<p>Thanks, Shawbridge for explaining the academic two-body problem so well.
By the way, I hate “the life of the mind” moniker, and the assumption that only those in academia lead intellectually rich lives.</p>
<p>Some personal anecdotes re:the cost and remunerative benefits of “the life of the mind”.
I have two kids of college age, and another coming along. All three are “unschoolers”, with the biggest cost consisting of overdue fines at the Chicago Public Library. The first spent four years at Dartmouth as a Pell grant recipient studying play writing and is now living in Brooklyn doing online work for Dartmouth and appearing in commercials, working 24 hour play writing festivals, etc., and is having the time of his life at about $25,000 a year.
My daughter is a Princeton student who took the double “Humanities Sequence” freshman year, is now doing two terms as a Junior at Oxford studying history, and can’t believe her luck. I’ve never had the scratch to get to Europe and don’t expect to unless circumstances change very severely.
I haven’t had a discussion with my kids about what the “payoff” for all this is supposed to be, and I can honestly suppose that they don’t expect anything very well defined.
They already know you can live the life of the mind on a budget completely outside of schooling.
As I write this, I think of my mother, the out-of-wedlock offspring of an Irish girl and a Harvard MD student raised in abusive foster circumstances who dropped out of the New Bedford, Mass public schools and became the most well-read person I have ever known.
The wisest writer on education I have come met in writing is Ivan Illich, who had the opinion that schools sought to convince people that the means and opportunities for learning are scarce, when of course they are abundant.</p>
<p>Hey Shawbridge: terrific summary of the situation. My only quibble is with your off-handed comment on the market for rabbis. Anybody who missed this NYT story from a few months ago might enjoy this: “Yes, Miky, There Are Rabbis in Montana”: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/us/05religion.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/us/05religion.html</a></p>
<p>mythmom, getting jobs in your preferred field wasn’t always so easy even back in the late 1940’s. Try being a Jewish woman graduating from Columbia Law School in 1948 and looking for a job in a law firm, like my mother. She found nothing at all, and ended up working as a money market analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank for a few years until my sister was born. She never did work as a lawyer (she worked as a public elementary school teacher at P.S. 72 on 104th and Lexington for the last 13 years of her life, after going back to work when I was 7), although she was considering trying to start some kind of legal career at the time of her death at the age of 52. </p>
<p>My father, on the other hand (same law school, same class as my mother), was able to get a job at a law firm when he started out (after spending a couple of years helping to draft the Internal Revenue Code of 1954), for the then-generous starting salary of $3,600 per annum. It was better than the $21 per month he’d made in the Army, and, besides, my parents only had to pay $47 per month for their apartment on Wayne Avenue in the Bronx!</p>
<p>I didn’t go to graduate school in history for the very reason of all the horror stories I heard when I was in college in the early '70’s, concerning how difficult it was to find a good job in the humanities, let alone get tenure. So this is nothing new. In retrospect, I still wish I’d done that instead of going to law school, which I view as one of the two or three worst decisions I’ve made in my entire life. (In fact, the worst, since changing the other two – my marriage, and waiting as long as I did to come to terms with who I am – would certainly have meant no J., and I’d do it all, all over again, to be able to have him.)</p>
<p>Hilarious article, Mackinaw. I didn’t mean that there weren’t synagogues in East Wherever. Just that if the rabbis don’t leave, there aren’t any jobs. My parents moved to a town in NJ when I was 4 and my mother was on the committee that hired the rabbi soon after. He was there well past my wedding at which he officiated and my sister’s wedding (she’s 14 years younger) at which he also officiated and I think she’d completed law school before she got married. So, I was hypothesizing that there might not be a lot of turnover. I could be wrong about that.</p>
<p>DonnaL, why are you unhappy you went to law school? Have you worked as a lawyer? A number of lawyers that I know don’t recommend it as a career, but I’m curious about your thoughts.</p>
<p>I’ve been a lawyer for 30 years now (God, I’m old!) and have never found the work particularly fascinating, or cared a great deal about many of the cases I’ve litigated. Also, without going into detail, some of the people I’ve had to work with over the years have not been the most pleasant people I’ve ever met.</p>
<p>PS: When I got married in New Jersey in 1987, the rabbi who officiated had to have been over 80, and had been at the same congregation since my ex was a child and probably before that.</p>
<p>Donna: Thanks for the info. Always happy to learn and change my ideas.</p>
<p>“Threads like these remind me of a comment by George Balanchine, ballet master and genius of the New York City Ballet.
Someone pointed out to him in an aggravated way that a New York City sanitation worker made much more and had better benefits than a NYC Ballet dancer.
Balanchine acted acted surprised, and said “garbage stinks”.
Made perfect sense to him. Counted himself as a lucky guy, and I’m guessing he viewed his dancers likewise.”</p>
<p>His dancers didn’t feel lucky. Until they unionized. And finally got wages/benefits at least as high as a janitor’s ;)</p>
<p>I don’t see what the big deal about the “life of the mime” is. Marcel Marceau did pretty well for himself but just how many people can occupy that niche? I think a student is better off orienting him- or herself as a generalist who can—</p>
<p>oh. mind, not mime. </p>
<p>Never mind.</p>
<p>I keep thinking the phrase is borrowed from U of Chicago’s promotional materials.</p>
<p>When I saw the thread title, I assumed that it was another attack on the University of Chicago, and thought, oh no, here we go again!</p>
<p>Question: what exactly is an “intellectual non-academic job.” Like a museum curator?</p>
<p>Researcher at a Think Tank. Archivist at a historical society. Statistician at the CDC. Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank. Agronomist at the UN. Ethnomusicologist at the Smithsonian. Botanist for the National Parks service at the Grand Canyon. Theatrical historian at Lincoln Center.</p>
<p>etc.</p>
<p>Consultants who solve problems and then step back and seek to discern what is generalizable from what is situation-specific can have careers that are not academic but are intellectual. </p>
<p>I spent the first five years of my life as a professor and now work as a consultant and occasionally write articles or books that capture the generalizable knowledge. If one is lucky, others find the generalizable knowledge to be of value. A Google search for my name yields, among other things, many university syllabi (usually business, law, public policy, international relations and other professional schools) that inflict my writing on unsuspecting students.</p>