The 28-year-old traveler was tall, with rough hands, a chiseled jaw and unforgettable, deep-set, melancholy eyes. He arrived in town, his worldly possessions in two battered suitcases, and inquired at a general store about buying some bedding. But the price was far beyond his budget. The strikingly handsome 23-year-old merchant took pity on the man and invited him into his own bed, free of charge, which happened to be just upstairs. The traveler inspected the bed and, looking into the merchant’s sparkling blue eyes, agreed on the spot. For the next four years the two men shared that bed along with their most private fears and desires.
If this sounds like the opening of a homoerotic dime-store novel whose subsequent scenes feature fiery loins and ecstatic eruptions, hold your panting. The year is 1837, the place Springfield, Ill., and the leading men none other than our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, and his lifelong friend Joshua Speed.
It is a story that historians have told and retold, puzzled over and reinterpreted, dismissed and decorated. Some describe Lincoln’s acceptance of Joshua Speed’s generous offer as terse and matter-of-fact; others as beaming and emotional. What none of them questions is that Lincoln and Speed’s years of living together cemented a friendship unparalleled in its intimacy and tenderness in Lincoln’s life. So far, all major historians have stopped short of intimating that Lincoln was ever involved in a romantic affair with a man — in fact, they explicitly discourage such interpretations.
But Larry Kramer, the 62-year-old gay rights hell-raiser, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (“Women in Love”) and Pulitzer-nominated playwright (“The Normal Heart”), wants to change all that. In February, at a gay and lesbian conference in Madison, Wis., he read a portion of his unfinished book, “The American People” — which, in the course of describing the history of gays in early America, avers that Lincoln and Speed were not merely bedfellows but lovers.
“There’s no question in my mind he was a gay man and a totally gay man,” Kramer declares. “It wasn’t just a period, but something that went on his whole life.”
Like the rumors that Thomas Jefferson had sired the children of his young slave
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Sally Hemings, questions about Speed and Lincoln’s relationship have circulated for years. In “Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years” (1926), Carl Sandburg wrote that their relationship had “a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets,” which some have taken as a veiled reference to homosexuality. In 1995, just after Bob Dole rejected campaign contributions from the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group, Log Cabin member W. Scott Thompson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that gays should feel welcome in the party, “given that the founder was gay.” Novelist Paul Russell, author of “The Gay 100,” a ranking of the world’s most important gay figures, also investigated the rumors but chose not to include Lincoln, feeling that the case was not strong enough, though he did include questionable figures like Shakespeare and Madonna. In an interview that will appear in a forthcoming anthology called “Sexual Writings by Gore Vidal,” Gore Vidal told Kramer some years ago that during the research for the historical novel “Lincoln,” Vidal too began to suspect that Lincoln was gay.
Like most of Lincoln’s early private life, the story of his friendship with Speed is a murky one — although not nearly as murky as Lincoln’s early liaisons with women. After four years of living in intimate quarters, Speed announced plans to sell the store and return to his home in Kentucky, where his family owned a large plantation. Lincoln, who was notoriously awkward and shy around women, was at the time engaged to a vivacious, if temperamental, society girl named Mary Todd, but as the date of Speed’s departure and the marriage approached, Lincoln cracked. He wanted to break the engagement by letter, but at Speed’s entreaty, he went to Mary Todd and told her face to face he did not love her. Some argue that Lincoln had fallen in love with another woman. Soon after, Speed departed, leaving Lincoln mired in depression and guilt.
Seven months later Lincoln traveled to Speed’s home in Kentucky, where he spent a month being nursed back to health. After that the two men corresponded affectionately for decades, chronicling their most personal internal conflicts — including their abject fear of marriage, which they ominously refer to in their correspondence (always emphasized) as forebodings. Speed was the first to approach the altar successfully, an ordeal that Lincoln coached him through with tender but not altogether convincing letters of encouragement. It seemed that Speed was on the verge of a premarital meltdown similar to Lincoln’s. “If you went through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in anyone present, you are safe, beyond question,” Lincoln wrote just after the date of Speed’s betrothal, “and in two or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men.” Subsequent clandestine letters inquired whether Speed really was “happier or, if you think the term preferable, less miserable.” Both men eventually married and had children; they remained close until they had a falling-out in 1855 over the issue of slavery.
A shared bed, tortured secret letters and a fear of women — what more proof could scholars want?
Real evidence, they say. First, the shared bed is meaningless, most argue, since in the 19th century American frontiersmen often slept two and three to a bed for purely economic reasons. “It was very common for men to share the same bed in the 1800s — especially in taverns,” says Gene Griessman, author of “The Words Lincoln Lived By” (Simon & Schuster, 1997). “We know that Lincoln had a long, affectionate friendship with Speed. He deeply loved the man, but to go beyond that fact is to go beyond any evidence I have seen.”
“It sounds like this might be a case of taking a 19th century event and giving it a 20th century context,” says Douglas Wilson, author of “Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln” and co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Wilson adds that this trend of seeing the past in terms of the present — what historians call “presentism” — has seen a recent revival, with the controversy over Jefferson’s alleged relationship with Sally Hemings and the “outing” of Walt Whitman.
Other scholars believe that such cozy sleeping arrangements did reflect a distinct emotional landscape for men, but didn’t necessarily lead to hot homo lovemaking. “There was a lot of male homoerotic desire in the middle of the 19th century,” says UC-Berkeley political scientist Michael Rogin. “There may be evidence of male-male desire, but that’s not gay. If ‘gay’ is going to mean anything it’s got to mean orgasms with other men. There’s got to be some sense of transgression and forbiddenness.”
In an era obsessed with the fine points of identity nomenclature, exactly what constitutes mid-19th-century homosexuality is a sticky question. Can homosexuality — be it queer, gay or radical fairy butch — even exist without a name? And can it exist without self-identification on the part of the lover? Can it exist simply through desire — or must those desires be consummated?
Kramer has little patience for such theoretical hairsplitting. “I do not think that people were different starting with the Garden of Eden,” he says. “Why do we imagine that people were these naive asexual beings before the 20th century? Lincoln had a lot of sex.”
