Moving there was like moving to Mars-utterly alien but
profoundly compelling. I thought I would stay for just a
year and then go back to Washington and resume my work.
But before my sabbatical ended, I was invited to become
Pendle Hill's dean of studies. I stayed on for another decade,
living in community and continuing my experiment with
alternative models of education.
It was a transformative passage for me, personally,
professionally, and spiritually; in retrospect, I know how
impoverished I would have been without it. But early on in
that passage I began to have deep and painful doubts about
the trajectory of my vocation. Though I felt called to stay at
Pendle Hill, I also feared that I had stepped off the edge of
the known world and was at risk of disappearing
professionally.
From high school on, I had been surrounded by
expectations that I would ascend to some sort of major
leadership. When I was twenty-nine, the president of a
prestigious college visited me in Berkeley to recruit me for
his board of trustees. He was doing it, he joked, because no
one on that board was under sixty, let alone thirty; worse
still, not one of them had a beard, which I could supply as
part of the Berkeley uniform. Then he added, "In fact, I'm
doing this because some day you'll be a college president-of
that I'm sure-and serving as a trustee is an important part of
your apprenticeship." I accepted his invitation because I felt
certain that he was right.