Maybe now you will finally start acting your age. Since arriving here fresh from grad school you have buzzed with energy. You helped develop our then new Center for Environmental Studies. You have chaired it, as you have the biology department, and have directed the Bronfman Science Center and Hopkins Memorial Forest, whose permanent plots you have conducted a census of at fifteen-year intervals. You wrote for the journals Science and Natural Science and authored a series of popular books on wild flowers. You studied how species relate to each other and developed a curious, though you assured us scientific, interest in the sex lives of salamanders. Locally you developed rich resources on the history of Williamstown and served for many years on its Conservation Commission. All of this you did before the invention of Red Bull. At the age of fifty you thought you might try a marathon, which you have now done more than eighty times, still completing three or four each year, including Boston and New York, often in partnership with runners who are mobility-impaired. Never one to slow down, you now embark on the natural experiment of determining what retirement looks like for someone who is forever twenty-one.
I hereby declare you Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology, Emeritus, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 3, 2018