Epilogue: The Professoriate as Vocation

As we cultivate vocation in undergraduates, our own reflection upon academic roles provides new insight concerning the vocation of the professoriate. What does it mean to be a mentor, teacher, colleague, and scholar in the current landscape of higher education and in this cultural climate? How does our training in genre, language, critical analysis, interpretation, and theory assist our understanding of the professoriate as vocation?  As teachers and scholars, our commitments to all aspects of the discipline, including its forms, theories and practices, means that we must also regularly examine our own commitments to the profession. In engaging with texts in the classroom as well as in the practice of the public humanities, we cultivate our own possibilities and test what we hear as our vocational calling. This concluding chapter examines how the academic study of literature is a means to renew and inspire the work we do individually and collectively with students, institutions, and communities for the public good.