Kramer doesn’t pretend to be a Lincoln scholar or even an objective researcher. (“I have read all the biographies, and they are full of shit,” he spits, and derides Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald as “some dried old heterosexual prune at Harvard.”) He’s an unabashed gay rabble-rouser, beating the bushes of history to find gay heroes. But if he really does have the new primary sources he claims to, even the staunchest defenders of Lincoln’s heterosexuality may be forced to reconsider. Kramer claims to have a trump card, a smoking gun: a hitherto unknown Joshua Speed diary, as well as a stash of letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his love affair with Lincoln. The secret pages, which were discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men lived, now are said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa.
No sooner has Kramer mentioned the discovery and location of the papers than he grumbles, “That’s already more than I wish I had said.” Kramer is ambivalent about airing the entire subject. Even the reading, he explains, was a spur-of-the-moment stopgap measure to save him the trouble of writing another speech for a second appearance at the conference. “I didn’t know there were any reporters there,” he says, “and I didn’t let anyone tape it.”
Although Kramer refuses to share any portions of these documents, the Capital Times in Madison reported some of the juicier quotes from the reading: “He often kisses me when I tease him, often to shut me up. He would grab me up by his long arms and hug and hug,” Speed reportedly wrote. Addressing his dear friend as “Linc,” Speed allegedly described the young politician as a man who couldn’t get enough hugging and kissing: “Yes, our Abe is like a school girl.” Kramer also attested that Speed recounted conversations in which the two men wondered whether other men, too, had relationships like theirs.
Whether these quotes prove that Lincoln was gay is debatable — although, of course, Kramer may possess others that are more explicit. But he goes further: He not only claims that honest, rail-splitting, nation-uniting Abe was a proto-bossy bottom, but that there existed a whole 19th century gay frontier subculture. For example, he says there was an underground travel agency that arranged for small groups of man-loving men to travel into the wilderness for nature appreciation and other earthy pleasures. Both Lincoln and Speed, Kramer says, frequented these camping trips while living in Springfield. In one circular, which Kramer shared by phone, a man named “Dapper Dan from Kansas” invited “fellow travelers” on a “holiday journey” to sleep outdoors. The passage he read was certainly suggestive but hardly explicit.
Repeating a claim long circulated in the gay community, if not in Hamilton scholarship, Kramer also claims that Alexander Hamilton was “essentially a cock-tease.”
All these assertions, however, pale in the face of Kramer’s most outrageous theory: that Lincoln’s murder may have been a kind of gay-bashing, resulting from a kinky sexual set-up. “There’s some evidence that shows that Speed presented Booth to Lincoln as a ‘present’ and the young Booth, who was a gorgeous man, was virulently homophobic, like the men who killed Matthew Shepard,” he says. “If the murder turns out to have had a homosexual underpinning, that’s going to freak everybody out.”
Seemingly outlandish claims like these — along with the fact that Kramer is not by any conventional definition a scholar — obviously raise questions about his historical judgment and probity. Isn’t Kramer just a propagandist, laboring mightily to turn the 1800s into 18th and Castro?
Interestingly, however, Lincoln scholars have largely held their fire even when confronted with Kramer’s more extreme claims. “That’s pretty wild,” says Douglas Wilson of the Lincoln-Booth theory. “If Lincoln and Booth had ever met, I would have thought we would have known more about it. But all ideas are welcome; you learn more when people argue.”
Arguments coming from Larry Kramer tend to have a special vehemence. Long a lightning rod for controversy both within and without the gay community, Kramer knows how to play his cards for all they’re worth — although playing them close to his chest is not his strong suit. After founding ACT-UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, two staggeringly influential organizations within the gay community, Kramer assailed the Reagan administration, the medical establishment and heterosexuals in general (whom he referred to as “they”) with razor pen and acid tongue. Just as often, he attacked his own community; his conflicts with factions of the two organizations he founded erupted into public spectacles of ire and recrimination. No setting was too sacrosanct for Kramer to tell his angry truths — as evidenced by a eulogy he once gave in which he accused the gathering of mourners (including himself) of murdering the deceased with their complacency and passivity.
Compared to those days of high dudgeon and real crisis, it seems odd that Kramer is so anxious about his scholarly crusade to out a dead president. Why won’t he share his evidence? His explanations vary from wanting to protect the poor folks of Davenport from a mob of Lincoln lunatics to simply wanting to finish his monster-in-the-box book (now 2,000 pages long and at least five years away from being finished) in peace. He’s also planning to submit a short excerpt of the Lincoln material to magazines this fall. But when pressed, he confesses that he fears the vitriol, or worse, that may rain down upon him from outraged defenders of Lincoln’s sullied honor. “Don’t tell them where I live,” he adds at the end of one phone conversation, with no hint of irony.
It’s possible that Kramer was led to some of his evidence by a more respectable scholar, C.A. Tripp, the elderly author of the groundbreaking “The Homosexual Matrix.” Kramer admits that he hopes a forthcoming book by Tripp comes out before his own. Tripp’s book also plans to drag Lincoln out of the closet, but according to Kramer, it will do so with a good deal more scholarly muscle and nuance. Kramer says Tripp has evidence that Lincoln had not just one, but numerous homoerotic relationships throughout his life. Unlike Kramer, however, he does not construe these ongoing sexual encounters as self-consciously homosexual. Speaking by phone from his home in New Jersey, Tripp refuses to “drop any pearls” before his book is finished. “It’s too far away,” he says, “about two years.”
When told that Kramer had expressed enthusiasm about Tripp’s findings, Tripp snarls good-naturedly: “Of course he did. Kramer’s a propagandist. And that’s all I have to say.” He does acknowledge, however, that his research was based on “absolutely new” primary sources that no other historian has seen.
All this talk of new primary sources makes the Lincoln history establishment curious despite their skepticism.
“It’s possible there is something else, but I would be very surprised,” says Michael Burlingame, author of the “Inner World of Abraham Lincoln” and history professor at Connecticut College. “If there’s a Joshua Speed diary, then I’m eager to see it.” Indeed, Burlingame is one volume into a three-volume account of Lincoln’s life; presumably such findings might guide his current project in new directions.
Burlingame is familiar with Tripp’s work and despite his “enormous respect for the man,” he disagrees with his ideas about Lincoln’s sexual orientation. “Speed and Lincoln were close emotionally but their letters have no discernable romantic overtones,” he says. “Besides, there is too much evidence that Lincoln was strongly attracted to women.” By way of example he cites the fact that Lincoln was a “proto-feminist,” fell “head over heels in love with 18-year-old Matilda Edwards” and loved a beautiful young woman named Ann Rutledge.
