Here is the text from a Glenn Reynolds post about his father's retirement dinner.
YEAH, LIGHT BLOGGING TONIGHT. Went to a retirement dinner for my dad,
who closed out 40 years as a professor of Religious Studies, and only
had a couple of posts scheduled for the evening. Lots of reminiscences
about his confrontation with Billy Graham and Richard Nixon (more on that here), his founding of the Journal of Religious Ethics,
and an amusing message from Stanley Hauerwas. Plus, more affectingly,
lots of people talking about how he started or boosted their careers in
academia. As an academic, your life is like George Bailey’s affecting
people in ways you often don’t fully realize, except, on rare occasions
like a retirement dinner, when they tell you.
That is so true. It reminded me of a chance meeting I had with one of my father's former students.
We talked about Morningside and realizing that he would have been there
when my father was an assistant professor, I asked him if he knew Dr.
James Miller. He asked me why I asked and I told him Dr. Miller was my
dad. He leaned towards me, took my hand again, gave it a big shake and
said, "That man taught me how to think." John told me a story of the
first test my father gave to students in John's class. It was a very
hard test and many students did poorly, but John said that it was that
test and the way my dad encouraged students to think about history that
taught John how to think.
Here is another of my old posts about teaching and why student evaluations are poor ways of judging the ability of teachers.