should attend.