The Wabash Commentary

JDP:  I think very few big decisions in life come from one big Eureka moment.  I left Wabash because of a slow accumulation of a number of things over the course of four or five years.

In some ways, I was in an unusual position on the faculty.  There are many faculty who have strong reasons for being in central Indiana, in addition to Wabash College, whereas for me and my family there were none.  My blood relatives live ten hours away from Crawfordsville; so do my wife’s. My wife didn’t have a job in Indiana that would have been hard to reproduce elsewhere; we didn’t have the two-body academic problem, she’s a school teacher, and can work anywhere. Also, we’re kind of an outdoors-y family, and living in central Indiana can be a challenge if you like wild places.  In short, our only claim to being in Crawfordsville was Wabash, so when that situation became increasingly less attractive, it was easier to move on.

It’s probably not appropriate for to comment here in great detail on why my situation at Wabash became less attractive to me, so let me just say that I think that faculty life at Wabash can be difficult for those professors whose ideas about liberal education are more than a few standard deviations from the professorial mean.

JDP:  When I talked about life on the margins, I was speaking not only about this or that college as a whole, but sub-populations, pockets on this or that college campus.  So I don’t know if I would say that Wabash, or in fact any one college, ever is what you described (I have forgotten the words you claim were mine!); I don’t know if Wabash ever was like that. But there certainly are strong (but small) pockets like that on campus.

JDP:  Well, I’m a stalwart champion of diversity in American higher education, of giving students real choice in the type of college they attend. I’m a champion of all-female, all-male, and co-ed colleges. I’m a champion of religious and secular institutions. I’m a champion of large and small institutions, of research universities, great books colleges, and community colleges. I’m a stalwart champion of colleges with unique identities. But I’m most certainly not a champion of the current trend in American higher education of the homogenization of colleges and universities; the desire to make them indistinguishable from one another, more or less.

What must change in my teaching style now that I’m no longer at an all-male school? Well, I teach mathematics, so that would be less of a pressing issue in my day-to-day teaching style.  If I were to teach a course like C&T here at Northern (and I won’t) I suppose I would have to think about that. . .  One thing that would change, of course, would be the way in which I would participate in the day-to-day life of students outside of the classroom or beyond the classroom, but in terms of teaching mathematics not much would change at all.

People sometimes behave differently with members of the opposite sex than they do with members of their own sex. Here in Marquette, for instance, there is an all-female kayak club and an all-female trail-running group. The idea, obviously, is that women will have a different experience participating in these activities if there are no men involved, and for some women this different experience might be a better experience. So the “outside of the classroom change” you ask about would simply be to be mindful of the various ways people have of communicating and interacting with each other, with a special sensitivity to the subtleties occasioned by these differences in style. And now that I think about it, I guess I should be mindful of this even in the mathematics classroom.