Such evidence, however, can be interpreted several ways. Heterosexual men have never had a corner on the market for feminist-friendly attitudes — in fact, one might argue that proto-homosexual men might better sympathize with the plights of proto-feminist women. Moreover, some historians reject the tale of his love for Matilda Edwards as a paranoid fantasy that Mary Todd Lincoln concocted to explain why Lincoln abandoned her at the altar. In “Lincoln,” David Herbert Donald suggests that there was “no real justification” to think that Lincoln had fallen in love with her and that Edwards had expressly denied that he ever “even stooped to pay [her] a compliment.” In turn, Douglas Wilson calls Donald’s refusal to deal with the Edwards evidence “just hopeless.”
Historians also posit wildly different scenarios regarding the doomed Ann Rutledge. All evidence comes from third-hand accounts that held that Lincoln became acquainted with her while she was still engaged to another man. Soon afterwards, she fell ill; Lincoln sat by her bedside for the last two days of her life. Some contend the two were on their way to being engaged, others that Lincoln might have befriended her simply because she was already spoken for. Others say her death left him a devastated man who, at least from a romantic perspective, never recovered. Yet as Kramer is quick to point out, not a single letter exists between Rutledge and Lincoln, and in the thousand pages of Lincoln’s personal correspondence, he never once mentions her name.
Finally, in chronicling the proof of Lincoln’s heterosexual romances, historians are split in their interpretation of his marriage to the volatile, possibly insane, drug-addled Mary Todd Lincoln. By all accounts the couple had a difficult, turbulent relationship, but over the course of 10 years they managed to bear four children. Some historians paint theirs as a difficult but loving bond; others as the quintessential marriage from hell. Douglas Wilson gives credence to stories that Lincoln visited prostitutes during his marriage and later believed himself to have contracted syphilis. David Herbert Donald, in contrast, paints Lincoln as a faithful, if not exactly doting, husband.
All of these heterosexist interpretations get Kramer foaming at the mouth. “Why is their version so much more believable than mine? So much of the history that is shoveled into the world is bullshit — we really have to invent our own.”
Do such overt desires for a specific outcome make it impossible for Kramer to separate fact from wishful thinking? That was the charge leveled against those who initially argued that Walt Whitman was a 19th century homosexual. At first this idea was derided as far-fetched propaganda, but it is now largely accepted (although academics continue to debate whether it is legitimate to call Whitman “gay”).
But does it really matter if Lincoln was gay? What difference does it make if the man who reunited the country, ended slavery, wrote some of the most majestic speeches in the English language and died a martyr’s death desired — or actually had sex with — other men? According to Illinois state historian Tom Schwarz, it doesn’t make any difference: “It’s only important if he made conscious decisions based on his sexuality which then influenced his political behavior, public policy or his decisions on slavery. If not, its importance readily diminishes.”
Schwarz’s politic words, however, don’t take into account the enormous symbolic significance that will attend any reevaluation of the sexual orientation of America’s most beloved figure. Imagine if the Hemings-Jefferson love affair had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt (which, as scientists continue to remind us, still hasn’t happened) in the Jim Crow 1950s, when certain states still prosecuted miscegenation? Bigots would have had one less legendary leg to stand on. Similarly, if the man on our $5 bill was proven to be gay, right-wing politicians who invoke Lincoln in one breath and denounce the homosexual menace in the next would be forced to reexamine the deeper meaning of the phrase “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” Certainly, for queer theorists and gay scholars, the ability to claim the man who was arguably America’s greatest president as their own would arm gay battalions with a powerful new rhetorical weapon.
“Greatest” is the operative word here. When Kramer first announced at the Madison meeting that he was setting out to get gays their “first gay president,” he could have made his job easier by looking to Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan. The only bachelor to take office, Buchanan spent 15 years living with Sen. William King. The contemporary press ridiculed the men’s relationship mercilessly, and Andrew Jackson once called King “Miss Nancy.” The problem, of course, is that James Buchanan is not the guy to stake a modern civil rights movement on. Passive and ineffectual, he slowly but surely led the country into a bloody civil war. Despite the fact that it was “obvious” that Buchanan was gay, Paul Russell says he chose not to include him in “The Gay 100″ — he just wasn’t anything to be proud of.
One equally controversial gay figure did make it into the book: none other than the fire-breathing Larry Kramer. In fact, he’s the highest-ranked of all living people on the list. “A lot of people wouldn’t agree with that,” Kramer mutters when informed of this fact.
In similar fashion, many of Lincoln’s contemporary enemies would have seen the deification of the rough-hewn, socially awkward president as the worst kind of historical revisionism. But as Kramer knows, from a political perspective, revisionist history is the only kind of history that counts.
One of the enviable perks of the academic life is the funded year off that comes every seven years, and my husband and I were miraculously scheduled for sabbatical at the same time. The year fell during what was technically the second year of our “empty nest,” but it was the first time we’d be without children and day jobs. Unlike our colleagues, who head to dusty provincial church archives to research the something-something in medieval Spain, we were free to go wherever. Filled with ideas for almost every medium — play, essay, screenplay, pilot, humor pieces — I dreamed of untold productivity and an endless summer at my in-laws’ lake house in New Hampshire. I would finally have the time and quiet I’d been hungering for after 19 years of teaching and raising children.
Staying on in a summer community is like being in a department store after closing, or the zoo after dark. I wanted the place to empty out. I wanted to turn at the flashing light without waiting for the endless line of cars piling in from Boston. And yet the weekend after Labor Day, when I showed up at the flea market ready to bag the bargains that await the locals, I discovered there was no flea market after Labor Day. In high summer I bitterly complained about the busy, noisy beach where it was impossible to read undisturbed. But when I took a late September swim, it was eerie to find myself alone there. I felt like a ghost, condemned to wander the places where I was happiest.
