Buck’s Miracle

      I knew that Buck has been an undergraduate at Northwestern and I knew where Northwestern was and even a bit about its appearance. I knew those things because when we lived in Chicago we’d driven past NU along Sheridan Road as it bordered Lake Michigan northward passing within a block of our apartment.  That’s about the extent of my knowledge when Buck announced that there was a job there that he was recommending me for. It was an unusual job in that the opening was in the School of Education with a joint appointment into the Department of Psychology, where Buck had been in the undergraduate Honors Program. Buck said that Northwestern was a very highly rated university and that the Psychology Department there was regarded as tops. Later events confirmed that assessment. He knew virtually nothing about the Ed School there, but understood that there was an effort to establish a close relationship between the two units. There would be no chance at all for a regular appointment in Psychology but perhaps this sort of hybrid might work. My Ph.D. was to be in Education but I had more work in psychology than most such people and Buck knew important members of the psych faculty. Worth a try, he thought.

      A member of Northwestern’s Education faculty, and Educational Psychologist (he said) whose name I didn’t recognize phone me and we set up a trip back to Chicago. I was scheduled to spend most of one day with education professors and the other with members of the psychology faculty. Of course, I would meet with the dean of the ed. school and the chair of psychology, and I would spend two nights at the home of the guy who had phoned me.