The Death of a Vision | Faculty Commons

John Marson Dunaway
French & Interdisciplinary Studies
Mercer University

During my early years as a member of the French Department at Mercer, I worked very hard to establish a reputation as a promising young scholar, reading papers at professional conferences and publishing several articles and three books during my first 12 years.

It Seemed I’d Found My Big Break

Each fall I eagerly searched the MLA’s list of job vacancies and sent off letters of application, hoping to land a position with a major research university. Finally, it seemed I’d found my big break. In 1984, I was interviewed at a major university with a prestigious national reputation.

The interview went really well, and just about everybody assured me that I was a shoo-in for the job.I purchased caps and tee shirts sporting the distinctive logo of the school before flying back home to await the anticipated letter of appointment.

I waited. And waited.

As you may have guessed, I was not offered that job. The story I got from my sources at the “university of my dreams” was that departmental politics had muddied the waters, and the position ended up not being filled that year.

I Was Crushed

I was crushed. Our third child had just been born, and we were a one-salary family. I had to borrow money from my father to buy a decent family automobile. I was caught in the middle of some highly contentious campus politics, in which I was branded “a malcontent” by my administration. I felt I was at a dead-end in my profession and even started laying plans for attending law school and making a career change.

Well, 25 years later, I’m still teaching French at Mercer, and I now look back with gratitude at how God has orchestrated things so as to clarify my calling and renew my sense of fulfillment. It wasn’t an overnight turnaround, of course. First, the advent of some interdisciplinary teaching opportunities (Great Books and Senior Capstone) gave me new challenges and allowed me to connect with a broader range of students and colleagues.

Not long afterwards, I was chosen by my students for the college’s major faculty award. Through Faculty Commons, I discovered the great joy of working to organize Christian faculty and staff at Mercer. And finally, I got involved in the Lilly Endowment’s Program for the Theological Exploration of Vocation (PTEV). Since Mercer received its PTEV grant in 2000, I’ve been dividing my time between teaching and the work of the Mercer Commons (A Center for Faith, Learning & Vocation.)

I Love My Job

I love my job and my university because I clearly feel God’s hand of direction in both. I’m thrilled to be actively facilitating our faculty’s exploration of what it means to be a faith-based university and how we may live out our callings as faculty at a faith-based institution. My research, which has always been focused on French religious writers, continues, dove-tailing nicely with the rest of my work in academe. And my relationships with my students are more fulfilling than ever.

My early construal of calling was probably a socially scripted version of success, or what Brian Mahan calls a “prefabricated envisioned self” in his Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and The Ethics of Ambition. Now I am trying to listen alertly for the “still small voice” that points me in the right direction.

What is your special calling in academe? “Seek and ye shall find.”