When I was in graduate school preparing for a career as a research mathematician in the 1960’s, I had a crisis. I was good enough to have a career but not that good. I dropped out of grad school for a year and did a little civil rights politics. A wise old historian, Raymond Sontag, counseled me to return to finish my PhD. “If you don’t do it now, you’ll never do it, and besides, even if you spend your life doing human rights and development work, you’ll have more options with a PhD behind your name.” Needless to say, he was right.

After I got my degree, I went into the Peace Corps and went to Chile to teach math and work with the math community I found there. That is one of the few times in my life that I did something right the first time. I got right the fundamental principle of productive development work, namely that you don’t go into a community or culture to do something for people, or to people, but rather to do something with people, and that it is that shared purpose around a felt need that gives the work its authenticity, its energy, and ultimately its productivity.

I returned to the US in the late 60’s for a job at Columbia University in New York City.  I loved NYC for all its life and energy and for the rough but realistic interaction with a vast diversity of peoples and cultures and ways of surviving. But something had changed with the new generation of students I encountered at Columbia. The fresh, sometimes naive, maybe sometimes even delusional, “ask not what your country can do for you” generation was being gradually replaced by young people with a more guarded “life is hard so you’d better look out for yourself” posture.