"So you decided to be a bum" and other interesting developments

When I turned down tenure and left UND (as opposed to being on leave), a friend from graduate school said there was something romantic and rewarding about what he called the “peripatetic intellectual.” The peripatetic is nomadic, working in many places for relatively short periods of time. Those of us schooled in the arts and history of rhetoric can appreciate why this is a romantic notion. We are Aristotle moving and teaching, the itinerant sophists who go where there is demand and work for as long as the students need us and the locals will tolerate us (as I write that sentence, it makes perfect sense why I was destined to leave North Dakota).