I found this piece of undergraduate writing when I was searching for a story I wrote on Penn State’s Circleville Farm, which the university disbanded before selling the prime farmland for residential development. While I recalled writing a feature on six “Master Teachers” in the College of Agriculture -- the interviews were fun because I learned a lot about fields I’d barely heard of (“soil morphology”!!) -- I did not remember what headline the magazine’s editors had given the feature. When I finally found a copy of the magazine -- and the headline -- the same year that I was told by a former department head that I “pay too much attention” to my students by engaging them in collaboratively organized activities on campus, well, this old piece of undergraduate writing became inventionally provocative, compelling me to reflect upon the ratio, the time between. Thirty years out, the headline’s question seems a hectoring prophecy.
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