A Meaningful Academic Life: Improvised, Amusing, Unsettling

Abstract

In this essay, originally presented to an audience of colleagues, students, and university faculty, I briefly review the meanings I ascribe to my experience of nearly half a century as a university faculty member. I emphasize the improvisational quality of professorial life, the amusing characters I was able to observe and with whom I often worked, and several unsettling and agitating dimensions of university life that I experienced along the way. Inspired by the challenge of educating the whole person, mind and heart, and passionate about the moral, emotional, and literary urgency of the human sciences, I plan to continue to focus on self-clarifying, evocative, and potentially transforming stories.