User:Robbie/rmcc narrative bio 2pp: Difference between revisions

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 <p>Born in 1939, I grew up preferring sports to academics, doing just well enough on the scholastic escalator until I formed a sense of purpose as a Princeton undergraduate. Then, I wrote a good senior thesis, aced comprehensives, and in 1961, received my BA, unexpectedly with high honors. </p>
-<p>Columbia followed, where I studied history and thrived after a bad start as a somewhat picaresque academic — tilting with the doctoral mill, emerging well- certified yet undisciplined. In those days, the old-boy network plus a great job market created magical opportunities — a phone call recruited me, 3 years beyond the BA, as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University. Two years later, a similar call initiated my return to Columbia, where I joined the Teachers College faculty in 1967. There I stayed, rising through the ranks, fast, then slower, to become the the John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education in 2002.</p>
+<p>Columbia followed, where I studied history and thrived after a bad start as a somewhat picaresque academic — tilting with the doctoral mill, emerging well- certified yet undisciplined. In those days, the old-boy network plus a great job market created magical opportunities — a phone call recruited me, 3 years beyond the BA, as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University. Two years later, a similar call initiated my return to Columbia, where I joined the Teachers College faculty in 1967. There I stayed, rising through the ranks to become the the John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education in 2002.</p>
 <p>Through all my schooling, I was poor at assigned learning, but ardent in independent study, in the classical sense — striving after, concentrating on, favoring, applying oneself, giving attention to, being eager, zealous, taking pains, diligent, devoted to. With the bookstore as my curriculum, I studied my way through Princeton, sparked by avid reading in the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. At Columbia, I made the verb, to study, the means and goal of my career. With free rein from my dissertation sponsors, Lawrence A. Cremin and Jacques Barzun, I went all out on an intellectual biography of Ortega, defended in the spring of ‘68 in the midst of campus turmoil. It became a large, well-received first book, [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1971_man_circumstances_all.pdf Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator], published in 1971. </p>
-<p>Simultaneous with the book’s publication, I received tenure, and within the domain of Ortega’s influence, the work brought recognition from writers like Jacques Ellul and Salvador de Madariaga. It all proved to be a short-lived high- point that I found difficult to move beyond. I began to drift, dreaming of life as a public intellectual, uncertain what should come next. I reflected on political and educational thinking from Rousseau forward and explored how modes of communication and material life affected personal and collective self- formation, but found it difficult to establish the work as topics of broad public interest. And in an education school ethos, many professors and students perceived my thinking to be tangential, too distant from the realities of public schooling.</p>
+<p>Simultaneous with the book’s publication, I received tenure, and within the domain of Ortega’s influence, the work brought recognition from writers like Jacques Ellul and Salvador de Madariaga. It all proved to be a short-lived high- point that I found difficult to move beyond. I began to drift, dreaming of life as a public intellectual, uncertain what should come next. I reflected on political and educational thinking from Rousseau forward and explored how modes of communication and material life affected personal and collective self-formation, but found it difficult to establish the work as topics of broad public interest. And in an education school ethos, many professors and students perceived my thinking to be tangential, too distant from the realities of public schooling.</p>
 <p>Should I try to move elsewhere? Perhaps, but with tenure among colleagues I liked in a major university in a great city I loved, I stayed put, committed to turning my youthful commitment to study into a full theory and practice of education. In life, a persistent question can become a quest: <i>Can each person find within their actual circumstances resources requisite for pursuing comprehensive, life-long, voluntary study? Can each, grasp actual opportunity to study as fully as they will find worthy what their vital concerns compelled them to devote themselves to?</i></p>