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 19^th 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.