When defending educational foundations, Isabel Nunez and Pamela Konkol sometimes find themselves responding to the question of "why?"-often phrased, "But WHYYYYY do we have to take a class on this stuff??? (We want to take more methods!)." As distressing as this can be for teacher educators whose own work reveals rather a marked fondness for both the social and philosophical foundations, it is nevertheless necessary to convince students that the philosophy, history, and sociology of education are relevant and meaningful to their work in the classroom. This is a struggle with which Nunez and Konkol have been engaged since 2006 when both of them started work at their institution (the same week, in offices just across the hall from each other's). They are usually successful with their students, or they know well which sides of their grades are buttered. If only it was their students alone they needed to convince. The past seven years they've also needed to defend the necessity and utility of the range of foundations of education to many colleagues among the college faculty and administration. Their "why" questions are similar: "how can we make room in the curriculum for these "luxury" courses when we have to meet the standards?" (whatever standards those might be). This task can be more challenging but they did persuade enough of their University colleagues to vote for the creation of The Department of Foundations, Social Policy and Research in the summer of 2009 possible. It has been an interesting journey, with both hills and valleys, and one they say that they are glad to be traveling together. It is the story of these travels that Nunez and Konkol would like to share in this article, and, in the spirit of hope and optimism, they decided to begin with the most inspiring moment of that tale: the birth of the new foundations department at a time when this area was under fire throughout the field of education. A bibliography is provided.