Youâd be surprised. MBAs often are on this score, but thatâs because of who youâre hanging around with. (And â psst â history courses.)(Also art.) Iâm suddenly remembering how I was inoculated against these things by wealth. Hung around with a lot of very rich kids. Learned to see wealth on that scale, also saw what it was and wasnât good for. Eventually went off to work for an old prof at LSE; was invited to join his grad program. I turned it down because even from there it was clear that if I took that road Iâd spend my life making rich people richer, and that wasnât something I wanted to be involved in. I didnât see any good in that. Some years later I calculated what my likely income loss had been by not taking that road, and it was something staggering. In the other balance pan, a life. I donât regret it.
When my kid was little, and we were still in the recession and I was unemployed and living on savings â you donât get unemployment when you freelance â I got a call to come teach at a for-profit college. Boy, was I excited. I really needed that money. And I got there, and I found out it was an operation for both defrauding the Treasury and preying on the poorest, least-educated people around and robbing them of their chance for a real education. So I ripped my new boss a new one, and quit, and then went and testified to a Senate subcommittee, and handed over my training materials. The subcommitteeâs work resulted on legislation restricting the fraudulent activities of for-profits. My kid and I did manage to go on eating.
A few years back I saw where my institution was going and put myself on the market, and was interviewing at a T10 school. I was back for the second interview, meeting with a ludicrous number of people, when it hit me very hard that I wasnât going to go there. As it turned out, I wasnât going to go there anyway, because despite @roycroftmomâs ideas of how family court works, it wouldâve meant losing custody to a dad who wasnât going to do a good job of parenting. But I wasnât going to go there because it was so blindingly evident that these kids had everyfreakingthing in the world. In no way did they need me. Donât get me wrong; it was a wonderful place with very, very exciting work going on, and the salary wouldâve been a lot higher (and, to be fair, so would COL have been). But those kids, and faculty for that matter, already had a treasure mountain a mile high. The place where I am has next to nothing. And Iâm there walking across a courtyard knowing that I canât justify the move. Take away from kids who have nothing, give to people who have everything. I canât justify it for myself, I canât justify teaching my kid that this is how to be in the world.
I am a public servant. My institution has annual-review software built for some corporate environment, and every year it asks me about my customer-service performance, and every year I say for the record that Iâm not in the business of customer service: Iâm in the business of educating next generations for the next 50 years of this countryâs wellbeing. I do it because the idea of America and its promises are extremely important to me, and because on a personal level the young people themselves are important. To a lesser extent, soâs the science and this countryâs scientific enterprise. Itâs possible I should be more excited about that â Iâve been fortunate enough to be part of some significant, meaningful breakthroughs â but in truth it just helps justify how Iâve spent the last decade. The main thing is the education.
Many people in education and other forms of public service can tell you similar stories.
Now and then I teach Hannah Arendtâs longish essay on personal responsibility under a dictatorship. Iâm not generally a fan of Arendt, but I like this essay. She asks an interesting question in it: why didnât some people become Nazis when it was obviously in their interest to become Nazis, and very much not in their interest to refuse? Itâs worth reading. I thought at first that her answer was too simple, but eventually I came to think sheâs probably correct.
Anyway. If I thought this place would actually be better off without this university, and that the kids would be, on balance, better if it didnât exist, Iâd drop it. And fight it.
In five, ten years I expect Iâll leave this work and go back to my own work. Iâve so far taught maybe 500 kids, mentored many young professors and program directors, written a textbook that taught around a million grade-school kids, written part of another that taught maybe 15K college kids, unsuccessfully tried to defend the interests of GED-takers, did a bunch else. My graduates are at national labs, teaching, in medicineâŠitâs funny, Iâve lost track. They write sometimes with news. But in a while Iâll have done most of my bit for the public interest (I hope) and will to turn to other things that I also have some responsibility to, and are even less remunerative. The question about why I did this, apart from its being the most stable work that was here, the parental responsibility, and the custody tether â after all, I certainly donât have to do all this extra work Iâm not paid for â has a simple answer: who else is going to do it? I was given much, thereâs a dearth of volunteers here, I figure itâs my turn. Show up in droves and put your hand to it, and Iâll declare my shift over and clock out.
Free health care and good education, very safe environment where nobody spies on you for being a latchkey kid (we all were), excellent social life, time for hobbies and other intellectual pursuits. Of course, this was a weakened and dying sort of communism that was not sustainable. I count myself lucky to have lived there as a kid, and then being able to come here as an adult.