Professor Project: Sara Shady
Philosopher, author, mother and more.
By Callie Schmidt | Multimedia journalist
Bethel University philosophy professor Sara Shady recently published her first book, co-authored by English professor Marion Larson. She worked for nine years to create a gender studies minor here at Bethel, despite institutional push-back and complications. And she believes teaching gives her the opportunity to help shape people who will one day change the world.
How did you get to where you are now in your career?
“I’m probably not a good role model for this for students because I think my career path is atypical, in that I’ve never left school from kindergarten on. I went straight from high school to college, straight from college to graduate school, straight from graduate school to Bethel. When I was an undergraduate, I was majoring in philosophy at Taylor University in Indiana, and not really sure what I wanted to do as a career, and one of my professors told me, you should really consider the academic track and graduate school and potentially being a professor.
So I think with philosophy, if that’s your plan, getting real-world experience first doesn’t make that much of a difference, but I did pick a graduate program that would have a lot of teaching experience associated with it, because I was hoping I would like teaching. I found out I did really love teaching while I was in graduate school, so that was a good indicator for that I wanted to go to more of a teaching college or a liberal arts college than a research university.”
Why Bethel?
“Bethel found me. I was a graduate student at the University of South Carolina. I was working on my dissertation and not quite on the job market yet, and I got a phone call one day from Paul Reasoner saying they had an opening in their department, and they hadn’t found the right fit yet. I had met some faculty from Calvin College who knew I would be soon on the job market, and they passed my information along. My first thought was to say no, I’m not interested in going to Minnesota, but Jamie (her husband) and I talked about it and it seemed weird to not look into an opportunity.
So I interviewed, applied and was offered the job, and loved the campus idea. We initially thought we’d come here for three years and then look for other options. We didn’t have any family or connections to Minnesota, but Bethel has always felt like home for me since I’ve been here. Some of my closest friends here are also my colleagues. I find the work really meaningful, I love getting to mentor students, and I feel like there’s still plenty of work for me to do at Bethel, so my time here isn’t done yet.”
“Struggling in one assignment or in a class doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person or what your career holds.”
What was one success or failure in your career?
“Oh boy. There’s been lots of both. A story that I often tell students is my first semester of graduate school, towards the end of the semester, we had turned in drafts of a term paper to a professor of a class. He called me into his office and told me that the paper was such crap that it had to be thrown out entirely and I had to start over with a new topic, and there was only a week left to go. I actually started to cry in his office, which made everything worse. I had never had that experience before, because school was always something that I excelled at, and I think that was really a moment of me of, “Can I do this, should I be doing this?”
That was a great moment for me in my personal and intellectual growth to learn how to work through a challenge and to learn to accept criticism and defeat. I wrote a different paper, got some help from the professor on it, passed the class and ended up with a PH.D. And that sticks with me, because I try to encourage students, even students who fail the first test in CWC and have never failed anything — Struggling in one assignment or in a class doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person or what your career holds. And in fact, your ability to work through that situation is more of a testament to that.”
Why do you teach?
“The part of it that sounds so cliche but that I deeply believe in my core to be true is that I think that I have an opportunity to shape people who will change the world, in big ways and in small ways. I love creating light bulb moments for students where they see the world in a new way, where they see themselves in a new way, where they understand something more deeply than they did before, or they realize a new question they don’t know the answer to. And I feel like education is an incredible privilege for all of us who have the opportunity to. Only 5–10% of the people worldwide have the opportunity to earn an undergraduate degree. It’s a privilege and an honor to be part of shaping people who will go on to use that privilege and use that resource in important ways.”
Why philosophy?
“My parents would tell you that I was a philosopher long before I knew it. I was always the kid who always asked questions and would try to argue my way out of or around anything. I love wondering about things. I started off in college as a sociology major. I’m still deeply interested in questions about societies and communities and how we bridge diversity in those, but I took a philosophy class my first semester and realized, “Oh wow, I think about this stuff all the time, I didn’t know you could major in wondering about stuff.”
Philosophy feels like it matches my wiring and what I’m passionate about. I think philosophy has the great power and potential to help us think deeply about why we’re here. Those perennial ancient questions about what is the meaning of life, what’s the nature of the good life, who should I be in the world — I love getting to teach those things every semester, and to get students excited about thinking about answers to those questions.”
If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
“To breathe underwater, or to be some sort of water animal. I love the water. I am happiest swimming, snorkeling, floating…so if I had the ability to live in water indefinitely, that would be perfect.”
If you weren’t a professor, what would you do as an occupation?
“That’s a good question. Sometimes I wonder this. My friends joke that I would be a mixologist. I thought law would be an interesting thing to go into. I would want to work on issues of human rights and justice. So whether I did that through law, non-profit work, or through public policy work, some kind of civic activity is probably what I would be involved in.”
Who or what has influenced you the most? What are your other influences?
“There is a philosopher by the name of Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher from the twentieth century, and he wrote book called I and Thou. I went to graduate school thinking I wanted to study a different philosopher by the name of Martin Heidegger. I was in a seminar on Heidegger in graduate school and the kind of questions I was asking, the professor said, “You really need to read Martin Buber,” gave me a copy of I and Thou and said, “Read this and write a paper on this for this class.” And I fell in love. I have read that book every year for the last 18 years, and I still find new questions and ideas coming out of it every time I read it.
