The image at right was posted on Facebook by Randy Blazak, a college classmate of mine who is now a member of the sociology faculty at Portland State University. The picture is almost exactly a quarter-century old. It comes from the 1984-85 school year, when Randy was a senior and I was a sophomore at Emory University. The picture shows us recruiting on behalf of The Wheel, the campus newspaper. Among other things, I represented The Wheel at the 1984 meeting of College Media Advisers and the Intercollegiate Press Association. That meeting gave me my first (and quite obviously not my last) opportunity to visit Louisville.

Seeing Randy post that old picture, quite surprisingly, made me smile. I say surprisingly because I have long viewed virtually all of my student days, including those I spent at Harvard and definitely the days I spent at Emory, with a distinct lack of nostalgia, let alone genuine pleasure. If anything, I have thought about my student days in terms I draw from Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man (1915):

And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope . . . .

What accounted for the sudden shift in sentiment?

Over the years I have softened my views of my student days, out of a combination of creeping age (I dare not call it maturity) and gradual acceptance. I made mistakes, some more grotesque and destructive than others, but those years were a very significant part of my life. If anything, residual dissatisfaction with my years at Emory and Harvard has fueled my resolve to improve the student experience for those who attend the University of Louisville under my watch. Indeed, I sincerely believe that the quality of the student experience is the only metric that truly matters in higher education.

What made the real difference in this instance, though, was Randy's decision to include this image, one I had long since forgotten, in a Facebook album he called FB Friends of Blazak. Among its many underappreciated virtues (underappreciated at least within the legal profession), social networking enables people to acknowledge the impact that others have had on them. Frankly, but for Randy Blazak's decision to build an online scrapbook, I might have continued ignoring The Wheel and what on balance was the positive experience I had as a college journalist. Among other things, I learned how to write under extreme time pressure and how to mix text, images, and other graphical elements to achieve some sort of visually appealing layout.

Most of all, though, Randy Blazak's kind-hearted reach into the past reminds me, as does one of my favorite movies, that no person is a failure who has friends. For those of you who have not connected with me on Facebook, this is as good an opportunity as any other to join the social networking revolution. For the entire Cardinal Lawyer readership, I share a musical relic of the 1980s, one that was a favorite of mine as well as a favorite of Randy's, the better to celebrate old memories and old friends on this manic Monday.