College Days: Tales from the Life of a Professor-Errant (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781412083942)

College Days began as a collection of largely humorous, somewhat whimsical stories based on events that occurred during my time as a graduate student at the University of Kansas and as a professor at Washington State University. Then I began to add other stories and rambling observations that friends and audiences had enjoyed hearing me tell over the years, and while some of these tales go beyond my college days, and some are entertaining rather than humorous, the title College Days had by that time grown familiar to me, and so I have kept it.

In writing these stories I have no literary pretensions. I see them as having no higher purpose than whiling away a little free time or helping to pass the dead time that we all spend in waiting rooms and while traveling. It just so happens that things seem to happen to me that make me stand out. Not that people don't invent things that might well have happened to me, so magnifying the effect. Like Sam Goldwyn before me, I used to hear stories about things I had allegedly said or done, but also like Sam, I am in a unique position to distinguish fact from fiction.

Perhaps things happen to me, as my friends sometimes say, because I lack a sense of discretion, seldom exercise moderation, and am too often impulsive. Perhaps, as one person suggested, I am even emotionally damaged in many ways. Perhaps all those things are true. Perhaps I should have shaped up my life and made it dull and conventional. Perhaps then I'd not be writing these stories.