One of my first work-study jobs in college was writing the weekly community crime report for the student newspaper. The job was exactly what it sounds like: someone from the security office would provide a log of incidents from the previous week, and I would format them for publication. Location, time, nature of incident. Baltimore in the late nineties was not short on actual crime, even in the neighborhood near the university. The log reflected that.
At some point — I no longer remember exactly when, or what specific sequence of tedium had pushed me here — I started adding entries that hadn’t come from the security log. Not incidents. Something else. “3400 N Charles St, 0630: Sunrise.” I put them in the same format as the real entries, buried in the middle of the laundry list of mostly-petty crimes, and went home.
I was doing it entirely for myself. I wasn’t imagining an audience. I was eighteen years old and… bored (and blithely ignorant of what I later came to understand as a deeply problematic relationship between the school that’s also Maryland’s largest private employer, and the abject poverty a few blocks away from the leafy green campus).
Then one afternoon in a dining hall, I heard a group of students at another table paging eagerly through the paper. They were looking, as it turned out, for the community crime report — which had, somehow, become A Thing. A small, unsigned thing that a handful of people sought out. I sat with that information for a long moment, trying to decide what, if anything, to make of that.
I hadn’t thought of that in a very long while. I went back to Hopkins two weeks ago for the first time in years, to sit on a panel for doctoral students & post-docs who are thinking about what comes after the degree, and I found myself thinking about it again. There’s a specific kind of motion involved in returning to a place that was yours in ways the institution never quite authorized — and the word for it isn’t ‘homecoming’.
The playlist I made for an earlier visit, and which sometimes winds up back in rotation when I’m headed to town, is called “Homegoing.” The Barenaked Ladies are on it — I saw them play at Bohager’s in May of ’97, when they were touring for Born on a Pirate Ship — and “The Old Apartment,” which is a song about returning to a place you used to live and finding it inhabited by strangers and also, in all the ways that matter, still entirely yours.
My second work-study job was as the overnight desk monitor at the Hutzler Reading Room (a.k.a. ‘The Hut’), which still ranks among the more beautiful rooms I have ever been in at 3:00 AM — vaulted ceiling, arched windows, quirky acoustics, and the particular dust-motes-drifting-in-the-afternoon-light quality that old institutional rooms accumulate over decades of students doing the thing they came to do. I spent a lot of time in that room. Some of it was even… work.
My third was the student pub in the south end of Levering Hall — the old student center, such as it was, where I spent more time than in all of the other buildings on campus combined (my dorm included, some years) — working my way up over three-plus years from game room monitor, through the kitchen — there is a story involving a rusty decorative handsaw and a log of frozen beef that I will save for another day — to the bar, and eventually managing the place. I skipped classes, at one point, to attend a Sysco food service convention. This remains one of the more absurd sentences I have ever had to write about myself.
What I’m trying to tell you is that I was not, by any measure, a student who was primarily at Johns Hopkins to be a student. I was there — I understand this more clearly approaching fifty than I did at twenty — to find out what I was made of by doing things. Most of those things were not academic. Some of them were not exactly legal. All of them were real in a way that the curriculum, for all its genuine rigor, was not quite able to match.
I did graduate, somewhat despite myself. Then, eventually, I went to graduate school, because the inquiry that had started in the basements and atria and reading rooms of that campus felt like it needed more room than I’d been able to give it. I got an MA from Georgetown—mostly to repave my abysmal undergraduate transcript—and then a PhD from Princeton. I wrote a dissertation. I tried, for years, to do the thing you do with a doctorate if you are doing the thing you are supposed to be doing.
The form did not fit.
The Horizons by Hopkins event was held in the Bloomberg Student Center: a stunning, 150,000 square foot glass-and-steel palace which opened this spring (and which also feels, to this alum, like a slightly overwrought & overcompensating apologia for the university’s first 150 years of treating undergraduate students’ need for community as more of an inconvenience than a priority… but I digress). Levering Hall is still there — just… lesser, its squat centrality given over to this new thing.
The panel session on which I served was called ‘Radical Horizons’. It was comprised of scholars who’ve built careers outside conventional institutional paths. I was there as someone who had, apparently or aspirationally, something useful to say about that.
I still find this true and also genuinely funny, because I incorporated a company called The Principal Uncertainty less than a year ago and I am — still, even now — far closer to the question, than to any settled answer. The company facilitates deep inquiry (and does culture/leadership development work) with people and organizations navigating genuine not-knowing. I have a podcast. I am writing a book. My understanding of uncertainty is, at this point, autobiographical to a nontrivial degree.
What I went in wanting to say to the doctoral students in that room — and what I still wish someone had been in a position to say to me, clearly and without the particular institutional hedging that makes these conversations so often useless — is that the form is not the life. That the credential was built for a specific purpose inside a specific economy, and that economy has changed in ways the people who trained you may not fully register, because it changed after they got their jobs. That the skills you are building are real and valuable and genuinely rare, and that the pipeline designed to deploy those skills is broken in ways that are structural, not temporary, and which are not at all your fault. That the word “alternative,” as in “alternative academic career,” should be retired: there is no alternative, there is just the path, and the path is whatever you build.
