On Laxatives and GPA’s

Were, in a fire of becoming,
Laboring to be burned away,
Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,
Would be as serious as play.
–John Hollander, “Adam’s Task”

Still tunneling out of the avalanche of semester exams (have I mentioned I love my ninth graders in Western Civ? Exam essay quote: “Without the Reformation, Obama would be planning his Pakistan policy with the Pope.”), but I can’t let Paul Krugman — you know, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and NYTimes columnist — get away without tying his recent observation about the limitations of “mere” academic excellence to what I yammered about in the last post.

Krugman marks the passing of economic theorist Paul Samuelson. After summarizing eight — count ‘em, eight — of Samuelson’s seminal contributions to economic thought, and noting that any one of them would be enough to win him a seat in intellectual history, Krugman asks:

So how did he do it? By being smarter than anyone else, of course. But there were also, I’d suggest, two aspects of Samuelson’s intellectual makeup that empowered his intellectual quest.

The first was his playfulness. Read Samuelson’s work, and what you get is the sense of a man who, rather than sitting down to write Very Serious Papers, was having fun with ideas. Sometimes the playfulness boiled over into inspired silliness. Look at footnote #9 in his overlapping-generations paper, where he writes: “Surely, no sentence beginning with the word ‘surely’ can validly contain a question mark at its end? However, one paradox is enough for one article …” It seems clear to me that Samuelson’s playfulness liberated his imagination, and fueled his creativity. [emphasis added]

That Nobel Guy Sure is Smart

And to tie that in with my last post, real simply: some readers who didn’t read me closely enough (or closely at all, since I said it clearly) claimed I was saying “academic excellence” doesn’t matter, when what I said was that it doesn’t separate one 4.0 egg-head¹  from his or her numerically identical twins,  while social intelligence does. In a room full of 4.0′s, we’re going to want to work with the ones we’d give a 4.0 to for attitude and personality — professional attitude and personality, which I argue doesn’t mean “stiff” and “buttoned-up” (what I call “constipated” in my buttoned-down moments), but rather smart people who are also  engaged, engaging, and passionate about the work at hand. And I argue that takes social intelligence, because I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s all-too-familiar with “passionate professionals” who, owing to social ineptness, only alienate and anger their colleagues. It’s much nicer and more pleasant when they’re smart enough to be, well — nicer and more pleasant. Which takes smarts.

What I love about Krugman’s excerpt above is his identification of another intelligence — creativity, which he nicely links to “playfulness” and “fun” — that, Krugman believes, enabled Samuelson’s superior academic performance and insight.  Creative types aren’t doing it (only) for the grade (or _your extrinsic carrot here_), and it’s tempting to argue the converse: their academic creativity results in the grade (or other carrot). They invite complex subjects over for a private mental  cocktail party, entertain and have a good time with them, and share the proceedings with us in their texts and talks. And that’s why we like them more than the extrinsically-motivated grade-grubbers doing it perfectly, but without heart or spirit. (Those types risk becoming what Alexander Pope, in his “Essay on Criticism,” called “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read/ With loads of learned lumber in his head.”)

TED Talks is really all about this sort of buttoned-down, socially intelligent, and creative intellectualism.

Code: Lesson 2

It takes social intelligence to know how to button-down in spirit, and not just in form. Losing the tie is not the same thing as losing the constipation, as anyone literate in body and facial language knows. How we move, sit, stand, arrange our faces, choose what to say and how to say it, are all forms of writing by which others read us; we’re walking texts, in this sense. And our whiz-kids need to be taught this, since so many of them clearly need it.

I could go on forever about this, and probably need to, because I can hear the rumblings before the comments are even formed (so let me say, again, that I’m not saying academics don’t matter, but that so much else matters as well — especially in a landscape of diminishing opportunities). I’ll just close this sermon by saying that what I’m saying is nothing new to adults, but it is to kids. We’ve conditioned them to think that all work, no play, and 4.0 gpa makes Johnny a success, when they really, as the old saw goes, make him a “very dull boy.”

Now back — half-measuring, half-humming — to the grading.

1. and this is no slur on egg-heads, since I count myself among their numbers [↩]

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