The lake was quiet now, and we recognized the few year-round sails we saw in the distance. Taking our canoe down the Saco River, where in summer there are flotillas of canoes and beer rafts, we were now the only ones there. Arriving at Crescent Beach in Maine, where the parking lot is usually full of camp buses hugging the shade, we counted only 10 cars. By November, we were the only ones left on the lake, kayaking with hot tea in our thermoses, floating among the feathers left behind by the migrating Canadian geese. It was hard to shake the feeling that there was someplace we were supposed to be.
Without the academic calendar organizing our lives, there was a sense of unreality about where we were and what season we were in. Our life had the logic of dreams: “It was the New Hampshire house, but it wasn’t the New Hampshire house.” Brown leaves fell on the front porch, giving it an abandoned, haunted house feel – an effect heightened by our black cat, who sat on the porch railing watching the chipmunks. The weather further confounded us with a late October snowstorm (the headline in the local paper read “SNOWLIAGE!”). Watching the snow melt and the dirt roads growing muddy, it felt more like spring than autumn.
While new second homes are outfitted with every appliance, in this Cheever-y summerhouse it was considered a virtue to do without — to do without showers, dishwashers and dug wells. The water from the cistern had a bitter taste, and a washcloth left in the sink overnight would mysteriously turn blue. Whether it was the dubious water or the Dr. Bronner’s biodegradable soap, my hair was never entirely clean. Our clothing smelled like wood smoke and the cuffs of our jeans were perpetually muddy. When we went to town we were like Peruvian miners returning to daylight, blinking hard at civilization. The previously magical path to the lake became woodsy and damp and a late day swim now seemed medically ill advised. The milky sunset was moving earlier and earlier, but when we complained about the shortening days and the dark mornings, a year-rounder friend replied briskly: “What difference does it make if you don’t have to get up for work?”
The travails of a year off and the exigencies of an 18th-century summerhouse are a privileged set of problems to explore. But a sabbatical demands a kind of self-directed work that’s very different from an articulated class schedule and a proscribed roster of tutorials and department meetings. It requires a daily discipline, especially in the face of a beautiful New England fall. I careened from feeling stupid for staying indoors while the lakes and mountains beckoned, to feeling irritated that I hadn’t committed to a hard and fast writing schedule. Normally I worked on projects for someone; this year I was simply writing. There was no guarantee that anything I wrote would be produced or published and I was forced to confront the daily uncertainties of the freelancer.
I became obsessed with other writers’ schedules. I read an interview with Haruki Murakami in the New York Times Magazine in which I learned that he lived a “monkishly regimented life.” He ran or swam long distances, went to bed at 9 p.m. and woke up “without an alarm” at 4 a.m. to sit down to five to six hours of “concentrated writing.” It was implied that “concentrated writing” did not include answering emails or reading reviews and I remembered how Jonathan Franzen had famously put glue in his Internet port in order to avoid temptation.
As a professor one is perpetually needed, putting out logistical fires for the students on a daily basis, expected to respond immediately to their angsty, hormonal emails. Now when my BlackBerry blinked, it was only an email advertising a geographically irrelevant college lecture or the arrival of the new Athleta catalog. While we all fantasize about uninterrupted days, in practice there was something about the open calendar that inspired existential dread. Now when I had no students, and my two sons were both away at school, I missed the various human obstacles that used to stand between me and my writing. In the Nick Hornby book “About a Boy,” the wealthy, unemployed protagonist divides his days into 30-minute “units” to keep himself sane. How many times have you heard about the lottery winner whose life falls apart once he gives up his day job?
Writing full-time, my wardrobe was reduced to pajamas, jeans and the same red plaid flannel shirt. I’d put sneakers on to take a walk and then return to the same shearling-lined Merrell clogs. Once I discovered how little clothing I needed when I wasn’t teaching, the siren song of the nearby outlets was stilled.
In late October we moved into a winterized house that we’d planned to rent out, but our young tenants were blind-sided by medical bills, caught without health insurance after a complicated ectopic pregnancy, and moved out unexpectedly. Unsure how soon we’d be able find another renter, we decided to move into the unfurnished house ourselves.
When the snow finally flew, our world was enveloped in silence, compounded by the extra insulation of a new house. The only sounds I heard were the wood furnace kicking in or the occasional flying squirrel in the walls. This sepulchral quality was the aural equivalent of our empty nest, and the newfound quiet made it remarkably easy to concentrate. My husband painted in the heated basement while I worked long hours in the living room by the wood stove. When I looked out the window at a snowcapped Mount Washington, my heart swooned like a teenage girl spotting her crush at a party.
I often remind my playwriting students to ask the Passover question: What makes this day different from all other days? Talking to our children on the phone I struggled to answer that question myself. A writing routine requires, well, routine. When life is uneventful — when you don’t get dressed, go to work or see other people — there are suddenly many hours in the day for writing.
As the pages stacked up, I began to see how this sabbatical thing worked, and the twinges of guilt and embarrassment I’d felt about a year off went away. Teaching not only takes up the time that might otherwise go to writing, but the short-term ego gratification can supplant the need to write. Posterity can come to seem less important than the student in your office insisting that your class is “awesome.”
I subscribed to a website called I Done This that emailed me at 6 every evening asking me to account for my day. Replying with the list of tasks I’d accomplished opened up the larger question of what counted. Did grocery shopping count? Laundry? Taking a walk?
I also wanted to use the year to check off a private bucket list that included reading Dickens, learning Spanish and returning to figure skating. Middle-aged fear had supplanted my pre-pubescent skills so I took lessons at the local ice rink to recoup what I’d lost. Children were now being taught to skate by pushing milk crates around the ice so I skated among the jangling, periodic clatter of the falling stacks. I knew that Murakami or Franzen would never take time away from their writing to learn how to do a Lutz but I also knew that being a student, being bad at something, is the best way to remind yourself how to be a teacher, both because it’s humbling and because it reminds you that teaching involves breaking something down into manageable steps. How do you go from the security of skating on two feet to lifting one foot up and crossing it over the other while moving? Like writing, like everything, it’s harder than it looks.
A sabbatical too is harder than it looks. A sabbatical reminds you that humans are like working dogs. We like tasks; we like to be where we’re supposed to be at a certain time. A sabbatical also makes you confront the fact that you are replaceable. (A tone-deaf junior colleague emailed me early on to tell me what a great job my replacement was doing.) And a sabbatical forces you to articulate your definition of time well spent. If there were nothing standing between you and your writing, what would you write? And what else would you want to do? Is happiness grounded in geography? Is life about checking off bucket lists?
