“I was faced with a decision: either to accept a demotion to an adjunct professor, or to retire. And I chose retirement, which is a very scary thing,” Phillip Lopate recently told the crowd in a heartfelt speech at the party celebrating his retirement from Columbia University.
Expecting to hear the usual superficial sentiments, I was shocked. I nervously scanned the room at Faculty House, filled with the acclaimed 79-year-old author’s luminary colleagues (like Lis Harris, Benjamin Taylor, Margo Jefferson, Leslie Jamison, Sam Lipsyte, Alan Ziegler, and Bill Zavatsky.) Nobody batted a literary eyelash—in fact, they laughed.
