This post discusses the challenges faced by professors and students in non-career-focused majors, who often encounter pressure to prioritize economic returns. It highlights the importance of supporting these students in pursuing their passions while managing potential regrets. The author emphasizes the enduring value of craft and its impact on cultural legacy.
It’s true: there are still some professors and students who choose fields of study and complete majors that don’t solely open career pathways. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors must withstand the relentless and usually unsophisticated pressures from parents and peers to resist academic preparations aimed primarily at a short-term return on economic investment. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors feel marginalized and devalued for their calling, which is viewed as irrelevant and archaic, or worse, irresponsible and regressive.
For mentors and advisors in these areas, the challenge remains: how does one begin an effective conversation with students who are interested in educational opportunities outside the narrowing focus on career preparation?
This post reflects on the writer’s journey as a young artist, discussing the importance of mentorship and serendipitous reading. It advocates exploring texts outside the vocational canon to enrich understanding and foster interesting conversations. Examples of insightful biographies highlight how stories can enhance theoretical knowledge, emphasizing the role of wonder in vocational discernment.
Once upon a time, when I was a young painter just beginning a graduate program, a generous pastor and theologian invited me into a mentoring relationship when he noticed I was reading James Atlas’ biography of the American poet and writer Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). Lou Reed had written a song I liked—“My House” on The Blue Mask, released in 1982—about his friend and teacher Schwartz, so I wanted to know more about Schwartz’s life. My mentor and I soon discovered we shared an interest in listening to music, and the following Christmas, he gifted me a copy of Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.
At that time, I was also struggling with what I understood to be my calling as a young artist, and I was still a long way away from thinking about vocation as a collection of concepts. My mentor counseled me to think of my calling as service and doxology—that is, an expression of praise to God—and was very firm about the relative spiritual value of my calling, regardless of the perceived lack of its economic potential. He read mostly philosophy, and I read mostly critical art theory, but we found common ground in the biography of a cultural legend. Our shared exploration illustrates how reading outside the canon of vocational topics is good for creating opportunities to have interesting conversations that can lead back to vocation.
This post presents an imagined dialogue between Sarah and her mentor Joel, exploring the conflict between support of authentic vocational exploration for students and the pursuit of an idealized programmatic outcome. They discuss the dangers of constraining students with pre-imagined paths, emphasizing the need for individual differences and a more flexible approach to discernment.
This post is framed as an imagined dialogue between two friends: Joel is a mentor to the narrator, Sarah. In what follows, Sarah narrates a conversation between the the two of them about an ongoing tension between authentically helping students with vocational discernment and aiming at the ideal and pre-imagined results of programmatic “purity.”
My friend Joel sat at a coffeehouse table in the sun with a small stack of art books and his notebook. When I arrived, he welcomed me, no matter that I was a little late for our appointment yet again. He and I have been meeting frequently since right after I arrived on campus in my new role as lead vocational counselor.
The last time we met, Joel had made a cautionary remark about purity that I wanted to follow up on. When I sat down, he smiled broadly and began chatting about spring flowers, as the two of us share a keen interest in plants and gardening. On this day, he had been reading and writing about the American painter, Philip Guston; Joel’s writing about his reading seems to be an admirable life habit.
The author reflects on the challenges faced in advising for students, noting a disconnect between student expectations and meaningful discussions about their futures. Drawing from Rowan Williams’s ideas on the significance of time, the author advocates for teaching students to appreciate time’s giftedness, aligning academic rhythms with their religious calendars and broader vocational paths.
I have just finished a round of appointments with many of my first-year students and undeclared advisees to help them review their progress and pick classes for next semester. Even as I am blessed with students who are polite, eager, and diligent, some of their expectations create obstacles to having more meaningful conversations about their vocational arc. They often want to prioritize a more convenient, linear pathway—one aimed at a credential they are just beginning to understand. I would prefer to spend time with them discussing a more holistic trajectory: how they prepared in the past for their lives as students, what they are exploring in this present moment, and how they are creating foundations for their futures. Given this tension, this most recent round of advising conversations felt to me like boilerplate sessions of prescriptive compliance.
Have you had the experience that your work with undergraduates doesn’t end at commencement?
Have you had the experience that your work with undergraduates doesn’t end at commencement? In your role as advisor and professor, you helped first-year students and sophomores begin to find their way. You guided and supported them as juniors and seniors, when their vocational choices started to narrow with their more developed interests; this ordinary and important work may have culminated with writing a letter of recommendation or giving employers a reference. But now, especially in career-challenged and underemployed domains, have you realized that you continue to advise and mentor some of them long after they’ve graduated?
My speculation is that we ought to acknowledge the low or shabby aspects without dismissing the high or sublime, and we ought to hold up the high or sublime aspects without disdaining the low or shabby. And the sublime that we seek or find is usually gifted to us as an outcome of a lot of work that can feel shabby.
For the title of this post, I’ve riffed on an idea of the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021.) I will use his splendid essay “The Shabby and the Sublime” from A Defense of Ardor to frame my thinking about aspects of vocation. Zagajewski meant “shabby” and “sublime” in tight correlation with “low” and “high” poetic styles. I will use “shabby” and “sublime” more loosely to refer to a range of applications to vocation.
