Abstract
Years ago, as I rode my bike to campus, I passed a crew of Spanish-speaking men on a roof. When I returned 12 hours later, they were still at work, calling to each other in the dusk. While I had been teaching and talking with students, they had been hammering in the Georgia heat. Many of them might make wonderful scholars, teachers, or artists. “We’d all like to live by our art,” said a friend who plays in a rock band and works in the Max Planck Institute Post Office. In this age of rapid social transition, who gets to be a scholar or artist? How can a society best decide who should do research, and who needs to earn a living in another way? […]