What for are intellectual inquiries?

Way back in graduate school, I had a tough time figuring out where the line was that divided genuine intellectual desires to understand poverty and the challenge of development from an academic desire to investigate a "problem" because it would make for a good publication.  I am not sure if I ever chanced on a conversation where a research problem was presented as something like "this is a serious human problem that we need to understand."  Instead, it was always along the lines of whether one could get funding for the research or how many potential publications one might extract from that problem.

Such a mental torture did not arise only after years of immersion in graduate schooling--it was pretty much right from that first ever project work, which took me to Venezuela.  The summer after that, which was the end of my second year in the US, when I went to India, I had a wonderful research problem to work on, but could not resolve the internal tensions from an understanding that while my inquiry could even lead to a publication, it would do nothing to change the conditions of the people whose daily existence was my "research."  I never did resolve that tension and the project was half-assed.

I had even approached a couple of faculty with that dilemma.  I wanted to know how they resolved the interpretation that their fame and fortune were based on the work they did about populations that were unfortunate in many ways.  In an essay that I authored a few years ago, I wrote about asking a professor "how he reconciled the everyday problems of the homeless people with his own affluence, particularly when his affluence was closely tied to research and talking about the homeless."

I am not sure whether other graduate students also struggled with such a question, or whether I was in a minority. I had no idea because I never brought up this issue with others!  Looking back at it from a quarter-century away, I wonder if even then I had developing suspicions about a ponzi nature of higher education?

Anyway, the professor's reply was that "it is up to the individual to draw the line that separates personal lifestyle from social problems."

It has been one hell of a challenge trying to figure out where I ought to draw that line.  It is a constant iterative process, it seems like, because there doesn't seem to be any absolute criteria as guidelines.

But, perhaps I have solved that riddle, for myself, without figuring out what the criteria are--it is truly a heuristic process, maybe?  Because, there is very little internal stress anymore over what I inquire and write about.  The answer, which at least works for now, is that I am honest about whatever I do, and I do not do anything that I do not believe in.  I do not inquire about something just because there is money to be made, or a few essays to be extracted, but my inquiries and writings are what I truly think about?

I intentionally ended that previous sentence with a question mark, because I doubt that is my final word on this topic.  Quite an interesting puzzle to work on for the rest of my life!