I have had the extraordinary honor of founding and chairing not one but two degree-granting academic units: the first was the Program in Classical Studies at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana); the second is the Department of Classics at the University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida).In between those appointments I also chaired, for seven years, the Program in Comparative Literature at Purdue, which at the time had a participating faculty of 38 members and about 40 MA and PhD students. My academic preparation, through the PhD, was of an extraordinarily 'old-school' style of classical philology, with exceedingly rigorous expectations in terms of the classical languages (Greek and Latin), the primary sources in those, and the secondary sources on both literatures -- including scholarship in English, French, German, and Italian. Because I finished graduate school before poststructuralist (or even structuralist) literary theory had become common in classics, that was not part of our graduate curriculum. Accordingly I set about gaining proficiency in the fields of theory and contemporary criticism as well. This was what led me, rather naturally, into involvement in the field of comparative literature in the 1980s and after.