I came to St. Olaf College with no clue what a liberal arts college was. All my academic experiences were at large public universities, where professors lectured to big classes of undergraduates — leaving the grading to others — and conducted seminars for graduate students, all in their specialties. My friend, who still teaches at a school like that, has taught the same three classes for over 30 years now.

That’s definitely not how my teaching life at Olaf unspooled. Over my 30+ years here, I probably taught 30 different classes, not just in the History Department, but in the Paracollege, in the American Conversations Program, and in three different interdisciplinary programs — including one, like AmCon, I helped to found. One doesn’t have that much expertise going in; one evolves it at a place that encourages its faculty to grow.

It turns out that I’m a generalist with a short attention span. Teaching one thing somehow led to another, and when programs didn’t exist to accommodate how or what I wanted to teach, I helped nudge them into being. Olaf gave me the space and I claimed the agency to expand into places and teaching modes that interested me and my students. Sometimes we went there together; other times I took the reins. Teaching a lot of things expanded my pedagogical horizons as well as my research ones, not to mention the people with whom I got to work.

I like to think that my Olaf vocation story parallels a lot of students’ vocational stories. Given space to explore new things and the opportunity to be more than one thing simultaneously, a lot of students seem to wander into their vocations. So too do many learn that vocations can evolve, just like their interests did during their time at the college. That doesn’t happen by accident; that happens because of the college’s commitment to educating students broadly as well as deeply.