My dissertation director once said to my father-in-law: “You know what Anna’s problem is? She’s part academic, part administrator, and part activist.”
Dad said “Yep. But why is that a problem?”
I’ve spent my whole career, even my whole life, following my nose. Like the entomologist in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer, I don’t focus on a goal in the distance and travel a straight line towards it; I am always microsampling my environment for concentrations of the things I need. I fly toward them: community, integrity, public purpose, creativity, generosity, generativity, beauty…
This means I can look, er, nontraditional. I started Princeton at 16 and earned two more degrees from Cornell University. I’ve never held a job that existed before me. I’ve worked at four different higher education institutions in three different states, but always working toward the same goal: helping higher education be more useful in the world, by nurturing the spirits and practices of the scholars who make it so. How do I do that?
- By helping people develop a clearer sense of themselves and each other, using participatory and reflective approaches like Liberating Structures, Art of Hosting, deliberative dialogue, appreciative interviews, and a lot more…
- By working with teams, departments, issue-oriented groups, etc. to build a shared sense of purpose and a common vision, and them to put that into practice…
- By helping people, groups, institutions understand the kinds of impact their work has, through democratically-engaged assessment.
They say vocation is the thing you can’t not do…for me, that’s helping brilliant, generous people make the most of themselves and their sense of calling, especially in academic contexts.
Here are some questions I might ask you, if and when we meet:
- Why are you blogging publicly,
- What topics do you think you’ll write about?
- Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
- If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
Scholars as Humans 