The unique relationship between mentors and students informs the art of teaching and enhances the intellectual vitality of higher education and quality of teacher and student life. This collection of original essays presents autobiographical vignettes of important professors of our time. These essays reflect the appreciation of the authors-now successful academics-for their teachers/mentors, whose drive and creativity had such on influence on the careers of their students. No other collection presents such an autobiographical and biographical portrayal of college of education faculty. The essays examine what it means to be a professor in today's academia, with its erosion of the professoriate and the emergence of a questionable entrepreneurial pragmatism. The writers and their subjects explain their vision of the academic life sustained by a community and perpetuated through the lives of their teachers and their students, a tradition not only in teaching but also in mentoring.
