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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
by: Anthony DePalma

It was a fresh-faced summer morning, the kind of day that starts with promise and leads to hope because everything seems right with the world. Except that I had lost the library. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be as I strolled across campus that first day of faculty orientation in August 2008, reveling in the odd but pleasant sensation of starting something entirely new in a place that was thoroughly familiar, at least until I realized the library was gone.

I had just made the intensely personal decision to leave a position as reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times that I’d been proud to hold for more than 20 years to accept Monsignor Robert Sheeran’s invitation to come home and re-create myself as writer-in-residence at Seton Hall. When I graduated in 1975, I was a long-haired, wide-eyed communications major full of ideas for novels and books and stories, yearning to write my way into eternity. And here I was returning, having written books and followed the news halfway round the world, and back.
 
I crossed the campus that day without need of map or guide. New and old unfolded around me, invoking a sensation so exciting and yet so comforting that I found myself smiling inside and out. I rambled in these yellow-brick-road thoughts while crossing the University green, noting how the scraggly mulberry tree in the center had grown so long-limbed that steel cables now hold it together. The little leaf lindens and crape myrtles have grown stout and strong, while the path that we careless 1970s students had etched in the grass has grown into a neat brick crosswalk. I recalled how student protests back in the day had kept the green a muddy brown, mystifying first-in-the-family college students like me who hadn’t
time between work and rushing to the library to take part.
 
The library had been my protest, my way of demonstrating that I was breaking from my working-class background in Hoboken, where education often was secondary, to force my way into a world that treasured the Sewanee Review and the other literary journals that Monsignor Noé Field introduced me to. At the library I saw for the first time shelves and shelves of magazines, journals and newspapers from everywhere, each a world I longed to explore.
 
As I stepped off the green that August morning, I looked up and was completely disoriented. The library was not there, in front of me, where it had been the last
time I had been inside it. In its place was a modern looking building identified by a sign as Jubilee Hall. Though quite handsome, this clearly was not the library. Surely, I thought, as the campus had become more crowded, this new building must have sprouted directly in front of the library. Or perhaps my memory was off and I had forgotten how far from the green the library had been. After all, I hadn’t entered the building since 1975.
 
I walked around Jubilee expecting to find the library there. I could see other buildings (including what I later found out was the remade McNulty Hall), but definitely not the library that I now realized I had, quite literally, lost.
 
I eventually found it (after a sleepy graduate student I asked gave me a puzzled look and a lazy thumb) and took my place alongside the new faculty as writer-in-residence at the same University where I had once lost an election for editor in chief of the school newspaper. The winner of that election, Patty Williams, became the first woman to head The Setonian, another indication of how much time had gone by.
 
Besides the fine new library (they still have Sewanee, now online) I’ve noticed many other changes at Seton Hall. One of the most startling is how much more clearly the University’s Catholic identity seems to show through its institutional shell. Of course, it could be that I’ve changed over the decades and that now that I am a husband and father with a fair amount of living already done, I can perceive what before was invisible. But I think it’s more than that. As I entered the library on that first morning, I was struck by the dramatic words inscribed in the cupola — Bishop Romero’s soul-stirring evocation “My Word Remains,”Aquinas’ “The Son is the Word,” and Pope Leo XIII’s admonition (and battle cry to journalists): “Let no one dare to say anything false. Let no one fear to say anything true.”
 
The black robes of priests seem plentiful now that the archdiocesan seminary is on campus. The beer pub is gone and three Masses are celebrated in the beautifully renovated Chapel every day. The academic year began with a Mass at the University Center at which the boys in black were out in full force, and I’ve attended several faculty retreats that have featured prayer, meditation and preaching.
 
 I had changed quite a lot in the decades since I was a student, and so had Seton Hall. The University had become far denser, more filled in with academic buildings and dorms for students who now come not just from the ethnic enclaves of Northern New Jersey that I knew, but also from across the country and all corners of the globe. Parking, even with the new garage, is as bad as or worse than I remember. But because cars are not allowed in the central heart of the campus, parts of Seton Hall can seem more like a refuge than ever.
 
And yet, the outside world also seems to have intruded on Seton Hall. The front gate on South Orange Avenue that we could use is now sealed, and the other entrances that we would just drive through are guarded 24/7. And I had to catch my breath the first time I saw the memorial to the students who died in the Boland Hall fire, a sad but necessary reminder of the dangers of contemporary life, and the need for us to look out for each other.
 
Many days when I’m on campus, it doesn’t feel at all like the Seton Hall I remember, even when I meet members of the faculty who were here back when I was a student. It’s in the classroom that this circling back becomes most transparent, and most vexing. As writer-in-residence, I continue my professional writing, working on a variety of books and articles, while participating in University-wide lectures and presentations. I also teach courses in journalism and Latin American issues, based on my experience as a foreign correspondent for The Times. As I stand in front of my students, I can picture myself sitting in their place, a generation ago.
 
But I know my students don’t easily picture me sitting in their seats. That’s probably inevitable because we take the measure of time differently. For them the supply of time is inexhaustible, like air or water, with no conceivable need to circle back. They don’t feel they must squeeze from every minute all the living juice it contains. I know I didn’t when I sat where they are.
 
I’ve developed a kind of double vision whenever I am on campus, seeing things as they were in the past as well as looking at them in the present. As the academic year drew to a close, and seniors in my class were about to graduate, I wondered whether I dared tell them how difficult the road ahead is going to be? How many disappointments they will bear? How many turns in their own road they are going to have to navigate no matter what they decide to do with their lives, or what their lives do with them? Thirty years ago, my own professors offered me life advice, telling me that I’d be better off switching from print to television because the future of newspapers was grim. I followed their advice and accepted a full-year University internship at New Jersey Network that set me up for a promising career in television news. Then, as soon as I graduated, I went back to the TV studios to work as producer of the statewide nightly newscast. But after a few years I felt hollowed out. I knew that I had been right from the beginning, that I would find my true voice in the written word.
 
Today, the end is awfully close for some newspapers, and publishing as a whole is undergoing a fundamental transformation, down to the definition of what constitutes
 

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