THERE IS A NICE JOKE ABOUT ACADEMICS. It goes something like this: “You join another professor for lunch, and he immediately and incessantly talks only about himself. After twenty minutes, he pauses and says, ‘Enough about me. Let me tell you about my work.’ Then after listening to him pour forth for another twenty minutes, you finally hear, ‘OK. Enough about my work. Let me tell you what others are saying about my work.’”

The joke evokes our unease about talking too much about ourselves or hearing more than we want about others. Yet I want to balance it with a story that offers the opposite perspective and might help justify our anthology and this essay. Some years ago I finished the draft of a book about the value of a liberal arts education (Roche 2010). I gave it to two colleagues for feedback. By coincidence I received their feedback the same day. I had lunch with a historian who liked it but observed that it operated mainly at the conceptual level. In order to grab the reader, he said, historians tend to open their books with stories. Where are you in the book? You went to Williams, you studied abroad, you led a liberal arts college. Why don't you wind your own story into the book? I then had dinner with a philosopher, who said: It's good, but much too positive, too idealistic. You need to talk about the challenges of realizing the liberal arts, especially with faculty members who might be unwilling to move beyond their own specialty or discipline. That weekend I dictated 10,000 words to my computer, all personal anecdotes, which I then slowly wound into the book. Those personal stories gave the manuscript color and texture, and so it became a much better book, more than a string of concepts. I found the genre—integrating ideas, anecdotes, and statistics—appealing enough that I chose it again when writing a book on challenges and strategies in serving as a dean (Roche 2017).

So at the risk of falling into the role of the ugly academic, I will, as I believe can sometimes be interesting or even helpful to others, tell you my tale, winding into it responses to the questions we have been asked to consider.