During my last year of graduate school, while writing my dissertation, I accepted a position to teach at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a campus that had been in existence for only a few years. The offices and classrooms were comprised of rental space in several office buildings in downtown Boston, still a number of years away from moving to a more permanent site at Columbia Point. Although the physical trappings were different from the tree-lined, grassy knolls of many other colleges, this did not seem to bother the students. Many in my classes were the first members of their families to attend college and their excitement about doing so together with being pioneers in the creation of a new university more than compensated for the lack of grass and trees. The setting at the University of Massachusetts Boston triggered fond memories of my own undergraduate education when I attended college in a similar environment in Manhattan. My responsibilities required that I teach three sections of the same course each semester with approximately 30-35 students in each. I felt fortunate that at that point there were no large lecture classes with hundreds of students enrolled. Although I had been a…