By the time April rolled around we knew that back in Ohio our colleagues were in the home stretch. We became nostalgic for those hooky-playing autumn days when we were floating around in kayaks with the year off stretching ahead of us. A sabbatical wasn’t quite as sweet once everyone had the summer off. Though I’m only halfway through “Bleak House,” I can still point to a respectable stack of pages written. I’m speaking some present-tense Spanish and skating with the 13-year-old divas in the center of the rink. Come August, I will have to repeatedly answer the question “How was your sabbatical?”
This essay is the long answer. The short answer will be: “It was great.”
A Chicago skyscraper architect, a New York City children’s choir founder and a North Carolina scientist who studies how to prevent sports-related concussions are among the latest 22 recipients of the no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”
The $500,000 fellowships for 2011 were announced Tuesday by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Recipients largely don’t know they’re in contention for the annual awards, and often learn they’re winners with an out-of-the-blue phone call informing them they’ll receive the money over the next five years.
“I was dumbfounded, I actually cried,” said Francisco J. Nunez, 46, founder of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. Nunez finished what he called a “very strenuous” board meeting when he received a call from a phone number he didn’t recognize.
“I get this call from a gentleman,” Nunez said. “He tells me to tell whoever I’m with to leave and go into a private room. Next thing I know I have to sit down at my desk. I started shaking.”
Recipients can spend the money however they like, but many like Nunez say the honor of the fellowship makes them focus on what they would accomplish in their fields if only they had the means. And now they do. His group’s many choir programs have more than 1,000 young singers.
“I feel like I have an opportunity here and a challenge to figure out something really great,” he said. The foundation cited him for “shaping the future of choral singing for children.”
Even though they’re referred to as the “genius grants,” MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci said the more attractive quality is creativity.
“We hope we’re giving these people an opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have to pursue their area or interest and let that spirit that has driven them to be free to accomplish more in the future,” Gallucci said. “We’re aiming here at the future.”
As in previous years, a wide variety of fields are represented on the list of recipients, including both arts and sciences. This year’s list includes a former U.S. poet laureate, an elder rights lawyer, an evolutionary geneticist, a jazz percussionist, a cellist and a developmental biologist.
The foundation relies on hundreds of anonymous nominators to offer names to be put in contention for the grants. Nominations only are accepted from the list of anonymous nominators. Recipients often say they have no idea who nominated them. Names are then given to a selection committee of about a dozen anonymous members. They meet regularly to review nominations, narrow the list and then make final recommendations to the MacArthur Foundation’s Board of Directors.
Including this year’s recipients the MacArthur Foundation has awarded 850 genius grants since 1981.
Jeanne Gang, 47, was the architect of Chicago’s 82-story Aqua Tower and her firm, Studio Gang, puts a focus on green building and sustainable design. MacArthur cited Gang’s designs for challenging “the aesthetic and technical possibilities of the art form.” Gang said she will put together a plan for the grant money and methodically follow it.
“I’ve always tried to maintain a very experimental side and research side of our practice,” Gang said. “(The grant) will feed into our research, our prototyping, our creativity.”
Kevin Guskiewicz’s studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill have made strides in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of sports-related concussions. Guskiewicz, 45, said he wants to use some of the grant money to develop rehabilitation plans for athletes and soldiers who suffer concussions. The foundation noted Guskiewicz’s combination of laboratory and on-the-field investigations to further his research.
“It’s sort of like piecing together a puzzle,” he said. “We still have several more pieces of the puzzle to put in place.”
Some MacArthur money could go to the ECO Girls project in southeastern Michigan. Tiya Miles, 41, started the project when she was on sabbatical from her job as a history professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The environmental mentorship program connects urban girls with college students, she said.
“We’ve been getting some small grants, but I didn’t know how I was going to fund this project,” Miles said.
Miles’ scholarship focuses on the history and legacy of slavery in the U.S. and the relationships between African and Cherokee people in early America. The foundation said Miles is “reframing and reinterpreting the history of our diverse nation.” The grant money affords her the luxury of taking time to think and reflect on her future, Miles said.
“I have lots of plans that I could imagine,” she said.
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Online:
MacArthur Foundation: http://www.macfound.org/
For the dinner in honor of the Great American Novelist the guest list is made up months in advance. Nobody asks whether the visiting writer wants a dinner. Nobody considers the possibility that giving a lecture on a full stomach and after a glass or two of wine might be difficult. The dinner is not about what the writer wants; it’s about what we want. And we want to meet the writer. Are we highbrow sycophants competing for the chance to say forever after that we had dinner with the Great American Novelist? Or are we faithful readers grateful to hear more from a writer we admire? When Jonathan Franzen came to Kenyon College, I was hoping we’d be the latter.
The denizens of a small liberal arts college have a twitchy, uneasy relationship to fame. Those who once hoped to be literary stars themselves will often take a defiantly unimpressed stance. Having somehow been tapped to be Jonathan Franzen’s host, I bent over backward to invite a certain English professor to the dinner, seating him next to the guest of honor, only to learn later that he was “not a fan.” Bringing in a writer you admire is very much like bringing a new boyfriend home to meet the family. While you hope that they like him, and vice versa, you are resigned to being embarrassed.
In the weeks before Franzen’s visit, a sort of magical thinking took hold of the campus. A student told me with a “phew” that he’d just finished “The Corrections,” as if Franzen would somehow know who had and hadn’t read his books, indeed who had finished the books. I read “Freedom” over Christmas break, allowing enough time to finish the lengthy book but without reading it so far in advance of Franzen’s visit that I would forget things, the way I’d largely forgotten what happened in “The Corrections,” a book I’d loved years before. His are not disposable novels but all writers might be humbled to learn that however much a reader enjoys a novel, she soon forgets the characters’ names as if they were people she’d gone to middle school with. At the last minute, I ordered his memoir “The Discomfort Zone” and his translation of “Spring Awakening,” as if the act of ordering them offered a kind of partial credit.
