The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
42
Loyalty Is a Two-Way Street
W HEN DENNIS Cosgrove was an undergraduate student of mine at
the University of Virginia in the early 1990s, I found him to be
impressive. He was doing terrific work in my computer lab. He was a
teaching assistant in the operating systems course. He was taking
graduate level courses. And he was an A student.
Well, in most classes he was an A student. In Calculus III, he was
an F student. It wasn’t that he lacked the ability. He was just so focused
on his computer courses, being a teaching assistant, and a research
assistant in my lab that he simply stopped going to calculus class.
That turned out to be a serious problem, as it was not the first time
he had a semester in which he earned straight A’s with an F.
It was two weeks into a new semester when Dennis’s checkered
academic record caught the attention of a certain dean. He knew how
smart Dennis was; he had seen his SAT and AP scores. In his view, the
F’s were all due to attitude, not aptitude. He wanted to expel Dennis. But
I knew Dennis had never received a single warning about any of this. In
fact, all of his A’s offset his F’s to the point where he couldn’t even be
academically suspended. Yet, the Dean invoked an obscure rule that left
expulsion on the table. I decided to go to bat for my student. “Look,” I
told the dean, “Dennis is a strong rocket with no fins. He’s been a star in
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