There is also something that needs saying about what the degree was actually for — not credentialing, but something more like ‘formation’. The space to not-know. The time to find out what you’re made of, and for, by doing things… most of which may not be academic. That space has always been structurally privileged — not everyone gets access to it, and the actual numbers[1] are far smaller than the impression created popular culture — but it used to at least be defensible as a collective investment in something real. Making it cost a hundred thousand dollars, or two hundred thousand, while simultaneously conducting a political assault on its legitimacy, is not an argument about efficiency. It is an argument about who gets to have a certain kind of interior life on institutional time, and with institutional support.
At one point during the moderated conversation, one of my fellow panelists — the only one with tenure, and who holds a well-earned endowed chair — said something I wasn’t expecting: that work should not be your identity. I told him it was the first time I’d heard someone with tenure say that out loud. Probably an overstatement — there are tenured faculty who’ve said it, and meant it — but not by much. He said he found that tragic. I think we both understood what the other was pointing at.
A little later, in the working scenario portion — financial precariousness, nominally hypothetical — I told the room that I have a fraught relationship with money; ambivalent in the full sense: pulled in opposing directions by forces of genuinely equivalent strength. I spent countless hours across this quad reading Karl Marx with David Harvey just across the quad from where we sat, and now part of what I do is tell someone what they should give me money for my services. It is profoundly uncomfortable to do that without having the institution to launder the transaction.
On the question of credentials specifically — what to do with them, how to wield them — most of the conversation went in a direction I more-or-less agreed with. Then someone asked me about a time I’d felt unambiguously good about deploying mine, and I found myself telling a story about a bar in New York in 2012, where I’d ended up in a long conversation with a thirty-one-year-old neurosurgeon who had never once stopped to ask himself whether he actually wanted to be a neurosurgeon. The PhD gave him permission to go somewhere in that conversation he hadn’t been able to go before. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. I’m not sure it mattered that I was a doctor of anything in particular — what mattered was that I was credentialed enough to make the conversation feel like it had a container. It was the only time I could remember the thing functioning as something other than a source of ambient ambivalence.
I know this because I spent a long time trying to fill the form with what the form was supposed to receive — not in one clean arc toward clarity, but iteratively, recursively, the trying and the stopping interleaved in ways I still can’t fully map. Somewhere in that period I started doing work I actually believe in. I am not going to perform certainty about where it’s going because I don’t have any.
What I have instead is the texture of having been in the reckoning. Some of that texture might be useful to people who are earlier in it than I am — which is, as best I can tell, why I was invited. That, and possibly the fact that I have never, at any point in my adult life, been willing to fill the form with nothing.
The security office never complained, for what it’s worth. I don’t think they read the column either.
The 1-on-1s all ran long. Twenty minutes each on the schedule; forty in practice. At various points during the day I said, out loud, that this wasn’t therapy — said it to myself, mostly, and once or twice to the person across from me, as though naming the thing I wasn’t doing would keep me from doing it. I’m not a therapist. I have a Princeton PhD and an LLC and a podcast.
I meant it when I said it.
After the panel, a graduate student found me. International, first-generation, caught between what they knew to be true about their work and the very real precarity of needing a job that would let them stay in the country. They’d bled for every inch of ground they’d gotten. They came, I think, looking for a map.
I didn’t give them one. What I did over the next forty-five minutes I’m still not entirely sure how to describe. I kept turning questions back toward their own experience. I brought the horizon in close — ‘what’s actually in front of you today’, not ‘what’re you doing in a year’. They talked about how tenaciously they showed up for the undergraduates they taught, and how much they believed in the gift of being genuinely seen. Can you hear the parallel as you say that out loud? They could. We cried. I gave them a contact and my card and told them, more than once, that they were not alone.
Walking out, I recognized something without quite being able to name it. The work had a register I knew from an earlier version of myself — someone who spent time in Utah doing wilderness work, before the graduate degrees, before the LLC, before I learned to describe what I was doing in more defensible terms. I didn’t think about that at the time. But I knew the feel of it.
The best clinicians I’ve known — as peer, as client, as researcher, and, not incidentally, as offspring — tend eventually to say something like this: that the work they most believe in happens in spite of the structures built to authorize it, not because of them. The heart is what makes it possible. The credential is the container. I’ve heard versions of that for most of my life.
I’ve been saying “it’s not therapy, of course” for most of my adult life, and I’ve always meant it in a specific way — not as a denial that something real was happening, but as a distinction between the work and the institution built to contain it: the diagnostic apparatus, the professional distance, the credential that authorizes someone to sit in that particular chair. That distinction has mattered to me for a long time, across more contexts than I’ll enumerate here. Walking out last week… it still does. I’m just no longer sure the disclaimer is landing on the right side of it.
[1] ACE’s 2022 figures show 23.4% of US adults age 25+ with a bachelor’s degree—and, of those, only ~15% attended the kind of residential four-year school that appears as the default in nearly every film or television show with stories set in college.
I loved this essay. So many similar walks on both campus and such grace and gratitude for what you have shared and passed on.