A Couple Photos of This Evening's Sunset

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Reflections on My Academic Career - Part I

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 I'm currently in my second year of a three-year phased retirement from IU. After this semester, I will have one more course to teach in the 2022-23 academic year. I don't know whether the inclination is natural or not, but I've already begun reflecting on my career, the ups, the downs, the in-betweens. My reflections are not intentionally structured or organized. This will not be a chronological narrative; and it certainly will not be complete. It is not an exercise in nostalgia - I am not normally a nostalgic person, though I am sentimental. In other words, I care about the people and places currently and formerly in my life, but I have no desire to return to some earlier time in the mistaken belief that life was better then. Finally, I don't presuppose that anyone outside of my family will find any part of this, let alone the whole thing, interesting or valuable either in itself or as a socio-historical reference. For the most part, I'm writing this for myself an...
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Early Career Mentors

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It's difficult to imagine that anyone makes a career in academia without at least one great mentor. I had some good teachers in high school, but none I would label "mentors." But after high school I was fortunate to find three real mentors -- one in college, one in law school at Lewis & Clark, and one at Stanford Law School.   The first was Herman "Hal" Lauter , a philosophy professor at Occidental College. I first met Hal in The Collegium, an immersive first-year program I was fortunate to get into. Instead of taking various freshman-level courses, students in the Collegium spent the entire year diving deeply into the liberal arts. Hal was the faculty leader of the small group within The Collegium to which I was assigned. From that time through my senior year, Hal was my advisor and friend. [I'm happy to say he's still my friend; I'm planning to visit him in So.Cal. in the new year.]  The depth and breadth of his knowledge and his contagious exc...
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Growing older means reconciling oneself to many things: grey (or no) hair; declining athletic prowess; aches and pains that occur for no apparent reason; a daily pill box; and the inevitable. But growing older also provides opportunities for more positive forms of reconciliation, for instance, to one's own foibles and past mistakes. The most rewarding reconciliation might be with old friends who have been out of touch for a long time, not so much to rehearse (let alone relive) the past but to communicate about present conditions and concerns with people who share some of one's history and, therefore, a common frame of reference. Unfortunately, some old friends might not be open to reconciliation, whether for good reason or no reason at all. In that case, one must reconcile oneself to not reconciling.
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