University Politics: From Distinguished Professor to Extinguished Professor
Recently, while sorting through some of my papers, I ran across a poem I wrote about seventy years ago. I want to go to college,I know not where to go,Whether individualisticOr large and comprehensive,Are numbers my chief interestOr education glorified?No, learning is profoundestAnd learning over all. A rather crude poem, its redeeming feature is that…
In the Shadow of Mount Fuji
One of the best “perks” of being a professor is the opportunity to occasionally go on sabbatical. For most of us academics, that means returning to graduate school days and spending all your time focusing on a research project. Free from the distraction of teaching classes and grading papers, relieved from the tedium of committee…
Culture Shock in America
My third year at Tohoku University in Sendai was devoted to writing up a lengthy dissertation on Shugendo. Knowing that the academic graveyard is full of grad students who never took their doctoral exams, or failed them, or did not complete a dissertation, I felt relieved. However, this sense of satisfaction was offset by two…
Haguro, Red Hot Pepper, and Cool Enlightenment in a Mountain Temple
The previous post described living conditions in our house in northern Japan; this post looks into my work completing a doctoral dissertation on Japanese religion. My first year at Tohoku University in Sendai in some ways resembled my first year at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. In both cases I was unprepared…
Living in Japan: From A to Z (From Attanburo to Zuzuben)
Our welcome to Japan by Fulbright staff proved to be so helpful and kind that we could not foresee it would be outdone by our reception at Sendai. Professor Ichiro Hori, who had been a visiting professor at the Divinity School in Chicago, repaid us many times over for the hospitality he had enjoyed in…
From an Oldsmobile Convertible to a Boeing 707 Jet Plane
After my wife and son spent part of summer, 1962 in Boston, while I was in New York studying Japanese, we reunited in our hometown of Havana, Illinois. It is always good to “go home,” but that visit proved to be bittersweet. In quick succession we lost my maternal grandmother and grandfather. (During World War…
Manhattan Prison and Palisades Raspberries
Lucky breaks often mean being in the right place at the right time. I found out that it also helps to study the right language at the right time. In the 1950s, because the U. S. government realized that too few Americans were learning critical languages, they created the National Defense Foreign Language program to…
Das Heilige und das Profane and Foret Interdit
After several years of study at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I made a commitment to the field known as History of Religions, specializing in the religions of Japan. I began the study of Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and Japanese. In high school I had taken four years of Latin;…
What Does a Grad Student Do?
In an earlier post, “Pole Vaulting Over College Into Graduate School,” I identified my occupation as “graduate student,” a kind of non-working black sheep in both my own and my wife’s family. Of our four parents, only my mother had a high school diploma. Where my wife and I grew up, to be an adult…
Carrying the Mail
The university dominated our life in Chicago. My heavy reading and studying schedule kept me very busy; then we went to special lectures, and we even spent our limited free time socializing with grad students. But I never missed an opportunity to make a little extra money for our meager budget. In 1956, during my…
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H. Byron Earhart 