In seventh grade in Hanover, N.H., I was given the choice between taking shop or French. My classmates were chiefly the children of Dartmouth College professors. I was not. Me and one other kid elected for shop.
After some safety instructions, the shop teacher turned us loose on the table saw, the lathes, and the drill press. I made a coffee table with cherry legs and a mosaic top, and the joy of working with my hands has stayed with me. I painted houses in the summer time to work my way through college, and I can still fix a toilet. I’m sure I have saved tens of thousands of dollars doing my own work.
I’ve certainly since encountered people, and entire cultures, who consider manual labor best left to others. I remember a dean at a college in the United Arab Emirates who expressed frustration at teaching engineering to students who had never used a screwdriver or a hammer. As for myself, I’ve found that when you are painting a window sash or cutting a miter joint, your mind is free to roam even as your hands are trying to be precise. Sometimes I get ideas that are useful in my professional life. All in all, that shop class started me down an interesting path.
The choice of not taking French? That decision did not work out as well. At age 19, I found myself alone in Paris, an Army surplus pack strapped on my back. At the youth hostel they spoke English, but elsewhere I was often working with hand signals and muttering “Merci” softly, so the French wouldn’t know how much I was butchering the word.
I did get in four years of German, two in high school and two in college. I remember my German professors trying to coax the best out of me, because I wasn’t always giving them the effort they deserved. One highlight of a college German class sticks with me. We had read a short novel, and were discussing existentialism. Like a lot of college students then and now, I was working through the fog of a hangover and thoughts of my latest romantic obsession. But somehow my brain lit up and I understood what we were talking about. I wanted to say something in my halting German and I think I actually got it out. The existentialist’s insight that in a (presumably) godless world the choices that you make still matter, that an individual can give their own life meaning, and that even in a concentration camp you can at least pick your attitude, has stuck with me.
Fast forward from German class to my career here at The Chronicle. I’ve had many roles, but my favorite has been covering the growth of international higher education. It’s like watching a beanstalk in the child’s fairy tale: Tendrils growing rapidly between institutions and across national borders, thickening over time. The tendrils are now thick in some “education hubs,” still sprouting in other places.
I don’t mean to idealize the enterprise. Commercialism and the baser forms of elitism and competitiveness are sometimes mixed into higher education’s globalization.
From my time visiting institutions and watching researchers overseas, small fragments of memories stick with me. Hurtling around the curve in a high mountain pass in Bhutan in a pick-up truck, on the way to a remote college–no seat belts, no guardrails. The guide casually mentioned that 300 laborers had died building the road.
Having tea with a Berber guide and an American graduate student in a village removed from all roads on Mount Toubkal in Morocco, another country where French would have been useful. Eating lunch with a Mexican professor’s family, after a visit to his laboratory in Cuernavaca, where he described his research that used scorpion toxins as a tool to understand how cells communicate. His explanations at his laboratory were clear, and the soup at the lunch delicious. I know I have been extraordinarily privileged, and I’ve tried to use that privilege to bring back a sense of places and people to readers.
Along with watching connections grow between institutions, I see that academics who are trying to give their lives meaning are increasingly doing so by working internationally. International-relations administrators are trying to get past academic tourism, and work toward “deep internationalization.”
Many students are flocking to China to learn Mandarin, and rightly so. But I also remember talking to a Chinese academic administrator who was learning French, out of a love for France’s literature, food, and culture.
At a higher level in academe, I hear leaders talk about how the world’s biggest problems do not have national borders. Climate change and emerging infectious diseases don’t check in with immigration officials. Some academic leaders see a chance at making progress on those problems, while governments dither.
Shop class or French? Maybe both. The human drives to create, to fix things, and to make things new can be combined with the desire to learn other languages and to understand new cultures. Together, such ambitions might let universities hand a better world over to tomorrow’s seventh graders, as they try to decide what path to take. Those choices matter and, yes, you can pick your attitude.
David Wheeler is an editor at large for The Chronicle.
