As a child, you probably checked off the days remaining in the school year as summer vacation approached. College isn’t so different: As great as learning and intellectual growth are, you are likely looking forward to graduation, counting up credit requirements and counting down to the day when you will finally be able to move on from this long process called education.

But if former University president James Duderstadt has his way, your education — even after 12 years of school, four of college and the likely prospect of graduate school — is just getting started.

“We’re entering a world in which lifelong learning becomes not only a need of every individual, but the responsibility of a democratic society to provide it,” Duderstadt said in September. “It’s a world in which the pace of knowledge continues to accelerate and where you’re one paycheck away from the unemployment line, unless you’re willing to continue to prove your skills.”

Duderstadt, who served from 1988 to 1996 as the 11th president of the University, is knowledgeable about more than just higher education. He is a veritable giant of policy — and philosophy — on an array of topics, including energy policy and the Michigan economy. He is also a theoretical physicist and nuclear engineer by trade.

Thirteen years after his retirement from the presidency, Duderstadt maintains an office on North Campus in the building that bears his name. He rose into a leadership position because he wanted to get things done — and he stepped down when the job was finished.

Though much is often made of his retirement and unlikely return to the College of Engineering faculty, Duderstadt maintains that there’s nothing so mysterious about his decisions. He was a change agent who pushed the envelope, never thinking about whether it might hurt his chances at taking another presidency at a more elite institution.

“I burned a lot of bridges,” he said with a soft chuckle, reflecting on some of the unpopular decisions he made. “But once in a while, you have to do things like that.”

THE BOY WHO THOUGHT YALE WAS IN ENGLAND

Born in Carrollton, Mo. in 1943, Duderstadt was just the second person ever from his town to take the SAT. Passing on the usual career paths for rural Missouri boys in the 1950s (“agriculture, maybe dentistry”), Duderstadt’s parents encouraged him to apply to faraway schools — some of which were actually closer than he thought.

“I applied to places like Stanford and Michigan, and Yale and Harvard — which I thought at the time were in England,” he said.

Sight unseen, the young Duderstadt headed to Yale, with the promise of playing football for the Bulldogs the deciding factor. A culture shock was inevitable, but that didn’t make it any easier. Initially, Duderstadt carried a B average and struggled to fit in with his Andover and Exeter-prepped classmates.

But just as he would later in life, Duderstadt adapted quickly — raising his grades and taking on electrical engineering as his major because, as he describes in his memoir “The View From the Helm,” it was “the hardest engineering major so I reasoned it had to be worthwhile.”

From there, it was the Cold War and the notorious ‘60s that shaped his career.

“A lot of things were happening,” Duderstadt wrote in his memoir. “Martin Luther King was the speaker at my commencement. (President) Kennedy was assassinated in my senior year. The Space Race was off and running. I was interested in the space program, went to Caltech and then got involved in the nuclear area, which seemed like a hot area at the time.”

After a stint after graduation in Los Alamos, N.M., to work on nuclear-powered rockets intended for manned missions to Mars, Duderstadt intended to settle down in California. But his wife, Anne, had other ideas. “Having grown weary of the smog and traffic of Southern California,” Duderstadt recalled, she accepted on his behalf an offer made by the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan in faraway Ann Arbor.

“THE PRESIDENCY SWUNG AT ME"

Duderstadt arrived in Ann Arbor in 1968, and didn’t take long to make his mark.

“I went through the normal process of doing research and teaching and found myself more and more involved in university politics,” Duderstadt said. “I was on (the Senate Assembly), and in 1980 was surprised when the provost called and asked if I’d be dean of engineering. I was 36.”

As dean of the College of Engineering, Duderstadt began the type of work that would come to define his 40 years at Michigan. He was known for restructuring the school, making improvements and advancing the department to prepare for a new age in education.

Duderstadt himself puts it more bluntly.

“I had changed the College of Engineering so much that I felt I wasn’t the appropriate person to serve more than five years,” he said.