Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similarly be-gowned faculty who’d served one sort of semi-administrative role or other. She’s great, this colleague—a few years older than I, kind but also wry, patient of the inanities of institutional life, and possessed of a long-germinated talent for equability in the face of them. When I say we’re “colleagues” I mean it in the best senses: people who know each other from work and, in that odd little context, find a real and, I think, relieving, irony-rich enjoyment in each other’s company. I’d just found out she was retiring, effective more or less immediately upon completion of the stately ceremony we were all about to walk through, and so I was busy congratulating and envying her.

But then, thinking back on the accumulating wretchedness of the year, another question came to me.…