Glad you had a good Homecoming. Kudos on getting drunk, making out on some dance floor, throwing beers at that skinny kid in the Zeppelin T-shirt. Awesome.
There's only one problem: No one cares anymore. Honestly -- how long were you expecting us to bask in the reflected glow of your new bragging rights? Come on, silly. This is the week after Homecoming. The proverbial clock has stuck midnight; time to run back to the library before all the kids in the basement turn to pumpkins. Collegiate pumpkins. With midterms.
Don't worry, friends. This week I've got a motivational speaker to get us all back on track: Allan Stam. He has been expelled from two of the nation's most prestigious universities (University of Chicago and Cornell), worked as a line cook, been in and out of the U.S. Army, and learned that he has a flair for academia along the way. In modern times, this former renegade is the Daniel Webster professor of government at Dartmouth. Luckily, he was happy to provide us with a dose of common sense:
Tell me about your college years.
I did unbelievably imprudent things. We, you know, threw a jukebox off the roof of a 14-story dormitory ... badly behaved college sophomores behave today the same way they behaved 50 years ago. Mostly involved massive excessive amounts of alcohol and property destruction. The agreement I had with Chicago when I left was that I agreed to leave and they agreed to not expose why I was leaving. So, I went to Cornell for two years. And I flunked out. Worked for two years as a line cook in a restaurant outside Boston ... then I was sitting around drinking beer and I saw an ad on TV that said, "You, too, could be a green beret." And I said, "That sounds like fun." I had no idea what I was getting myself into. That was a total disaster.
How did you end up back in school?
I didn't want to be [in the army] when I was 40. The army does not value independent thinkers. I went back [to Cornell]. I found that being successful was not as hard as it seemed. Graduated from Cornell in 1988. Took me nine years to get my BA. First time around I was a chemistry major. I sat down the day before classes started and made a list of the majors you could complete in two years. Government was at the top of the list. Took some classes, liked it.
The line between being really successful and being a total screw up is not that wide a line. For me, I am sympathetic of people that have a hard time in college, but am totally intolerant of it. Like ex-smokers being intolerant of smoking. At the same time, intellectualism for its own sake I don't have time for. I had been through college -- mostly seen either as the reprobate, or as the student in the class that didn't believe in being taught.
How did you end up as a professor?
I couldn't get a job, spring of my senior year. I was looking into being a broker; I applied to graduate school as a hedge. Then when I got to graduate school, slowly bought into the idea that being an academic or a scholar could actually have some societal value. And it looked like a good gig, to be honest.
Being an academic means being able to produce new ideas, like Burger King produces hamburgers basically. If you have a knack for it, it's very easy. Good job, pretty rewarding, pay's not bad. Not investment banking, but. The biggest effects are mostly social though [most academics] don't see the intrinsic value of college athletics, for instance. I rowed varsity crew at Cornell and that was the most rewarding experience I had in all of college: beating Princeton my senior year. So I'm just an odd duck. Fortunately, I have tenure.
