the 1975-1976 academic year. Relates Schedler, "I was sitting on the side of a hill, and I could look down and see the San Francisco Bay. My eyes went over two interstates, each of which had 12 lanes and all these people. I was thinking, do I want to go back to Purdue with twenty-something faculty, 30,000 students, and all the hassles of that, or do I want to go to an 'underdeveloped country,' to a small university where I can spend a lot of time with students, raise my kids, and not be under that kind of pressure." His concerns stemmed, in no small measure, from the research he was doing. Schedler had written part of a PBS radio script on the ethical values implied by controversies surrounding the channelization of rivers in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, and in 1975, published a now widely anthologized essay "Our Destruction of Tomorrow: A Philosophical Reflection on the Ecological Crisis." Said Schedler in an interview, "Our problem is the seeming inevitable slide toward making the world into one huge Los Angeles. The forces that move history are beyond our ken and they are moving rapidly, like the test pilot who radioed back to earth, 'I'm lost, but I'm making record time.' So many people feel like this about what is going on around them." He also was drawn to the meaning-centered, face-to-face scale of life portrayed in E. F. Schumacher's essay collection Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. Schedler applied to teach at the University of Central Arkansas, a small university nestled in the town of Conway, and became the head of the Department of Philosophy (1976-1985). "I think participatory democracy can best be realized in small communities, where people still have control over their destiny," he said in an Arkansas Gazette interview. Origins and growth of the UCA Honors College Schedler took to his students and new post immediately. In 1978 he said, "I particularly enjoy the eagerness of Arkansas students to learn and their eagerness to do hard work I find them every bit as capable as any students I have had. They have not yet succumbed to the all-pervading indifference and weariness many students in other sections of the country exhibit to the so-called big questions." On a hot August day in 1981 then President Jefferson Davis Farris Jr. came to rest next to Schedler on a