Early on in her first tenure-track job at Michigan State University, in the late 1970s, the author happened to be riding the same train from Lansing, Michigan, to Chicago as the department chair who hired her, Alan Hollingsworth, who had since become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. It had taken her three years to land a tenure-track…

While a college student in the early to mid-1960s, the author decided to become a college professor because her own teachers excited an intellectual respect unequaled anywhere else in her life. And because she respected them and their judgments, their hard-won high evaluation of her work gave her a strong sense of her own value and self-respect.…

In this article, the author shares his experience being the "chair" of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He also shares how this department proved to be an "ordinary" department at an "ordinary" liberal arts college. However, to conclude…