Composing a Further Life

understandings, and opens up new mysteries to be pursued. “How about you, five or ten years from now, Dick?” I asked.
    “I know you think you’re going to be dead,” Barbara cut in, “but you’ve been telling me that for twenty-five years. You won’t be. So what do you think you will be doing?”
    “Whatever,” he replied. “One of the things I have learned is that when people think they know what they’re going to do in five years, they almost never do it.” Dick’s wisdom.
    Mine: “One of the things I have come to feel, looking at the revisions that people make in their plans as they go along, is that if you think you know what you’re going to be doing in five or ten years, you’re wrong. But if you don’t have an opinion on it, you’re in trouble. In other words, go toward the future with a plan that you’re willing to let go of.”

CHAPTER X
Shaping the Future

    D ICK G OLDSBY HAD URGED ME to meet with Ted Cross, who had endowed the chair at Amherst College to which Dick was originally appointed, specifically to explore the question of legacies. I had explained my project when I made the appointment with Ted, and he had clearly prepared for our meeting by thinking about various kinds of legacies that are passed from parents to children. The term had a barrelful of meanings for him, ranging from property to the obligation of caring for aging parents, from positive values like social service to prejudices like racism and sexism, from genetic characteristics like intelligence or skin color to community membership, and going on to values that might get passed on to the greater society, from tangible economic values to social and ethical values. The legacy that particularly concerned Ted was a journal he had founded in his late sixties and the archive built in the process, the products of Adulthood II, after a successful business career and family.
    Ted, who is white, came from a middle-class family that had been hit badly by the depression and had had to struggle to give him the kind of education his parents had had. He has had a long-term interest in race relations and particularly in African American access to education, an interest that was born when he was general counsel for Sheraton Hotels in the early sixties. “There was a strike against one of their hotels in California, two hundred black kids arm in arm in the lobby protesting because no blacks were employed there. They paralyzed the hotel,” he said. “The police couldn’t move them—they didn’t have enough prisons for all these young blacks. So I was sent out as a lawyer for the hotel chain to negotiate some sort of a settlement. I worked out an affirmative action deal with the mayor and the hotel, in which the hotel would hire two blacks every year.
    “Then, on my way back home—it was the time of the second march on Selma—I had to stop in Chicago, and I was watching this horrible business at the bridge on TV, and instead of going home I went to Selma, and I was in Selma for a week. From then on, I just had an interest that I really couldn’t control in this whole situation. Maybe it was because my teachers had put me in an inferior category; I didn’t like people put in categories. So in terms of what became of me, I developed a very strong interest in the black situation.”
    Ted continued his career in law and also developed with his brothers a successful niche publishing company that was sold in 1980. “And then I said, Well, what next?” He was sixty-eight. “That was the beginning of the work leading to
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education,”
he told me. “We measure progress, evaluate individual colleges and universities—which ones are committed to advancing blacks, and which ones aren’t. Which ones have black faculty in large numbers, which ones don’t.” Ted’s focus in Adulthood II has been the creation and maintenance of the journal, tracking academic affirmative action and hiring policies across the country.
    Ted explained that he still had no succession plan to maintain the journal, which he works on full-time. “It’s really a problem,” he said. “Probably, as I look back on it, it’s more important than anything else I’ve done. We have established a history, an archive that is irreplaceable, on what’s happened over the past fifteen years—in the elite schools, the Ivy League schools, the smaller colleges, the public universities, we’ve got it all there. It’s been a