Two Remarkable Women: Their Lives of Learning

Career management has always been challenging, but 2025 brought shock, uncertainty, anxiety, and discouragement to the task for almost all of us who have pursued a career working for and with the federal government. We may face more and even greater such challenges in years to come. Those challenges may include war.

We could use a little encouragement, which is why I have made this post and attached to it two of the most inspiring career stories I have ever read.

Attached are the texts of two lectures given to the American Council of Learned Society, both entitled, A Life of Learning. They were parts of the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture series, which have been given each year since 1983. The attached lectures were given by two very great scholars and authors in very different fields. The first was by the late Annemarie Schimmel, who was a scholar of religion, an author, and a professor at Harvard and other universities. The second was by the late Helen Vendler, another Harvard professor and a renowned literary critic, teacher, and author.

I found these two lectures, in which each speaker described her life’s work, to be very inspiring. Neither speaker had been privileged in life. Both worked hard out of a love of learning, dealt with life and career obstacles and setbacks and, in their cases, struggled against academic prejudice against women. (At Harvard, when Vendler was finally admitted as a graduate student, the English department chairman told her, “You know, we don’t want you here... we don’t want any women here.”) Schimmel faced similar discrimination at Harvard. But both pursued what would ultimately be rewarding careers of study, teaching, and writing, because they loved learning.

These and other Life of Learning lectures are freely available at the American Council of Learned Society website: https://www.acls.org/

We in contracting make and manage the administrative and business arrangements needed by the organizations we support to obtain the materials, supplies, systems, services, information (“data”), and construction they need to accomplish their missions. To do that well we, too, must become learned in our field. We must go beyond OJT and official online courses. We must pursue lives of learning.

I was lucky to have been taught by my superiors and colleagues at what was the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Organization (SAMSO), now the Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC), and by Professors Ralph C. Nash and the John Cibinic of The George Washington University. I faced nothing like the challenges faced by Professors Schimmel and Vendler. My greatest challenge was my own immaturity, sloth, and stupidity.

I hope you will read, enjoy, and find inspiration in the stories of these two intrepid, learned, and successful professionals.

What professional challenges they faced and overcame! What professional lives they led!

Haskins_2001_HelenVendler.pdf Haskins_1993_AnnemarieSchimmel.pdf