You’d be surprised. MBAs often are on this score, but that’s because of who you’re hanging around with. (And – psst – history courses.)(Also art.) I’m 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 wasn’t 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 I’d spend my life making rich people richer, and that wasn’t something I wanted to be involved in. I didn’t 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 don’t regret it.
When my kid was little, and we were still in the recession and I was unemployed and living on savings – you don’t get unemployment when you freelance – 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 subcommittee’s 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 wasn’t going to go there. As it turned out, I wasn’t going to go there anyway, because despite @roycroftmom’s ideas of how family court works, it would’ve meant losing custody to a dad who wasn’t going to do a good job of parenting. But I wasn’t 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. Don’t get me wrong; it was a wonderful place with very, very exciting work going on, and the salary would’ve 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 I’m there walking across a courtyard knowing that I can’t justify the move. Take away from kids who have nothing, give to people who have everything. I can’t justify it for myself, I can’t 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 I’m not in the business of customer service: I’m in the business of educating next generations for the next 50 years of this country’s 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, so’s the science and this country’s scientific enterprise. It’s possible I should be more excited about that – I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of some significant, meaningful breakthroughs – but in truth it just helps justify how I’ve 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 Arendt’s longish essay on personal responsibility under a dictatorship. I’m not generally a fan of Arendt, but I like this essay. She asks an interesting question in it: why didn’t some people become Nazis when it was obviously in their interest to become Nazis, and very much not in their interest to refuse? It’s worth reading. I thought at first that her answer was too simple, but eventually I came to think she’s 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 didn’t exist, I’d drop it. And fight it.
In five, ten years I expect I’ll leave this work and go back to my own work. I’ve 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 medicine…it’s funny, I’ve lost track. They write sometimes with news. But in a while I’ll 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 – after all, I certainly don’t have to do all this extra work I’m not paid for – has a simple answer: who else is going to do it? I was given much, there’s a dearth of volunteers here, I figure it’s my turn. Show up in droves and put your hand to it, and I’ll 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.