Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

November 23, 2004

Dear Colleague,

At the last day of class, I imagine myself saying wickedly to students, "Well, I hope your bank accounts are healthy, for a bill to the amount of $225,000 is in the mail." How have I arrived at this figure? Last year, Princeton paid me $5,000 for a fifty-minute lecture, which comes to $100 a minute. This semester I teach a seminar on humanistic geography and I spend two-and-a-half hours a week with students for a total of fifteen weeks, which comes to 2,250 minutes; and, at $100 a minute, this adds up to--if my arithmetic is correct--to $225,000.

Like many faculty members, I love my job. When I was still employed, I remember saying that if I were a multi-millionaire, I would gladly teach without pay. Now I have actually taught a seminar, six years after retirement, with no cost to students and tax payers. So I wasn't just blowing hot air. But why the free offering? The answer is that we humans are social beings, which means that we have a basic need to speak, and, even more important, to be heard. Since everyone shares this need, in any social gathering no one has more than two to three minutes to sound off before he is interrupted. Worse is that hardly anyone listens, for as another speaks one uses the time to prepare one's own speech, attending to what the other says only in the hope that a word or two in it may offer a suitable launching pad.

This being so, imagine the privilege of speaking fifty minutes at a time to roomfuls of starry-eyed and bushy-tailed youngsters week after week, month after month! It surely is unconscionable to ask to be paid for what is, after all, a source of pleasure comparable to eating, sleeping, and sex. There is another reason for not wanting payment--or rather, for feeling uneasy about the financial recompense. It seems to be applied to the wrong sort of goods. Society pays us for the information and knowledge we posses and offer to the young. But for those of us who think highly of our calling, information and knowledge of the kind one can find in encyclopaedias or online are the least of the goods we have to offer. Far more important are the new insights, perspectives, and ideas. But these come to us out of the blue and so never seem to be quite our own. Can we ask to be paid for, or copyright, what, after all, are hints and nudges from God? Note the expression, "it occurs to me"--the "it" being something out there--rather than "I occur" when we say something new. Note also that whereas we always return the lawn mower we borrow, we seldom feel obliged to return the book, because most of us--whether we know it or not--subscribe to the belief that a book, if it is any good, contains ideas and revelations that come from "above" and is therefore to be distributed free, like God's rain and sunshine.

We profs can't charge society for God's gifts. Or, to put it another way, because what we say contains God's gifts they are priceless, which means that society can never offer us adequate compensation. In fact, right up to the 1930s, universities did not pretend to pay faculty a wage, but rather a stipend, considered to be a mere token for their inspired work. What did the faculty live on? Well, in America, they were supposed to have their own money. This was true even of faculty at a state university, such as UW, until about the time of World War ll. As for Britain, the dons of Oxford and Cambridge, bachelors all, had modest needs and these were taken care of by Colleges than drew rent from landed properties. Oxbridge dons were the spiritual descendants of medieval monks who, undistracted by family obligations, could devote themselves wholly to the intellectual and moral well-being of their students. They would have taken as self-evident Whitehead's definition of education as "the training of souls."

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu