by Tom Sanders — Sewanee’s Website
Jim Peterman has not retired, he is quick to point out. He is taking a sabbatical, which “is not a vacation,” he adds. What he says only occasionally and in fairly private settings is that the sabbatical (a period of reflection and study that prepares professors to refresh their teaching and research) had been a long time coming. On the normal rotation, he would have taken a sabbatical about seven years ago, but in addition to teaching, Peterman, a professor of philosophy at Sewanee, also spent those years working hard as an educational entrepreneur, building a program of academic civic engagement that would go on to gain national recognition from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Public Interest Technology University Network.
“The Office of Civic Engagement has been all-consuming, and I have not really had the opportunity for several years to step back and take perspective,” he says. “Once you start a program, you just have to do it. So, I’ve been really busy, and I am now in a period of discernment.”
Today, he rests. But not for long.
One could argue that civic engagement is baked into the mission of the University of the South—to educate students to “be prepared to search for truth, seek justice, preserve liberty under law, and serve God and humanity.” Peterman and others argued just that point when proposing the formation of the Office of Civic Engagement in 2012. While a healthy group of faculty, staff, and students have been pressing the importance of civic engagement for over two decades, Peterman has always been at the center of those efforts.
Read full story here on Sewanee’s website.