I agonized over the writing of Franzen’s introduction, even though the times I’d been a visiting writer I never paid much attention to whoever introduced me. Wanting to introduce myself to Franzen before his visit, I was told to correspond through his agent. This was alienating but understandable, and I wrote to Franzen with an East Berliner’s awareness that a third person would be reading our correspondence. I labored mightily to appear neither stalker-esque nor obsequious, but he never wrote back, no doubt because he was busy doing his own writing rather than focusing on another writer’s oeuvre.
The night of Franzen’s talk, looking out the window at my car in the driveway, I suddenly noticed its distressed, muddy state and had a sudden urge to wash it. It would have taken 30 minutes to run to town for a car wash; Jonathan Franzen would likely be in my car for a minute and half. Still, I tried to reach my husband, who was planning to run to the hardware store, to see if he’d take my car in. Fortunately, he didn’t answer his cell and I tried to quickly forget this embarrassing evidence that I was not immune to the dizzying power of celebrity.
As it turned out, Franzen didn’t have the chance to be appalled by my car. It was a nice night and Franzen and I walked from the college inn to the dinner at the Parish House. Franzen’s ability to attract controversy was belied by his Clark Kent demeanor. He presented as a rumpled, mild-mannered reporter who only occasionally revealed hints of his superpowers. Adjusting to his thoughtful, deliberate processing time, and feeling outclassed intellectually, I stripped myself of my default comic rhythms and became suddenly earnest, discussing Thomas Mann and the best translations of Rilke.
I told him that, according to Wikipedia, we were born in the same month of the same year — indeed our fathers had been born in the same year. Perhaps this search for common ground informs every first meeting, but I noticed that other people that night reached across the canyon of celebrity in a similar way. A student named Caleb briefly bonded with Franzen during the book signing over the fact that he shared a name with a character from “The Corrections.” (Admiring the student’s signed copy afterward, with its gloriously rococo version of Franzen’s initials, I wondered if Franzen had practiced the signature as an aspiring novelist.)
I introduced Franzen around during drinks, emphatically calling him Jonathan before catching on to the fact that he went by “Jon.” He displayed a brief moment of self-deprecating panic when I suggested he meet the film and drama faculty. He joked about how square he must look in his Oxford shirt next to the young acting teacher’s stylish jacket. The group asked whether he truly put Krazy Glue into his Internet port to prevent himself from looking at email while he was writing. When I confessed to being weak when it came to the temptations of email, Franzen earnestly told me there was no shame in avoiding the source of addiction. I resolved to look into the Internet-blocking software a friend had recommended, called, appropriately enough, Freedom.
For all my agonizing over the guest list and the final seating arrangement, once we sat down to dinner it soon became apparent that the acoustics of the Parish House were so dreadful that you could only hear the person sitting immediately to your right or left, and even then, just barely. Because of a last minute substitution Franzen ended up beside a feisty poli-sci professor who insisted on locking horns over writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Trying to save him, I asked about his translation of “Spring Awakening,” wondering what had annoyed him about the Broadway musical. He hesitated, saying that he’d best articulated his complaints in his introduction to the play. I thought of the crisp, new script sitting unopened on my desk, and felt like a student who had vigorously studied chapters 1-10 only to discover the exam was actually on Chapters 11-20. I smiled wanly and told him I looked forward to reading it.
Franzen wasn’t a high-maintenance guest but he had asked to have 40 minutes in advance of his talk to prepare. On the way into the building I offered to show him the stage where he’d be speaking, but he demurred. I was taken aback, as theater people place an almost holy emphasis on “the space.” Expecting him to warm up or to pull out his notes, I was somewhat surprised that his preparation consisted of taking a nap in the Green Room. After I’d roused him and we huddled behind the curtain waiting for our cue, I realized that given the cacophony of the full house, Franzen wouldn’t even hear the introduction I had slaved over.
At the podium, I turned to welcome him and saw that he was crossing the stage still hanging on to his leather briefcase, which suggested either a charming geekiness or a spy headed to a drop. I scurried down the stairs and into the front row, where the pounding of my heart finally began to subside. He opened by saying that he’d been told that he wasn’t allowed to read from his novels but instead had to give a talk. I flushed with shame because I was the one who, when given the choice by his agent, had voted for a talk.
Franzen admitted upfront that this would be a recycled talk, one that he hadn’t looked at since giving it at a conference in Germany a year ago. Would the audience, which consisted largely of students, be charmed by this slacker admission? In fact, a prim article appeared later that week in the college paper, gently reminding the reader of the Tenets of Public Speaking, the first of which was: Be prepared. If you are invited to speak in front of any group — from your local Girl Scout troop to a huge convention — consider it an honor. The article seemed to fault him, not for giving the same talk again, but for not having readied it.
His was not the first recycled talk to be given at Kenyon. Many have done it, and most have confessed to it. But some have finessed it better than others; Tony Kushner framed his recycled speech with the playful description of a nightmare he’d had in which he realized he was about to give a talk he’d already given here. When Tim O’ Brien came, there was a village-wide blackout just as the audience of 700 people was gathering in Rosse Hall. O’Brien asked for a flashlight and soldiered on, thereby engendering a tremendous sense of event and solidarity. Franzen customized his opening by outing himself as a bird watcher, claiming to have just seen some special black vulture on the village’s water tower.
Then he began reading, and the tempo, unlike his own conversational rhythm, was very, very fast. His sentences were elegant and complex and they were difficult to grasp upon first hearing, even without the added velocity. I tried to telepathically urge him to slow down, but I saw that, for all his formidable intellect, for all his “awkward,” as the students called it, he was enjoying himself. He enjoyed being onstage. He enjoyed the hair-trigger laughter he got every time he critiqued one of his own sentences or acknowledged a passage that only made sense in Germany. Behind the podium, he would periodically kick up a back leg, as if he were Doris Day giddily kissing Rock Hudson.
Franzen began by impatiently dispatching the four perennial questions that writers were asked: Who are your influences? What time of day do you work and what do you write on? Do your characters take over and tell you what to do? Is your fiction autobiographical? As he settled and slowed, he went deeper into the complicated relationship between autobiography and fiction, talking about the honesty and self-exposure demanded of writers. He conflated his breakthrough as a writer with breaking out of a confining marriage, describing how he’d made the mistake of censoring himself to the point where it affected the organic outcomes of his early novels. He drove home the liberating point that fiction wasn’t meant to be nice.
