Over the last two weeks I’ve been trying to save my academic career. Not from the Academy itself, who seem reasonably friendly (in aggregate) and willing to bear some of my incessant skeptical eyebrow-raising. But rather from the forces of Life: the increasing pressure to be making an actual living, the development of troubling family health matters, my ridiculous belief that I should be working no more than 40 hours a week on homework and teaching obligations, my inevitable interest in things that are Not Part Of The Thesis.

From me, in other words.

The Life Academic is not a thing you can do in parallel with… well, anything at all. You’re a fool if you think you can have a family and a house and a Paying Job and graduate school all at once. You might be able to swing it, but the odds are stacked against you. Even professors need nannies and honorariums.

So in order to stave off the next wave of attack from the direction of Real Life, I’ve been trying to Rethink It All. This involves reactivating my social network, which has been languishing while I’ve been in-country at the U, and calling in some social capital chits, and generally having Lots of Lunches. Meeting with friends, and colleagues, and people who might have money I could scrounge, and in the meantime trying to build a new consultancy with colleagues scattered quite literally (and surprisingly evenly) around the world. And so in person and online I talk with everybody, and try to get enthused about the Big Thesis-y Picture and explore alternative stuff and new ways of thinking, and making a sufficient living, and making the world a better place.

For me. And other people, sure, but for my family and me above all else.

So lots of talking. Name-dropping. You know the person who has come up most often in this?

You would think it might be some famous person or hublike social networky fellow, somebody we (my social network) All Know. Mark. Or Cosma. Or Howard Rheingold. Or some University person (which University is after all the Biggest Log in my Logjam of Life) like my academic advisor or the Dean of the School of Information (why she and SI are involved in the network is harder to explain here than elide) or maybe Stu Kauffman, my old academic advisor from Another Life.

You’d think that.

The person who has come up more often than any other in my innumerable exhausting conversations of the last two weeks?

John Dewey.

Michael Cohen (who is an old colleague-of-colleagues, and who I chatted with the other day about a joint Ph.D. degree in my IOE Department and the School of Information) said he was exploring Dewey’s surprisingly unremarked role in theories of organizations—a role supplanted to some extent by Herb Simon when he came along. Dewey and his stress of the importance of habits in individual and group behavior came up several times.

Erik Schultes (who is an old friend from the Santa Fe Institute and classmate at the 1991 Complex Systems Summer School) is now a filmmaker here in Michigan trying to make an ambitious project documenting the Octopus via modern networks theory, and as we walked away from each other he asked us where Dewey’s house is. Down the street, as it happens.

Cosma mentions Dewey, or maybe I mention Dewey to Cosma, and says he’d like to attend more to the great man’s work.

And finally, a constant. Sitting on the game table under the windowsill in the dining room, a stack of local Ann Arbor newspapers from the 19th Century. I salvaged them months ago, in hopes of digitizing them, but the technology for newspaper scanning is pretty shabby these days. In the topmost volume, of the Ann Arbor Democrat, an amusing satirical article about some events we will probably never understand. Some local kerfluffle, some bawdy mob, some drunken student prank. And who do they mention by name? They say “The Administration”, but they name “Professor Dewey.”

Perhaps, given a run like this, so should we all. Mention him. Read him. Surprisingly, very few of his works have made it into Project Gutenberg by way of Distributed Proofreaders.

I think I’ll do what I can to fix that in the coming days.