The essay covers a lot of ground, including a lot of reflections on historical practice, but two things particularly resonated for me. One is the way she opens the essay: "I have always wanted my work to be useful. I’m an earnest sort."
The other is a perhaps minor theme, but one that recurs throughout: her mixed feelings about pursuing an academic career at all. (We learn here she did have a career in typesetting and graphic design production for a decade or so.)
Although I have chosen not to catalogue here the frustrations of my working life, I will just say that systemic factors in the institution have often meant, in my view, that I could not give students the education that I would have liked, at a price that would have felt fair. The remedies I could see to the negative sides of life in the university were mainly individual ones.... My early retirement reflected my never-entirely-absent ambivalence about universities.
