Dear IU:

I feel I have much to thank you for. I’ll start with your good looks: thanks for your many trees, your spring tulips and flowering dogwoods, your winding waterways. Thanks for being the best place to take an aimless wander. Thanks for the stairs in Ballantine, how they’re the best at making me lose my breath. Thanks for Teter Quadrangle.

Thanks for teaching me how to think, for teaching me that simple questions and answers are never as fun or interesting as complex ones. For making me read the difficult but rewarding things: St. Augustine, Ann Radcliffe, and economic theory. Thanks for the 3,000-page Norton anthology of critical theory I had to lug to my lit theory class one semester. (Hey, at least I can riff – a little bit – about Jacques Derrida now.) Thanks for professors whose teaching left me buoyed and inspired after every class.

Thanks for having the most caring people; I’m always struck by the utter coolness of how the people here—students, faculty, and staff alike—pursue what excites and energizes them. Thanks for all the cozy places on campus in which to meet up with friends: the union, a nook tucked away in Lindley, a bench outside. Most of all, thanks for teaching me the most important lesson of all—that we have an ethical imperative to care for those around us how we can.

Thanks, IU. I’ll miss you.