The Professor’s Assignment: Getting to the Guts of the Matter

Title: The Professor’s Assignment: Getting to the Guts of the Matter
Author(s) Jon Ericson

“Reading [The Professor’s Assignment] was like taking a master class in what really counts at a good liberal arts institution.”

From the Foreword by Bruce Svare, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience, State University of New York at Albany, Fulbright Scholar 2006, 2014, 2023 

 

I was there

The Professor’s Assignment captures the invention of something that no one who ever had the good fortune to be a speech major at Drake will ever forget—a curriculum that taught the values of curiosity; critical thinking; public participation; reflection on what it means to be moral, publicly and privately; and, as Ericson correctly insists, fun.

Reading The Professor’s Assignment, I felt humbled and a little shocked to realize how much of the outlook I’ve carried through a lifetime was shaped there. This short book is like seeing pictures you’ve never seen and hearing stories you've never heard about the place that you’re from.

—Steve Perry 

 

Me too

When second hand met minute hand exactly at top of the hour, the room went theatrically dark. The professor appeared in the umbra of a single, hidden lectern light. What ensued felt like some new teaching brew.

The Professor’s Assignment invites us behind the lectern, and above and around it, traveling to the origins of a seminal liberal arts program. What does it mean to be a thoughtful human being? A thoughtful citizen? What is good teaching? The answers that stay aren’t formed of words so much. What we look for is some demonstration of the answers in life. Across forty-nine years, I remember Comm 24 vividly. It showed me how I want to be.

—David Wolfersberger

Published by: Jon Ericson
ISBN13: 979-8234042668
ASIN: B0GTV7STHN