A president looks back 500 years and finds his calling
by President William V. Frame

Following are excerpts of a piece written by President Frame for the September 6, 2002, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Having recently returned from a 10-year stint in the corporate world to my original home in the academy, I have stumbled onto an idea of great utility—both to rationalize my own tortuous career path and to guide the curricular and cultural reforms needed to serve our college's students. The idea is vocation. ...

The most immediately distinguishing aspect of vocation is that of being drawn to an undertaking with a deep sense that "This is the right work for me!" I first encountered that aspect as a reporter for the student newspaper at Ohio State University in the early 1950s. Campus journalism in the early days of the civil-rights movement was a thrilling business, and it gave me, for the first time in my college life, popular recognition. Yet my inner voice had not yet matured, and was thus overwhelmed by its natural rival, the voice of public acclaim.

That orientation, unfortunately, remained as I shifted my study to political science and followed it into the professoriate ... where I eventually achieved tenure and the rank of professor of political science. Now I see that I was actually chasing after the seductive but ultimately unsatisfactory vindication of acclaim. ...

Even so, the process of becoming a professor and achieving tenure introduced me to two of the critical axioms of the teaching vocation: Great teachers begin and remain as serious students—of themselves as well as of the world—and learning improves life. But since I discovered those axioms in a selective liberal-arts college that was purposely set well away from the city, they took a particularly private and mildly antisocial form. They did not gel with the outgoing and service-oriented aspects of vocation. ...

A sneaking discomfort with all this caused me, I now think, to strike out from the secure shores of rural academe after 13 years there. I had gone to Chicago to direct a research program in the humanities at the Newberry Library. I fell in love with the city, which, I realized, is the quintessential social institution of the modern world. ...

As a result, I was hesitant to return to the college at the end of the fellowship. Almost frantically, I cast about for an alternative, wondering what a 42-year-old professor of an arcane art could do effectively in the "real" world. I joined the First National Bank of Chicago as a trainee in the summer of 1981. ...

Those seven years in commercial banking, followed by three in corporate finance, gave me a profoundly different attitude toward work and the world than I had acquired in the academy. Yet as I advanced in the commercial hierarchy ... I became less and less interested in the ultimate purpose (stockholder value) of the institutions that employed me. I knew that my appreciation of the compatibility of work and personal fulfillment in the modern commercial world had deepened in several important ways, and I longed to see how that new understanding would resonate with students. I wanted to go back to teaching.

Yet, as I was absolutely dumb-founded to discover, higher education institutions did not invite my return, especially into any available teaching or teaching-related administrative function. I had to make my way back through finance ... I re-entered the hallowed halls as vice president and chief financial officer at Pacific Lutheran University. ...

It was there that I learned of Martin Luther's respect for "the fine liberal arts," which he proposed as the chief human therapy for modernity—the world in which work had begun to disconnect from its earlier communitarian functions. Vocation, or the called life of service, is the ultimate objective of that therapy. ...

I could see in Luther's idea of vocation the makings of a life-changing educational concept ... in the presence of Luther and my colleagues in a church-related college ... I began to draw together into a new educational philosophy the disparate elements of what had by now been four different adult careers. ...

Now, as president of Augsburg, I am pursuing the application of vocation in our curriculum and culture in ways that reflect my personal and increasingly fulfilled search for my own calling. ...

Looking back, I see that the concept of vocation has helped me find a pattern in what I once regarded with shame as a restless turning from one profession and career to another ... it has allowed me to make real progress in drawing together into a satisfying whole both thought and action, theory and practice, work and leisure, and ultimately, reason and faith. That wholeness is the ultimate gift of the called life of service—and what I believe we should strive to achieve for ourselves and for our students.