ABSTRACT
I have always loved Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” but in truth my career is one in which I have traveled two roads, both the academic and the governmental. Some who pursued only one road have gone further in achieving a high position or in the length of their list of publications, but I would not trade with them. I have found both halves of my career satisfying and cannot imagine my life without either. I would like to recommend such a course to others, but I must confess that it is not easy to plan to take two roads. In my case, serendipity played a large role. I certainly had no fixed plan to take the roads I did. I grew up on a farm in
Northwest New Jersey, and that childhood bequeathed me a lifelong love of the outdoors. As a teenager, I wondered about a career as a forester or a farmer. For a spell, I was influenced to think I might want to follow in the example of the friendly local minister. My father was in the securities business, and I often felt I would wind up following in his footsteps. He loved his work. He used to say that “in my business, you are in everybody’s business,” and he encouraged me with visits to his office on Wall Street. At the same time, he never tried to control my choice. It was a wise approach which allowed us to remain close without feeling tension or guilt about my decisions. I have followed his example with regard to my three sons, none of whom has chosen an academic path. When I went to college “down the road” at Princeton, I had no idea what
I wanted to major in, much less choice of career. I found psychology, history, politics, economics, and philosophy all interesting, so I chose an interdisciplinary major in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. For my senior thesis, I wrote a history of a private firm in Philadelphia as an example of Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship. I was gratified to win a prize, but what the thesis taught me was the fascination of original research and trying to make order out of a chaos of empirical material. In retrospect, the most important thing I got from Princeton was a broad basis in liberal arts. I still findmyself remembering
lessons from my early science and philosophy courses. When students sometimes complain to me that their liberal arts education is not preparing them for anything, I respond that it is preparing them for life. College courses are like building blocks. An undergraduate business degree allows you to pile them into a tall tower quickly. Liberal arts is more like a pyramid with a broad base that does not reach the same early heights. But when the earth shakes, and it likely will more than once during the course of a career in today’s world, pyramids are more stable than towers.
