The Work and the Business

A school is a community of inquiry, a gathering of people with intersecting purposes and affinities and passions, an outpost of the republic of letters, an eternal set of occasions to just do the work. A school is also a pile of money and power with intellectual and administrative layers wrapped thinly around it. I weave in and out of both understandings, trying to reckon just enough with the money-and-power part to put me in position to concentrate on the do-the-work part.