Being a Scholar

This book is the product of 40 years of teaching.  For most of this time, I was working with graduate students in education at Michigan State and Stanford, an experience that gave me a great opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a scholar and to work toward becoming a scholar.  The eleven essays I’m presenting here are the product of that reflection.  I wrote them over the last decade and published them in a variety of venues.  Recently, my friend Ed Schein suggested that I collect them into a little volume, which I decided was a good idea.  My hope is that this book can serve as a useful guide for students entering into doctoral study and for scholars early in their careers in the academy.  Its particular focus is on scholarship in the social sciences, but much of it may be relevant to people in other fields as well.

These essays vary considerably – in length, from 600 words to 6,000 words; and in form, from simple exhortations to analyses with lots of citations.  But what I hope they all have in common is a straightforward conversational tone and broad accessibility.  These pieces spring from my eagerness, as I neared retirement, to shrug off the stilted academic voice I had to adopt four decades to clear the hurdle of peer reviewers and instead apply my teacher voice directly to the page.