Chronicle of Higher Education, Friday, September 6, 2002, by William V. Frame
For the original article, see chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i02/02b01101.htm.

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.

As the president of Augsburg College, one of the 43 Lutheran colleges in North America, I have met the idea on its home ground. It was Martin Luther who gave shape to its development in his teaching on education, and it has been Lutheran colleges that have saved the idea from today's commonly used technical-job-training definition.

A vocation is a called life of service. Luther certainly did not limit vocation to the profession of clerics. (What the world needs, he believed, is a good cobbler, not only someone who hangs a cross upon his work.) Indeed, the competence that vocation demanded was reconciled in Luther's thought much more thoroughly with citizenship and civility than with theology. It was to be practiced in the venue he called the "Kingdom on the Left," which he hoped would be served primarily by schools and colleges—as distinguished from the "Kingdom on the Right," which was to be served by the church.

Among other things, a focus on vocation has helped us at Augsburg to more sharply distinguish education from the arts with which it is regularly confused: training, informing, demonstrating, inspiring, convincing, indoctrinating, positioning. I have practiced several of those noneducational arts over the span of my life's work, with varying degrees of competence, and the experience was in every case unfulfilling. Yet that very experience, now interpreted within the context of vocation, has deepened my confidence in the transforming power of education, properly understood and practiced.

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 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. In fact, I long thought that it was merely accidental that one day I found myself at a "highly selective" liberal-arts college in the countryside of the Midwest, 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. I was appealing to a particular cabal of intellectuals, and measured the wisdom of my work by the strength of their cheering.

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 jell with the outgoing and service-oriented aspects of vocation.

The obligation of vocation to serve the world in ministry to others emerges from a love of the world, not a rejection of it. At the liberal-arts college, most of us on the faculty preferred theoretical or classroom wisdom far above experiential learning. That reduced our citizenship to a confidently enlightened criticism of the public and of public servants. We diagnosed in those days; we did not propound therapies to advance civility or improve society.

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. The city compels its aficionados to construct a coherent, interactive, public life. Among the professional urbanites whom I met, collaboration and deliberation with colleagues—across departmental boundaries, with superiors as well as subordinates—seemed to make work both fulfilling and ultimately civic. I began to realize the drawbacks of the enriched privacy that I and many of my colleagues had created at the excellent college in the country.

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 full 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. I took a pay cut, worked out a leave of absence with the college, and enrolled at the midpoint of an intensive introductory-accounting class offered by a downtown university.

When I later resigned my rank and tenure to stick with the bank, what I wanted most was knowledge of how the commercial republic, so long the subject of my teaching and writing, actually worked. Thrust into the midst of it, I discovered the corporate world to be a far different place than I had learned it to be in the academy. To begin with, it was far more humane—more candid and encouraging. It also was, shockingly, full of better-educated people. The international division that I joined after banking boot camp had six or seven Ph.D.'s, not counting those in the country-risk and economic-analysis units. More musicians and artists were on my floor than at the entire college. Perhaps most surprising, there was more hunger for serious conversation than among my faculty colleagues.

I also discovered that profitable business is accomplished only among those who have learned to trust each other. Contrary to the academic arguments about the role of self-interest in financial transactions, I learned that the only deals that hold together and lead to new interchanges are mutually satisfactory ones. In the corporate world, a trusted colleague's word is better than a signature on a legal document.

Moreover, except in a few areas of the bank, any cultivation of privacy that led toward individualism and a work silo meant the end of one's career. Collaboration, relationship development and management, helpfulness—these were the hallmarks of successful careers.

The radically social character of corporate life, as I experienced it, revealed a new relationship between the private and the public. I noticed that no transaction was completed in the commercial world—even when it answered profitably to the particular interests of each party—unless it could be publicly described as meeting the interests they held in common. The kind of deliberation that could discover and then dignify the common interest depended about equally on theory and practice. Hence, the corporate world ranked experience—understood as "doing business" in the world of work—far above its meager status in the academy.

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—eventually becoming the equivalent of a senior vice president and then moving into senior management at a Fortune 500 corporation in the upper Midwest—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 dumbfounded 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—and I am still understood, after a reunion of 10 years, as a businessman in the academy.

I re-entered the hallowed halls as vice president and chief financial officer at Pacific Lutheran University, one of the 30-odd colleges of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. A new president of the university intended to revitalize the place by means of strategic planning. I was commissioned to find the distinguishing marks of Pacific Lutheran in its tradition and location.

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. Luther's writings on the division of life into two distinct but related kingdoms reopened a relationship for me that had been shattered by the academic orthodoxy that religion is both a private and anti-intellectual matter. I mean, of course, the relationship of reason and faith. What Luther taught me is that faith is a form of knowing, not an alternative to it, and that it is through the faith side of cognition rather than the reason side that the beckoning voice of vocation comes.

I could see in Luther's idea of vocation the makings of a life-changing educational concept. My own academic respect for reason had cut me off from the great riches of theology, and had consigned my personal religiosity to an intensely private preserve. But, in the presence of Luther and my colleagues in a church-related college that was reaching for institutional revitalization, I began to draw together into a new educational philosophy the disparate elements of what had by now been four different adult careers.

It was the corporate experience, above all others, that facilitated my fruitful contact with Luther. It forced me to deny my original academic view that the private realm is the exclusive venue of personal growth. It presented work to me in an unexpected integrative role. I began to see it as the testing ground of data-driven or bookish academic wisdom, and as the dimension of life to which one could unashamedly bring all of one's abilities. 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. In fact, vocation is changing the ways that I and others throughout the institution assist students in their journey through college and help them envision their careers—beginning with the vocation of being a student. We have intentionally introduced the concept of vocation into the curriculum and extracurricular activities, and are encouraging all of our employees to consider their work and career prospects in light of vocation.

For example, we have created six courses that specifically focus on the idea of a personal calling for each student. Some are general-education courses, designed to reach a broad spectrum of students, while others are geared to the specific needs of students who intend to pursue careers in ministry. Among other activities, we also conduct two retreats annually for freshmen and sophomores as an opportunity to discern their calling, their responsibilities to one another, and their career choices. We have added assessment instruments to the career-counseling process that deal more directly with a theological exploration of value and vocation. And we plan to conduct a summer-vocation institute, where 20 Augsburg students who have been advised by faculty members in vocational pursuits will, in turn, advise high-school students.

We hope that our students' lives will have a profound reformist orientation, but that it won't be some theoretical social justice that calls them. Indeed, vocational lives are in, of, and for the world. But they are lived by human beings aware of their need of redemption, convinced that they could be wrong in their recommendation of any policy, and obliged by the great joy conveyed by their freedom to make of themselves a gift to their neighbor.

As for myself, 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 finally brought me some clarity on the question of why I gave up my tenured professorship in midlife to become, of all things, a commercial banker. It has cast some light on the academy's refusal to accept my application to return after a decade in the corporate world, except as an administrator in finance.

Finally, 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 our students.