Please read his original essay if you’re interested in his thoughts about an ontological requirement of poetry not to exclude high style. Zagajewski offered a pointed critique of modern poetry and of our time’s preference for low style over high style, for a simplistic style that excludes expressions of the sublime in favor of shabby chatter. His diagnosis when comparing a thing in poor condition from hard use or lack of care and a thing that is beautiful or good beyond measure may surprise you.
Loyalty comes before a discerning intelligence; it makes me listen and understand first, even while I may be struggling internally with my preferences for what I think is right or correct or better or true.
This post will try to explain a way of thinking about our vocational interactions in which loyalty might weigh more than intelligence.
Before the technologies of notes apps and simple word processing software were created, I collected and saved memorable quotations on notecards, using a typewriter. Then I’d file the typed and titled cards alphabetically in an old, wooden, recipe card box. In that box, in the Ls, is a card titled LOYALTY. The card contains a quotation from San Martin, “The Liberator,” whose idea about loyalty was found repurposed on a factory wall in Argentina in the 1980s. The quotation ended with “Remember: an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of intelligence.”
I can’t remember where I came across the quotation or in what context it was used, but I’m pretty sure I made the effort to capture the thought because I was intrigued by its comparative equivalency in favor of an unthinking loyalty. At the time, and until recently, I was suspicious of loyalty, especially as a tool used to manipulate people to act without thinking.
Reflection and discernment can be amplified in spaces that are slower and quieter than most classrooms, in spaces that have a sense of entering and belonging. Such a room would invite and signal to a student that what we are doing here is different, just as being in chapel and in the lab and studio is different.
Have you ever had an experience of a physical space so powerful and so sudden that it energized your creativity and prompted the open question, “What if . . . ?” This happened to me recently, at the national NetVUE conference in Dallas. During downtime, my colleague Dr. Amy Hermanson let me accompany her on a long walk from our hotel to the site of The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. As we walked, Amy fondly recalled the seminars and lectures she attended at the Institute earlier in her academic career. We were met by our host, Francis Ryburn, who graciously gave us a tour of their facilities at the Stroud House, on Routh Street.
The Stroud House is a modest, late 19th-century brick structure. Originally built as a residence, it was later used as a business center for small, arts-related designers and dealers, and the Dallas Institute acquired it in 2014 through the generosity of Dr. Joanne Stroud, who died in 2021. After chatting briefly with us, Francis offered to show us the interior spaces, which include a couple of large meeting rooms on the second floor. It’s here, in these rooms, where I was immediately impacted by the simplicity, dignity, and possibility of space—for the kinds of spaces that are perhaps needed for thinking about vocation and vocational discernment. These quiet rooms are places in which to dream, reflect, be befriended and mentored, and get clarity.
How does the idea of self-creation apply specifically to teaching vocation? And at what point does our teaching vocation become a system?
Philipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere (Die Farbenkugel), 1810. Wikimedia. Public domain.
Teaching vocation requires the instructor to strike a balance between making too much or too little of vocation. A good balance works out differently for instructing first-year students than it does for instructing seniors, and it likely works out differently for undecided students in a liberal arts college than it does for majors in pre-professional programs in a comprehensive university.
In my experience having also taught vocation concepts outside the academy, a priority for vocational discernment and reflection seems dependent on the audience’s affinity or urgency for conceptual frameworks. I generally have a more difficult time getting people who work in “fast time” vocations—action-, labor-, and task-oriented—to be energized by vocation concepts than those people who work in “slow time” vocations—thought-, relationship-, and process-oriented. I can only imagine the reactions I’d experience teaching vocation to people who are insecure about the things I take for granted; I speak from a point of privilege and to people who enjoy degrees of privilege.
What got me thinking about how much to make of vocation was an essay by Danish professor Anders Michelsen, in a book for Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition, Your Color Memory. Michelsen’s essay is titled “Color and Self-Creation,” and it uses color systems to explore creative agency and cultural contingency. A phrase repeated in the essay is, “We create systems that create us.” This claim, confined to the domain of color, is elaborated by a historical overview of color theory that concludes with, “We organize our colored world around systems that are increasingly of our own making . . . by adaption, exclusion, interpretation, and creation.”
Against what prevails in culture as a hesitancy about color, Michelsen argues for the positive value of self-creation systems and for their creative agency. Color grants humans the field for deciding, reflecting upon, and setting color systems; color systems are modes of human imagination. If readers are interested in how this framework leads to a “politics of creation,” you may want to become familiar with David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, 2001. {For an excerpt, click here}.
Michelsen’s essay takes me in a different direction, however. How does the idea of self-creation systems apply specifically to teaching vocation concepts?
I have been holding your email in my heart and mind since I received it. Thank you for the confidence you have placed in me! You are in the throes of vocational discernment, even as you enter your mid-career. I certainly understand your concerns for the present and future realities of your calling.
The following letter is offered in the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (written between 1903-1908).
Dear colleague,
I have been holding your email in my heart and mind since I received it. Thank you for the confidence you have placed in me! You are in the throes of vocational discernment, even as you enter your mid-career. I certainly understand your concerns for the present and future realities of your calling.
The older I get the more difficult it is for me to control my own ego and impatience when I mentor others. Why do I, by default, frame the answers to other people’s questions by using my own “special” narrative? Why do I feel compelled to move quickly and forcefully to bold solutions? I hope my response to you is clear and measured in humility, empathy, encouragement, and honesty, and that it gives you something of the help you’re seeking.
