A Meaningful Academic Life: Improvised, Amusing, Unsettling
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18778/2450-4491.08.17Keywords:
evocative autoethnography, memory work, compassionate teaching, transforming stories, Arthur P. BochnerAbstract
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.
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