Unpaid thinking work while on furlough

More than a fortnight into the summer, I have been tossing around the word furlough a lot, whenever strangers and friends alike ask me about my "summer off."

"So, how do you spend your time then," asked a neighbor who is a year away from reaching sixty.  Perhaps he is contemplating retirement and, therefore, how to spend time post-work.  I suppose not everybody can goof away in a prematurely retired life like how this guy does! ;)

There is a paper that I am writing for a journal--it is almost done.  I need to wrap it soon because the deadline is nearing.  There are other things related to my professional life that I am able to address only during the uninterrupted summer days.

Meanwhile, student emails keep coming.  Like this one, from "A":

I hope you're having a good summer break so far and was wondering if you could send me more articles on economic geography or really anything interesting that you would like to share with me.
Thank you for your time,

How can I not engage with this student, right?

Life in the academy is not really about what happens in the classroom.  It is about what I do outside the classroom preparing for those minutes in the classroom.  Those minutes require days and days of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing.  Else, as Kalidasa wrote more than 1,700 years ago:

He's but a petty tradesman at the best,
Selling retail the work of other men

Perhaps even back then there were people who wondered what teachers did in their easy lives!

Almost always, everybody has comments on teaching and teachers, on what has to be taught and how anything has to be taught.  I am glad that there is such an interest in teaching and learning.  But, as one can imagine, this level  of outside commentary on teaching can easily slide into judging what is "correct" and what is not.  And if something about the teacher is not "correct," then off with her head.  Or, at least, fire the teacher.

Academic freedom, which is something that very few teachers around the world have, is, therefore, precious.  And tenure plays an important role in academic freedom:

Tenure for professors protects the right to pursue unpopular research and take unpopular positions. It is one of the counter-majoritarian bulwarks of a free society, like a free press or an independent judiciary. 

Trump America and opportunistic populism has started going after tenure and academic freedom.

Aversion to “expertise” and rejection of “establishment” authorities is a central element in the politics of populism. The honest, practical, plain-speaking majority is pitted against the complacent, condescending, and entitled mandarins.
The truth, however, is that populism is a politics of bad faith. Our societies would stop functioning without the expertise that comes from academic knowledge. Populist political leaders who win votes by disparaging experts – we can all choose our favorite examples – are bound to find themselves fumbling for the light switch when they come to power. Expertise remains essential to any decent governance whatsoever.  

Here in the US, while conditions in higher education are getting dark, it is nothing compared to many other countries, like in Turkey or Russia.  In Hungary, Central European University (CEU) "is fighting to remain a free institution in Budapest, Hungary’s capital, following the passage of new legislation that would, in essence, require the university to close."

Ultimately, academic freedom depends on the health of democratic institutions. When democracies are weak, when majoritarian populists erode checks and balances, press freedom, and judicial independence, universities are especially vulnerable. That is what has happened in Hungary. 

Populists and authoritarians always go after artists and professors--these are groups that always question the status quo.  I cannot understand how within a matter of months the political environment has become so toxic.  At least for now, I have the furlough months to think about all these, and more.

PS: If you are interested, I sent the student,"A," this reply:

I will start you with these two, both from the NY Times: One and Two.
Read them preferably in that order.
They are on completely different topics, but you will see that they will wonderfully enrich your understanding of the world, and will make you think about quite a few things.

Why can't we all get along?

Soon after a new Iraqi government was formed in the post-Saddam years, in my class I showed students the photographs of the three top most people.  One was a Sunni, the other was a Shia, and the third person was a Kurd.

I asked the class whether they could tell who was the Shia Iraqi.

Of course they could not.

In another meeting, I showed them a photograph of an Indian male and and a Pakistani male.  They didn't see any difference.

You can see where I am going with this.

People might look the same, eat pretty much the same foods, listen to the same music, and yet they could be ready to kill each other.

We humans are strange, eh!

Reading Branko Milanovic's blog-post reminded me of those classroom exercises.He questions, challenges, the assumption that "people who live close to each other are “similar”, have similar preferences and want to live together in a country or a union."

I grew up in Tamil Nadu, and I could never understand why I was in the same country with many others.  Well, other than the couple of years when I was consumed by an "Indian" rage.  It is not that I thought any less of the other parts of India and the people there.  I did not see any reason why I had to be in the same country as the people in the north, west, and east did, similar to how I did not see any reason for Tamil Nadu to be in a political union with Iceland.

Just because we "live close to each other are “similar”" did not mean we had to be in the same country.

Milanovic warns us about:

the common misconception that one often hears even today, namely that ethnic or religious conflicts are somehow the product of lack of knowledge of the two communities about each other and that if people only spent more time with each other, the conflict would lose its raison d’être and dissipate. 

Exactly.

Shia and Sunni in Iraq are warring not because they do not know each other well enough: they have lived together as neighbors for centuries. Does anybody think the Spaniards and Catalans do not sufficiently know each other? Or Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks who speak the same language and who have intermarried prior to the Civil War in the 1990s more than if the marriage pairing was random? The same is true for ethnic and religious wars in other places: Catholic and Protestant Irish, Ethiopians and Eritreans, Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Even the worst civil conflict of all, the Holocaust, did not happen because ethnic-German Germans and Jewish Germans did not know each other well or did not intermarry sufficiently. On the contrary, it is often argued that of all countries in Europe, Jews were most integrated in Germany.

Therefore:

I think  -–and I trust that this is something increasingly confirmed —that similar people are as likely to want to share a state as to be willing to split up or to go to war; and that believing  conflict can be prevented by people knowing each other better is just an illusion.

So, ... what can be done, right?

We can only wait for, and work towards, better leadership.  Like Helmut Kohl, for instance:

"Helmut Kohl was not just the architect of German unity. He contributed substantially, more than others, to the reconciliation between European history and European geography" ...
Kohl’s successor and one-time protege, Angela Merkel, struggled to rein in her emotions as she hailed “the chancellor of unification”.
“Without Helmut Kohl, the life of millions of people, mine included, who lived on the other side of the wall, would not be what it is today,” she declared.

Those of us who are old enough remember all too well how bleak and "cold" the world came across in 1988.  Then, the world became very different in 1990.

But, Kohl's own life and death show us how complicated all these are.

His apparent anger and bitterness towards them is said to be behind his refusal to even allow a state funeral to take place on German soil. Many of his former colleagues and friends have not been invited. Even his driver, Eckhard “Ecki” Seeber, often described as his closest confidant, is believed to have been excluded. So too Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
His elder son has gone so far as to describe the funeral plans as “unworthy” of his father. It is unclear whether Walter Kohl or his younger brother Peter, who have been estranged from their father for years, will even attend.

Such is the human drama on this planet!

It was sixty years ago, today

They got married sixty years ago, on the fourth of July.

I thought it might be awesome to pay for an ad in the newspaper, with their photo as well; but, that turned out to be next to impossible.  All I could  manage was this tiny bit ;)

Over the years, they have experienced the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, which is, well, life.  They have even put up with me ;)

From about fifteen years ago