By Joy-Jayne Bassey, EMBA student

Somewhere right now, before Dallas has caught up to its own morning,
a class is meeting across eight time zones, in five languages,
with a sixth just finding its footing.
Nobody in the room needs telling this is unusual.
It has just always been Tuesday, here.

Half a century is what football calls halftime.
You go back to the locker room, sweat still on you,
and the whole point is what you do next.
Different lights now. Different pads.
Same body that learned, young, on real turf, in real pain,
that a team moves together or it doesn't move at all.

You traded the pads for a pulpit, and the pulpit
for a university that stretches further than most people ever get to see.
Long before any of that, there was Homewood —
the neighborhood you chose to raise your family in
instead of the one that would have been easier —
and East Liberty, where you planted a church
to fit the block it stood on.

Fifty is just the number on the outside of all that.

May the second half surprise even you.

May you keep learning from the people you're supposed to be teaching.

May the size of the job never swallow the size of the man having a birthday —
tired sometimes, unfinished sometimes, allowed today
to just receive something for once.

May the road from a football field to Homewood
to a president's office keep making sense to you
the way it did on the days nobody was watching.

I am one student, out of thousands, who has never met you
and knows you only by the door you left open.

Happy fiftieth. Play the second half like you mean it.