Learning to Love Life Outside Academe
by Peter Temes WHEN I LEFT academe, I often thought about the title of Milan Kundera’s book Life Is Elsewhere. Like many scholars, I had the feeling that intellectual life was terribly thin outside colleges and universities. My earliest experiences in the 9-to-5 world didn’t help much. In my first nonacademic job, as a marketing clerk at a newsletter publishing company, I was surprised to hear bright colleagues begin each day with long conversations about what had been on television the night before. My boss once asked me – in what he must have thought was a withering tone, meant to encourage a little less critical thought on my […]