It’s about how we relate to other humans beings, and to the natural world and God. That professor ended up being my dissertation advisor, and Martin Buber ended up being a major theme in my dissertation. And a lot of the questions I was asking back then about living amidst political and racial diversity are now questions that I ask thinking about how do we live amidst significant religious diversity. So those themes continue to play out in my scholarship, but I do find the ideas in that book deeply meaningful to my personal life, as well.”
What is your most embarrassing teaching story?
“There’s so many, but the the story I often tell students on the first day of class so that they know that it’s okay to laugh at me is that I’m clumsy, and I was once teaching a class and erasing the chalkboard, and somehow I lost control of the eraser, and it flew out of my hand with such force that it hit the chalkboard, ricocheted off the chalkboard into my forehead, knocking off my glasses and leaving a chalk rectangle imprint on my forehead. There were 30 minutes of total silence in the class, and then a student sitting in the front row said, “Professor Shady, did that really just happen?” and then we all died laughing.”
What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?
“When I was finishing up my dissertation, I was close to the end and I thought, I need to reorganize this whole thing and restructure it. And my dissertation advisor said no, right now you need to finish this, because if you don’t know how to finish a project you’ll never go on to write or do anything else. I have used that statement a lot in my life about finishing an article, finishing a class project, just sort of learning to lessen my perfectionistic standards and tendencies. At some point, you have to say goodbye and go on to the next project.”
Why did you choose to adopt?
“Adoption is something both Jamie and I have always thought is important for ethical reasons. We have so many kids in the world that don’t have families, and every child deserves a home and deserve a family. So we felt like adopting gave us the chance to make a significant difference in the world of one person, and kind of all the issues we were passionate about around the globe, it gave us a chance to invest all of that energy into one person. We felt like it was something God was bringing to our attention as well.”
“When I think about who I am now, my faith journey has been about learning to have faith in spite of the fact that I have questions, and that faith doesn’t require certainty by any means.”
What is your faith story?
“I grew up in a Christian family. So there’s a story of me being four and asking Jesus to enter my heart, but I don’t have memories of not being a Christian. I think college and graduate school both were really pivotal for me in terms of realizing I had way more questions than I had answers. When I think about who I am now, my faith journey has been about learning to have faith in spite of the fact that I have questions, and that faith doesn’t require certainty by any means. And learning to be okay with that and comfortable with that, and comfortable with the idea that at the end of the day, I might be wrong about all of it. I hope not. I want to believe in a world of redemption and hope that’s promised to us through Christianity, and that’s what I choose to believe. But I also have to live with the fact that I’ll never be absolutely certain of that, and there are a lot of other options that humans have good reasons for choosing, too.”
What do you love about Bethel?
“I love the size of Bethel. I can get to know students well and in personal ways, and see the same students grow and develop and change over four years time.
I love that Bethel is a liberal arts college. That the arts and humanities are seen as incredibly valuable to anything that we study.
I love that, as much as Bethel is a bubble, it’s certainly not as conservative or liberal as a bubble might be. There’s actually some space for religious and political diversity at Bethel.
I really love the pietist heritage of Bethel. The idea that what’s really important is putting faith in action and living out our faith. I love that at Bethel a lot of things come down to that question of what does it mean to love neighbors well, what does it mean to love others well. And that gives us some space for dealing with difference. But it’s not perfect by any means.”
What would you wish to change about Bethel?
“We still have a lot of room to grow in thinking about how to be hospitable towards difference. Whether that’s racial and ethnic difference, economic difference, gender difference, religious difference, differences in sexual identity — We allow a lot of diversity on our campus and we think about tolerating it, but tolerating or letting it be present on our campus is different than being hospitable towards difference. Being gracious towards difference.”
“I think we could spend more time making ourselves a little bit uncomfortable and getting outside of our circles.”
What is one critique you have of Bethel’s student community?
“That it’s pretty fragmented. That people tend to get into their different groups, and it seems like in four years time, in a lot of ways those groups get smaller rather than larger. So you start out with your freshman dorm and then you move in with a smaller group, and your community in a lot of ways tends to get smaller. And I think as a recent example, there were posters on campus that a group of students found deeply offensive, and the group of students who created the posters didn’t understand why they were offensive. Well, if those students who didn’t understand actually spent more time with people who are different from them, I think they would have understand. I think we could spend more time making ourselves a little bit uncomfortable and getting outside of our circles.”
What is the best moment you’ve had here in your time at Bethel?
“It’s a moment, but it’s a recurring moment, so it’s a little bit like cheating, but commencement is a great moment for a few different reasons. You get to see students walk across the stage and think about the role you played in who they became and how proud of them you are. As a person who does a lot of general education teaching, I get to see the student who was failing CWC get the diploma and think about the time I spent investing in that student at their first semester on campus and helping them to grow. The students I get to know more deeply and one-on-one and mentor over time and watch them graduate, whether they’re philosophy majors or not. So that’s deeply meaningful to me. I also love the tradition at Bethel that at commencement the departments stand to recognize their graduates. I love that moment of solidarity because I love my colleagues in my department. It’s a joy to work with them everyday. We have shared values of our educational mission here, so it’s also a great moment of solidarity of celebrating our work together.”
