WHO AM I? A Perennial Student Bum
How do I say who I am, without repeating, “I… I… I…”?
I was born a Baby-Boomer in northern Alberta, Canada, the middle of five children of an ex-pat Tennessean geophysicist and a Puerto Rican New Yorker nurse-turned-mom. I was raised on the bald prairie of Regina, Saskatchewan, “a nice place to raise kids”, and chewed wheat kernels for gum (though not often). Elementary and high schools were completely average.
I was snared by philosophy in my undergrad years at University of Alberta, first Marx, then Nietzsche, then Shakespeare, Plato, and Aristotle. I had good teachers, such as Leon Craig.
I went on to study at Dalhousie in Halifax (political philosophy), University of Victoria (Classics), St. John’s College Santa Fe (Great Books), Claremont Graduate School (government), and Berkeley summer schools (Greek and Latin). Along the way, I picked up Augustine, Late Antiquity, Thomas, phenomenology, the brilliant Christopher Dawson, the American Founding, and Strategic Studies (with the humane Bill Rood). Following my Claremont PhD, I got a job at the US Commission on Civil Rights, involving some fascinating hearings under the noble Clarence Pendleton and Bill Allen.
I taught at Brock University in the Niagara Peninsula, Cal State San Bernardino, Bethany College in West Virginia, and then back at Brock. Meanwhile, I married one serious woman, with whom, seven daughters and three sons. I dropped out of academics after the birth of our third child, because I was dead-ended as a male in the humanities and social sciences. (I learned in 1991 that every position in my field was reserved for a woman until 2011.) Since then, I have taught part-time at every opportunity, but that was never enough to support the family.
For the next 15 years, thanks to the wise Ted Byfield, I slid sideways into journalism (Alberta/ Western Report). We moved to Calgary, where my aging parents lived. Neither grandparents nor grandchildren cared very much about our contentment, so my spouse and myself had the blessed opportunity of growing up between grand-generations. I later became religion editor at the Calgary Herald. All that was better than anything I missed in academics.
By 2008, print journalism was dying, so, again thanks to friends, I slid sideways into government tribunal work: five years as an Employment Insurance referee, and six years as a Citizenship and Immigration Canada citizenship judge. That taught me a lot.
I only ever wanted to teach philosophy in a small college, but I had three fascinating careers and stumbled into extraordinary contentment, with a happy marriage, our grown kids as friends, and soon-to-be grandchildren. The passage of time is a funny thing.
That required roughly two-dozen first person singular pronouns, for which I apologize.