ABSTRACT
Men and women who teach in universities are often excoriated in the press and in other quarters for not doing enough to justify their rewards of a living salary, several weeks or months a year without having to be in the classroom, their research grants, and, for some, tenured positions. The craft or art or profession of teaching in an institution of higher learning is generally believed to house otherworldly types ensconced in an “ivory tower.” I must confess that my own calling into that craft or art did not sound loud and clear; other horizons signaled invitingly: I could go back to sea; try to live by writing fiction and free-lance articles; become a newspaperman. Always my father’s fate shrouded my mind, and feeling myself a coward for not risking the precarious, I chose the ivory tower. Once committed, I looked on those who had done little or nothing but read books by way of preparation with skepticism, if not hostility, only half-aware of my unfair snobbery, the snobbery of calloused hands. Colleagues to whom I responded most warmly were those who had worked with their hands, been to war, or otherwise brought to the classroom qualities generally believed to be foreign to pure scholarship.
