While we may wish to spend our time pondering academic freedom, new means of scholarship, philosophies of shared governance, and other grand questions surrounding higher education in the twenty-first century, our daily lives as faculty members are spent mostly among the trees, where we actually toil. It is there that we find the paths that lead us to understanding of the forest. Our work is certainly not divorced from our philosophizing. However, we often forget to mention, when we finally reach a promontory where we can see over the trees, just how it is we got there.