During the question and answer period, the questioners had to climb out of their row in order to speak into microphones standing in the aisles. This setup attracted a certain kind of questioner, almost exclusively young men in flannel shirts given to provocation and self-promotion. The first two students asked about David Foster Wallace, which implied that the students were less impressed by Franzen’s writing than by his association with Wallace. Neither student seemed to allow for the possibility that it was painful for him to talk about his dead friend.
One question took the form of a throwdown. Franzen had agreed to return to Kenyon to give the commencement speech for his nephew’s graduation. Was Franzen up to the task of giving a graduation speech at the college where Wallace gave what’s considered the finest graduation speech ever written? (Wallace’s commencement speech was posthumously published as “This Is Water.”) There was an excruciating pause before Franzen graciously said that he’d be satisfied with being second best.
We were witnessing a sort of adolescent acting out as the students tried to tangle publicly with a writer they admired. I was sympathetic to their mixed-up impulses, remembering myself in a college drama class taught by a handsome, Oxbridge Ph.D. candidate. Instead of writing the paper I was supposed to write about Ibsen, I perversely wrote a parody of an Ibsen play, showboating my budding dramatist’s awareness of his structural mannerisms. In my head I argued that this was a valid exploration of Ibsen’s techniques but at the same time I knew it was a desperate attempt to get the attention of the teacher. Keeping me after class to ask why I hadn’t turned in the paper, my tutor had the same forbearing expression that Franzen wore now.
One student asked about obscure ’90s bands, another wanted Franzen to agree that genre novels were as good as literary novels, and another student sincerely asked why the cerulean warbler, at the heart of an environmental battle in “Freedom,” never appeared in the book. Franzen replied simply: “What would it do?” But the somewhat disastrous question and answer period climaxed with a question from a young man with a known Oprah obsession, who was excited about Franzen’s visit largely because the writer had once sat in a chair across from his idol.
The Oprah fan, a quirky campus character, was aggrieved because Franzen had refused to appear on his campus Web-show, which might be described as a cross between “Sprockets” and “La Cage Aux Folles.” It was ostensibly a talk show but, in the clips I’d seen, it was the student host who did most of the talking before cheerfully urging his guest to dance. I’d worried that Franzen, wanting to be a sport, might say yes to the interview only to have his embarrassment live on forever in cyberspace. So the invitation had never reached him. Now, having seized the microphone, the student was determined to get his interview despite the lines of students forming behind him. The mortified audience slunk down in their seats.
The students later discovered that Franzen’s talk was already circulating on YouTube; he’d given a portion of it last fall at the National Book Festival. Instead of Germany, Franzen had begun by saying that he hadn’t looked at the talk since he’d given it in Seattle. He used the same kind of comic asides, pausing after a given sentence to announce that it would be rewritten. Or he’d say “good evening” and then correct it to “good morning,” in order to bring the audience into the joke of the recycled talk. I thought of something Anna Deavere Smith had written: “Public figures are so expert at … performance that they have a greater gift than actors for making what they have said before seem as though they are saying it for the first time.” The students pointed to this clip as evidence that they’d been had, and their mortification morphed into indignation. They began to speak of Franzen as if he were a freshman friendship that they were so over.
The next morning, I found Franzen in the lobby of the Kenyon Inn, hanging out with his nephew, Eric, who had just rolled out of bed. Both the formidable writer and the literary celebrity had disappeared, leaving behind the fond, sardonic uncle. As I politely asked Eric tiresome middle-aged questions about what he was studying, Franzen mocked his nephew’s lightweight liberal arts courses. One in particular sounded bogus to Franzen, and he playfully snarled: “College architecture!” In that moment, it was Franzen who became the slightly embarrassing relative, acting up in front of a professor, and Eric shrugged at me, as if to say: “What can you do?”
Every year or two, my husband, an academic advisor at a prestigious Midwestern university, gets a call from a student’s parent. Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so’s son is a sophomore now and still insistent on majoring in film studies, anthropology, Southeast Asian comparative literature or, god forbid … English. These dalliances in the humanities were fine and good when little Johnny was a freshman, but isn’t it time now that he wake up and start thinking seriously about what, one or two or three years down the line, he’s actually going to do?
My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students’ intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, “Aren’t these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?” Also, he says, “The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don’t want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice.”
Now, I love my husband. Lately, however, I find myself wincing when he recounts these stories.
“Well,” I sometimes say, “what are they going to do?”
The answer, at least according to a recent article in the New York Times, is rather bleak. Employment rates for college graduates have declined steeply in the last two years, and perhaps even more disheartening, those who find jobs are more likely to be steaming lattes or walking dogs than doing anything even peripherally related to their college curriculum. While the scale and severity of this post-graduation letdown may be an unavoidable consequence of an awful recession, I do wonder if all those lofty institutions of higher learning, with their noble-sounding mission statements and soft-focused brochure photos of campus greens, may be glossing over the serious, at-times-crippling obstacles a B.A. holder must overcome to achieve professional and financial stability. I’m not asking if a college education has inherent value, if it makes students more thoughtful, more informed, more enlightened and critical-minded human beings. These are all interesting questions that don’t pay the rent. What I’m asking is far more banal and far more pressing. What I’m asking is: Why do even the best colleges fail so often at preparing kids for the world?
When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors and mentors reinforced this complacency. I was smart, they told me. I’d spent four years at a rigorous institution honing my writing, research and critical-thinking skills. I’d written an impressive senior thesis, gathered recommendations from professors, completed summer internships in various journalistic endeavors. They had no doubt at all that I would land on my feet. And I did (kind of), about a decade after graduating.
In the interim, I floundered. I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa. I mooched off friends and boyfriends and slept on couches. One dreary night in San Francisco, I went on an interview to tend bar at a strip club, but left demoralized when I realized I’d have to walk around in stilettos. I went back to school to complete the pre-medical requirements I’d shunned the first time through, then, a week into physics, I applied to nursing school, then withdrew from that program after a month when I realized nursing would be an environment where my habit of spacing out might actually kill someone. I landed a $12-an-hour job as a paralegal at an asbestos-related litigation firm. I got an MFA in fiction.
