WAUKESHA – A lover of wisdom who has sought it in the wild as well as through intellectual inquiry, Jim Cheney, 62, will retire from the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha in June. He has taught philosophy on the campus since 1972.
World renowned for his work in environmental ethics and ecofeminist philosophy, he also specializes in American Indian philosophy, which he came face-to-face with on the Native Philosophy Project at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in 1996-97. A Rockefeller Foundation Visiting Humanities Fellowship supported his research. In addition to teaching environmental ethics and American Indian philosophy (often with English professor, Peggy Rozga), he has taught aesthetics (with Richard Raymond Alasko), Asian philosophy, epistemology (with psychology professor Sue Andrews), feminist philosophy (with psychology professor Jane Ewens), and philosophical ideas in literature.
A native of St. Paul, MN, Cheney started college as a mathematics and chemistry student at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, but after a year joined the US Marine Corps. When he returned to school in 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, completing his bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1967. He graduated with “great distinction in general scholarship” and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from UW-Madison, attending on a National Defense Education Act fellowship. In 1977-78, he studied religion, ethics, and psychology at Yale University through a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
In spring 2000, Cheney took leave from UW-Waukesha to co-teach a course in Ecophilosophy and Earth Education at Murdoch University, in Perth, Western Australia. Both faculty and students spent considerable time in the outback, and Cheney considered that to be the best part of the project. Artistic advisor for the class, his wife, Francie Alice, has mounted an exhibit of writings and art from their Australian adventure. It can be seen in the UW-Waukesha library into the summer.
A prolific contributor to the literature on environmental ethics and American Indian philosophy, he has published 25 essays in these areas in the last 15 years. Six of these essays have been reprinted in anthologies (two of them three times). He also has made presentations at meetings held in California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, California, Utah, and New York, as well as in Western Australia and in the Yukon Territory and Ontario, Canada, where he gave the keynote address at the Aboriginal Peoples Conference at Lakehead University in 1996. Most recently, he and his American Indian colleague, Lee Hester, gave the closing plenary address at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in Denver last month. In July, upon retirement, he will revisit the Yukon to deliver a paper at Yukon College and canoe the Snake River in the northern Yukon, above the Arctic Circle.
Jim lives with his partner, Francie Alice; his son, Carlos; his daughter-in-law, Ilona; and his grandchildren, Dayvin Rhys (age 4) and Kiyah Sage (age 1), on Milwaukee’s East Side.
“As for the future . . . it will not be easy to retire from the claims of both philosophy and the UW–Waukesha Field Station on my life. My deepest roots here are in the prairie soil of the Waterville Prairie and all that is associated with it: Wilderness University, Marlin Johnson, and the friends and students who love that place on Earth as I do. I expect that my Choctaw colleague, Lee Hester, twenty years my junior in age but my elder in wisdom, will not let me forgo my commitment to thinking and writing about American Indian philosophy. Nor will my ZenLite colleagues permit me to stray from environmental philosophy and the wild that has nurtured our collective thought during annual backpacking trips since 1989. I hope to continue teaching American Indian philosophy and literature at UW-Waukesha with Peggy Rozga. All of this is subject to the uncertainties and whimsy of this world, of course, but always (as Gary Snyder puts it) there are the ‘mountains and rivers without end.’” |
