My college career: I started out at the University of Maryland as a business major, and got a 0.86 GPA my first semester. Failed everything, got a B in tennis. I got kicked out of school.
How did this happen? Well, I decided to stop going to class. (I also decided to smoke weed from sunup to sundown and beyond.) To this day, I’m not entirely sure what I thought was going to happen if I stopped going to class, and I’m not clear — at all — why I made this decision, but that’s what happened.
I petitioned to get back in, was accepted, and got a 3.0 my second semester. I went to my classes, though I was still high all the time.
Third semester, I dropped out after a week and moved back home.
Three Gap interviews later (I got the job!) I decided I needed to get my ass back to college, and I went to visit two friends of mine who were at Rider University. I had a lovely time, and that’s how I ended up a business major at Rider University.
My first semester there, I met Dr. Richard Swain. He was an art history teacher, and I had to take an art elective, and that’s how that happened.
Swain, who passed away last week, was — as it turns out — one of the most important people in my life. I told him that, about five or six years ago, when I ran into him at the copy machine in the Fine Arts building where I was a student, and now a teacher.
He claimed to have remembered me, but I doubted it. And it was clear when I told him my little story about how he very literally changed the direction of my life, he had zero recollection.
Isn’t that crazy, by the way, how someone can have such a profound impact on your life, and they don’t even know it?
Anyway, the art history class: It wasn’t terrible. Swain would lecture, and 40 people would nod off, but I — for whatever reason, probably the fact I was high — found the lectures fascinating. I knew nothing about art history, but he made it interesting, and I was always ready to engage when he looked into the sea of students.
One day, for whatever reason, we started chatting after class.
At the time, I had long neo-hippie hair, was almost certainly wearing ripped jeans and a flannel. It was 1992. I looked like the stereotypical Gen X stoner slacker.
We got to talking, and Swain asked me what my major was.
“Business,” I said.
He stood there. He took a beat. He put his index finger on his lip, thumb under his chin, looked at me from head to toe and back again. He waited another beat and said …
“Jeffrey, you are not a business major.”
What he was saying, in his very specific (for those who knew him) Dr. Swain manner, was that I didn’t look, act, or behave like a business major.
I took it as a major compliment. Plus, he was right.
So much so, I went straight from class to the registrar’s office and changed my major to Communications, Journalism.
Truth is, I always wanted to be a newspaper columnist. (Well, I first wanted to be a garbage man, then a mailman, then a baseball player, and then, at age 12, a newspaper columnist after I discovered Dave Barry.) But it seemed … imprudent. A business major was a rock-solid major. Maybe I’d go into finance. Or accounting. Who knew. But it was a real path.
But those seven words from Dr. Richard Swain? They changed the entire course of my life. That’s not hyperbole. It may have been the single most important conversation I’ve ever had.
I graduated with a degree in Journalism, pursued the career, and here I am, still, today, doing exactly what I dreamed of.
And let’s not forget: Not only did that conversation change the course of my career, it also changed the course of my personal life. Fun fact: I met my wife at The Trentonian.
The entire trajectory of my life changed that day. Swain saw right through me like I was made of fairy dust.
Thank you, Dr. Swain. I cannot be more sincere.