In four decades of teaching college English, the author has watched many good teaching jobs morph into second-class ones. Worse, she has seen the memory and then the expectation of teaching jobs with decent status, security, and salary depart along with principles and collegiality. To help reverse this downward spiral, she contends that what is needed is a collective memory of better times and the language that shaped them. It was not always thus; that is what one must remember. The reality of the past is as much a basis for hope as a future wide with possibility.