Sinking, Swimming, or Just Treading Water? Meeting the Challenges of An Academic Career In the Humanities

The son of refugees from Nazi Germany, Herbert Rosengarten grew up in a post-war Britain that saw radical changes to public health and education, and that offered new opportunities to the children of the working class through state funding. A sound, if somewhat conventional education led him to Vancouver and the English Department at UBC, just at the time when universities in North America were experiencing the first stirrings of student challenges to traditional authority. He experienced the impact of such unrest at UBC, both in the changing attitudes and expectations of students, and in the workings of his department, which became a battleground between liberal and conservative factions, each striving to impose its notions of academic governance. He survived that conflict, only to see the foundations of his discipline shifting beneath his feet with the rise of new forms of literary scholarship; luckily for him, his own scholarly interests revolved around critical editing rather than interpretation, offering something of an anchor in often stormy seas. The latter part of his career has been spent largely in administrative posts, which have given him some interesting, if not always positive, insights into the intricacies of academic politics.