Servant leadership has entered the mainstream management and leadership literature but has not yet been equally embraced within the educational literature. Nor is it easily located as a leadership approach within the higher education sector. This reflects how higher education has been neoliberalised and has moved away from serving student needs and the common good. Authentic, robust, and principled student-centred educational practice should, and can, exist in the tertiary education sector, despite the imperial force of neoliberalism. This is the context to my story of how a hijacked ethnographic and student-centred doctoral investigation forced me to shift my focus towards an autoethnographic journey of personal reflection that surprisingly led to the identification of a latent and enduring personal philosophy of pedagogy called “servant teaching”.