Better Late than Never

by Ava Swearingen, student writer

Part of the student experience at the university level is learning to balance academics and a social life. Sometimes in navigating this quest for stabilization, however, things fall through the cracks. 

Robert Mead (’75) found himself in a tough position in October 1971. He was a student at Harding College — not yet a university — and decided to travel to Memphis with a friend to see James Taylor in concert. They had a ride to the show but did not yet have a ride back to Searcy lined up. Their plan was to hitchhike back.

What Mead and his friend did not account for was that no one was driving on the farm roads they needed to take to get back to Searcy at that time of night. They were eventually able to make it back to campus by 10 a.m. the next morning. For Mead, this meant he completely missed a test he was supposed to take at 8 a.m. for Dr. Raymond Muncy’s Western Civilization course.

Mead went to Dr. Muncy’s office to ask if it would be possible for him to still take the test. Dr. Muncy told him he couldn’t but he could turn in a book review instead. Mead was tasked with writing a review on The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. There was no deadline to turn the review in. 

For the rest of Mead’s time at Harding, the book review was never turned in. Fifty-three years later, though, Mead was back at Harding for his 50-year class reunion. While on campus, he dropped off his review to the history department. Dr. Muncy had already passed away, but one of his students still remembered a commitment he had made to his professor.

Over the last five decades, Mead has bought the book four separate times and started writing the review over and over, “...being reminded every time I heard James Taylor on the radio.”

Mead understood that this was an opportunity and a show of grace from his professor. Even if it took some time, he wasn’t willing to give up on this task, and he never fully forgot the chance he was given as a student.

Finally, the report was turned in inside a cleverly chosen Mead brand folder. It is nine pages long and written entirely without AI, which Mead quips was in order to keep “in the spirit of the times, 1971”. Nestled next to the submission date of October 30, 2025 reads “just a little late”.