Depending on how you look at it, I either spent a long time finding myself, or wasted seven years. And while all these efforts hardly add up to a tragedy (largely because I had the luxury of supportive parents willing to supplement my income for a time), I do have to admit feeling disillusioned as I moved from one gig to another, feeling as though my undergraduate education, far from preparing me for any kind of meaningful and remunerative work, had in some ways deprepared me, nurturing my natural strengths and predilections — writing, reading, analysis — and sweeping my weaknesses in organization, pragmatic problem-solving, decision-making under the proverbial rug.
Of course, there are certainly plenty of B.A. holders out there who, wielding the magic combination of competency, credentials and luck, are able to land themselves a respectable, entry-level job that requires neither name tag nor apron. But for every person I know who parlayed a degree in English or anthropology into a career-track gig, I know two others who weren’t so lucky, who, in that awful, post-college year or two or three or four, unemployed and uninsured and uncommitted to any particular field, racked up credit card debt or got married to the wrong person or went to law school for no particular reason or made one of a dozen other time- and money-wasting mistakes.
And the common thread in all these stories seems to be how surprised these graduates were by their utter unemployability, a feeling of having been misled into complacency, issued reassurances about how the pedigree or prestige of the institution they’d attended would save them. This narrative holds true whether their course of study was humanities or social sciences. My baby sitter, for example, who earned a degree in psychology from a Big Ten university, now makes $15 an hour watching my kids.
“I was not the most serious student,” she admits. “But I do wonder, why was I allowed to decide on a major without ever sitting down with my advisor and talking about what I might do with that major after graduating? I mean, I had to write out a plan for how I’d fit all my required courses into my schedule, but no one seemed to care if I had a plan once I left there. I graduated not knowing how to use Excel, write out a business plan, do basic accounting. With room and board and tuition, my time there cost $120,000.”
I asked Sarah Isham, the director of career services of the College of Arts and Sciences at my alma mater about this discrepancy between curriculum and career planning, and she repeats the same reassurances I heard 10 years ago: “What we do is help students see how the patterns and themes of their interests, skills and values, might relate to particular arenas. We do offer a few self-assessment tests, as well as many other resources to help them do this.”
When I ask how well the current services are working — that is, how may recent graduates are finding jobs, real jobs that require a degree — she can only say that, “The College of Arts and Sciences does not collect statistics on post-graduation plans. I could not give you any idea of where these students are going or what they are doing. Regrettably, it’s not something in place at this time.”
I went on to ask her how the college’s curriculum was adapting to meet the demands of the recession and the realities of the job market, and she directed me to a dean who asked not to be identified, and who expressed, in no uncertain terms, how tired he was of articles like mine that question the rationale, rigor or usefulness of a liberal arts education. He insisted that while he had no suggestions regarding how a 22-year-old should weather a recession, the university was achieving its goal of creating citizens of the world.
When I asked him how a 22-year-old with no job, no income, no health insurance and, in some cases, six figures of college debt to pay off is supposed to be a citizen of the world, he said he had no comment, that he was the wrong person to talk to, and he directed me to another dean, who was also unable to comment.
The chilliness of this response was a bit disheartening, but not terribly surprising. When I was an undergrad, it seemed whenever I mentioned my job-search anxieties, my professors and advisors would get a glassy look in their eyes and mutter something about the career center. Their gazes would drift toward their bookshelves or a folder of ungraded papers. And at the time, I could hardly blame them. These were people who’d published dissertations on Freud, written definitive volumes on Virginia Woolf. The language of real-world career preparation was a language they simply didn’t speak.
And if they did say anything at all, it was usually a reiteration of the typical liberal arts defense, that graduating with a humanities degree, I could do anything: I could go on to earn a master’s or a law degree or become an editor or a teacher. I could go into journalism or nonprofit work, apply to medical school or the foreign service. I could write books or learn to illustrate or bind them. I could start my own business, work as a consultant, get a job editing pamphlets for an alumni association or raise money for public radio. The possibilities were literally limitless. It was a like being 6 years old again and trying to decide if I’d become an astronaut or a ballerina. The advantage to a humanities degree, one professor insisted, was its versatility. In retrospect, though, I wonder if perhaps this was part of the problem, as well; freedom can promote growth, but it can also cause paralysis. Faced with limitless possibilities, a certain number of people will just stand still.
“So let me ask you something,” my husband says, my wonderfully incisive husband who will let me get away with only so much bitterness. “If your school had forced you to declare a career plan or take an accounting class or study Web programming instead of contemporary lit, how would you have felt about it at the time, without the benefit of hindsight?”
It’s a good question, and the answer is, I probably would have transferred.
There were courses I took in college, courses in Renaissance literature and the anthropology of social progress and international relations of the Middle East and, of course, writing, that will, in all likelihood, never earn me a steady paycheck or a 401K, but which I would not trade for anything; there were lectures on Shakespeare and Twain and Joyce that I still remember, that I’ve dreamt about and that define my sensibility as a writer and a reader and a human being. Even now, knowing the lost years that followed, I still wouldn’t trade them in.
A new Harvard study suggests that it’s not an abandonment of the college curriculum that’s needed, but a re-envisioning and better preparation. The study compares the U.S. system unfavorably to its European counterparts where students begin thinking about what sort of career they’ll pursue and the sort of preparation they’ll need for it in middle school. Could that be the answer?
At the end of my interview with Sarah Isham, she asks me if I might come back to Charlottesville to participate in an alumni career panel. “We always have a lot of students interested in media and writing and the arts. It would be wonderful,” she says “to have you come and talk to them.” She asks me this, and I can’t help but laugh.
“I don’t think I’d be much of a role model,” I say. “I don’t have what you’d call a high-powered career. I mostly do freelance work. Adjunct teaching. That sort of thing.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” she insists. “Our students will love that. So many of them are terrified of sitting in a cubicle all day.”
They should be so lucky, I think. But I would never say that — not to them and not to my own students. They’ll have plenty of time later to find out just what a degree is and isn’t good for. Right now, they’re in those four extraordinary, exceptional years where ideas matter; and there’s not a thing I’d do to change that.
(Credit: Hofhauser via Shutterstock) 
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 18: Francisco Nunez, winner of the MacArthur Fellowship was photographed on September 18, 2011 in New York, NY. (Photo by Chris Lane/Getty Images for Home Front)(Credit: Christopher Lane) 
Jonathan Franzen 
Yale University's Harkness Tower. 
