The Last Swim

Yesterday morning I took what was probably the last swim of the season off The Point. The water was down to about 66 degrees, the bottom limit of my range, and it is unlikely to be warmer when I get back. We water mammals of The Point talk about the lake flipping, a phenomenon that can bring warm water back toward the surface, but it’s an uncertain affair.

As I listened to the revetment regulars complaining yesterday about the cold and the waves, I felt as usual as if I had arrived in heaven. The sun, doubled by the lake. The jazzy rhythm of the waves between the point and the pier. The all-consuming water reminding me of when I gave birth, when everything seemed to be the birth.

I had to turn up the volume on the Eddie Vedder channel on the chilly walk back to where our son now lives. Sometimes life events feel overwhelming enough that you need a little dramatic music to put it all in its place, you know?

An hour or so after the cold plunge, I gave notice to Heterodox Academy (HxA) that I’m leaving and taking another job. I decided to start looking for a position in another operation when HxA decided to drop its public policy work. HxA’s President John Tomasi informed our members of this last week: “[W]e won’t maintain a ‘public policy’ team going forward. When it comes to state and federal policy, we will keep monitoring, analyzing, and speaking out when relevant to our efforts, but we have several partner groups who are better equipped to fly to state capitals and testify about legislation.”

Our policy department had been established in July 2025, just after I started working for HxA, and Policy Director Joe Cohn quickly became an important colleague and friend to me in our joint efforts to protect academic freedom from dangers inside and outside higher education. Joe has just taken the role of Executive Director at Yale University’s Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech. (There will be a formal announcement there soon.) HxA’s Director of Research, Alex Arnold, also just left HxA, and prior to that, Martha McCaughey, who had been HxA’s Director of Member and Campus Engagement, left to become a Special Assistant to the University of Wyoming’s president. These folks had all been important to my work at HxA.

When I saw HxA's chosen policy pivot against the backdrop of government actions against academia and I decided to start looking elsewhere, I let a close group of friends and colleagues know to keep an eye out for me. When the ad suddenly popped up for the job I will be taking on in a few weeks, it was so obviously a rare and incredible opportunity, I immediately applied. Everyone I shared the ad with understood why I was so excited about it. I got the formal offer Monday night.

But that’s not all that’s been going on. It’s a topsy-turvy employment time in our household. An hour or so ago came the official announcement that my spouse has been named the next President and CEO of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago, Illinois.

Aron was in a similar position to mine, finding that it was time for him to move on to a better fit. MSU’s president has been pursuing a plan of combining of the M.D. and D.O. schools, a very problematic plan for more reasons that I can name here. Once it became clear that Aron wasn’t going to be able to protect his college from this and that he also had been marked with an expiration date, he started looking at openings at other institutions. There was no other job he wanted at MSU, and he wasn’t ready to be done serving people in medical educational administration. I’m not at all surprised Rosalind Franklin snapped him up in a heartbeat. He's magic.

Aron can’t say it, but I can: MSU is absolutely nuts to lose him. He is objectively speaking one of the most successful and beloved deans his college – any MSU college – has ever had. He has created such a well-integrated, productive, successful institution spread across eight campuses that span the state. (His secret recipe is constant honest communication with his faculty, staff, and students.) There has been so much turnover at MSU, Aron is also one of the most senior deans, and his departure will mean a huge loss of institutional knowledge and skill. It’s just plain tragic for MSU. But all to the good of Rosalind Franklin.

I realized yesterday during my swim that almost exactly 30 years ago, we were both scrambling for jobs. We had just gotten married after meeting in grad school at Indiana University. Aron was entering the match, trying to secure a residency in internal medicine, while I was trying to obtain a tenure-track job to follow the one-year sabbatical-replacement job I had at the University of Minnesota. I remember some of my hair turned grey over trying to figure out how we would land in the same place.

MSU did us a favor then. They agreed to match with Aron assuring him that, if I got the MSU job I was a finalist for, he could take an internal medicine residency there, and if I didn’t get the MSU job, they would release him from the obligation. That meant we could try to be together elsewhere. It all worked out at MSU.

We’ve saved our pennies over the years and done well professionally, and now we have plenty of money to make decisions based on what we want to do, not what we have to do. In fact, that’s what we’re doing with these job changes.

But still, when you leave, there are relations you break, and it feels all wrong, even as the new feels all right. I know I am feeling really sad at leaving my remaining colleagues at HxA. I know Aron is grieving the end of his time at MSU. It's killing me to give up inquisitive, the intellectual magazine I founded and ran for HxA. I'll also miss writing for Free the Inquiry, the HxA Substack I've run and grown to 20,000 followers. But context is everything.

To answer our East Lansing friends’ questions, we aren’t selling the house. You know it has our garden, Aron’s workshop, the solarium, my bathtub, the porches, you friends’ vicinity. We’ll have a security company and a team of friends keeping it all safe when we’re not here, but we do expect to be here for many a weekend and vacation (and I will come for writing retreats, because, especially 30 years in, absence makes the heart grow fonder).

But we’ll be living mostly in Highland Park, Illinois, in a two-bedroom apartment I found in a sprint. It’s not far from Aron’s new campus and it’s perfect for my remote work. It’s near a grocery, near the train to Chicago and to Rosalind Franklin, with two bright exposures, west and south. It’s basically the lux version of the first apartment we had together in Indianapolis. The movers come next week to take the housewares we need to transfer there. If you see the truck, don’t worry. It’s just clothes and books and bedding. We’re furnishing the place with furniture deals on that end. Our intention is to retire back here.

Rosalind Franklin is a really special place, and we are both so excited about Aron getting to work for them. I know they will find him as kind and supportive and effective as his people at MSU did. In some ways, being on the north side of Chicago will make everything else easier for me, too. It’ll be easier to fly to my mom. Easier to go swim at The Point and the big lake’s beaches. Easier to teach the course I hope to teach in January. So much easier to meet our son for dinner, the symphony, or a hike.

But it is also hard. Hard to break ties or to know we will at least fray them through neglect, hard to turn the garden over to two professional weeders, hard to leave people Aron has turned to as kin for a decade or more. And hard to leave my own at HxA, colleagues who have become work cousins, and would have become work siblings given the time.

If you’re a friend, forgive us for not saying something sooner. We have been telling only the closest friends and family what is really going on, not because we don’t care about others but because it always feels so tentative, the offers and the plans and the decisions.

Our son has been in the strangest position of quietly cheering on both his parents in their quests to make safe landings. He has been extraordinary, really, as if our roles had reversed, too soon. But he was up to this new thing. As are we.

The last swim is always cold, but then there’s nothing like that cold to make you feel brilliantly alive.