COLUMN: Happy to be sitting in the ivory tower

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99Many graduate students, even many lower-level professors, unconsciously assume that their "real world" peers must be living it up, enjoying life to its fullest, devoid of the problems and self-doubt plaguing those who have committed themselves academic careers. Most of my old college friends are now employed at consulting or banking firms in New York or working the political scene in Washington. About all I know for sure is that they're now earning salaries several times as large as my stipend. I am in grad school, and they're not. And even on the best of days, that always seemed a bit lame. It took a recent movie to disabuse me of this distorted attitude. Toward the end of Outside Providence, the main character almost throws his friend off the roof for getting his girlfriend expelled from boarding school and her acceptance to Brown University rescinded. Suddenly he jerks back and pulls the traitor back onto the roof. "It doesn't matter," he spits. "Your life's gonna suck anyway." At that moment I realized that, even if I decided to stay in the academic world, no one would ever be able to say that to me because I like what I do and know it's worthwhile. It is often forgotten that a higher salary, cushy downtown apartment and the means to eat at lavish restaurants and travel around the world do not necessarily make for a happy life. After all, "more money, more problems" was a Roman proverb long before it became the title of a Puff Daddy track. But I have no desire to criticize those who choose this path if it's what they wish to do. My point is that students in the sciences and humanities simply cannot measure themselves by the same standards of self-worth and personal value as young professionals in the business or corporate worlds. If you judge the quality of your life by money alone, as our society usually does, you'll fall just below a bunch of working folks living out in West Philadelphia and just above some of the panhandlers who frequent Penn's campus. It's no secret that the average fellowship on which a Penn graduate student lives allows little room for extravagant spending. Instead, those who choose an intellectual life must be prepared to find fulfillment in their own line of work, the pursuit and enlargement of knowledge for the betterment of humanity. Almost all of us have heard these cheesy words many times before, and for good reason. There is no better justification for investigating the origin and large-scale structure of the universe, or the languages and cultures of long-vanished civilizations, or the relationship between Western imperial conquest and literature in the nineteenth century -- and for funding the people who give their lives to this enterprise. Faced with such an unconvincing slogan, many skeptics, both from the political right and the left, question the relevance and societal impact of academic research. How will it affect the daily lives of "normal" people to know that the rate of expansion of the universe is slowing? How will it improve the lot of the poor to know that some funny symbols on ugly clay tablets from ancient Crete are in an archaic form of Greek? These are valid criticisms and different scholars will answer them in different ways. When asked by one student why anyone would want to reconstruct unrecorded languages, my professor simply replied, "Because we can!" I would add, "because we should, because human beings are interested in their origins and history and because I love it enough to do it and spread the knowledge to you." If you find the very thought of studying cosmology -- or archaeology, or sociology, or comparative literature -- frightfully boring compared to long hours of office work, meetings and travel for excellent and steadily increasing pay, no problem. If you want to make a more immediate difference in the lives of people and take up social work or community service, even better. But for those who do enjoy any of those or other intellectual fields enough to consider devoting even part of your life to them, don't think first of the limited financial compensation. Ask yourself the tough question: "Do I love this discipline enough to put in the time and effort to make a real contribution to knowledge?" As long as our society respects scholarship enough to support its defenders with enough to eat and live honorably, that love will always be plenty of reward.