“What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” says the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned the things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead. The new one means nothing to me. That’s all I can say.”
“For me, that world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it. That’s all I can say.”
“Yes, you are still a soldier,” replies the guest.
(p. 93)
Yellow Crane in the Rain 
With reference to teaching, I get it. In the 1980s (for me) and 1990s (for you) it was both possible and likely that we would create an image of our professors when they lived outside the classroom and join it to our in-class impressions. We ended up desiring to replicate that imagined existence. This post-2022 LLM mania, combined with two decades or more of unchecked administrative superbloat and suffocating micromanaging of things that were once left entirely to the professor’s discretion, means it’s all well on the way out, like the allegedly genteel South in Gone with the Wind between the cries of “War! War!” at Twelve Oaks and the first great reverses (or victories, if you’d like to look at that way) of 1862. As the Germans said in 1944 and 1945, enjoy the war, because the peace is going to be terrible.
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