The Professor of Education As Spiritual Seeker
In the early 1980s, during a long-awaited sabbatical, I, a tenured full
professor at a so-called “public ivy,” returned to graduate school to earn a
degree in applied ethics and religious studies. In the late 1980s, I took time
off to earn still another graduate degree, this one in moral theology. Why, I
asked myself, would a person who for so long claimed to be temperamentally
indisposed to matters of the spirit spend so much money and energy pursuing
further studies in religiously-oriented disciplines? Was this my way of having
something “greater than myself to hold onto,” of seizing the “world by the
throat” in order to find more to life than I could ever have imagined? At
least on the face of it, these degrees had no palpable payoff for my work as
a teacher educator. In fact, to this day, I do not even bother to mention them
on my Curriculum Vitae for fear of appearing impractical, or worse,
intellectually self-indulgent, to colleagues in my professional school.