Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, died on Saturday.Associated Press
Alan B. Krueger, a titan in economics, died by suicide last weekend. As colleagues and admirers mourned, they also engaged in a conversation about mental illness in the professoriate and how professional success does not suppress personal struggles.
Krueger, a longtime professor at Princeton University, was found dead at his New Jersey home on Saturday. Hundreds of people shared their grief, including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in both of whose administrations Krueger served. In a written statement, Obama praised Krueger as someone who had “a perpetual smile and a gentle spirit — even when he was correcting you.”
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Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, died on Saturday.Associated Press
Alan B. Krueger, a titan in economics, died by suicide last weekend. As colleagues and admirers mourned, they also engaged in a conversation about mental illness in the professoriate and how professional success does not suppress personal struggles.
Krueger, a longtime professor at Princeton University, was found dead at his New Jersey home on Saturday. Hundreds of people shared their grief, including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in both of whose administrations Krueger served. In a written statement, Obama praised Krueger as someone who had “a perpetual smile and a gentle spirit — even when he was correcting you.”
Trained as a labor economist, Krueger researched and wrote about a vast array of topics — happiness, pain, terrorism, education, the music industry — and is perhaps best known for his work on the minimum wage. When news of his death circulated online on Monday, colleagues, friends, and current and former students shared stories of Krueger as a generous and kind mentor as well as a pioneer who steered the field toward empirical study rather than theory. They also reflected on the unexpectedness of his suicide.
This is such a beautiful, powerful, inspirational tribute to Alan Krueger.
Reminding us all that it is possible to:
1) Be a pioneering, brilliant scholar AND incredibly kind,caring
2) Be widely respected & adored as a kind & brilliant scholar AND still experience depression. https://t.co/LG0SDuw46A
Thinking about Alan Krueger, & about this piercing essay about suicidality, & about how little we know about people’s inner lives even when they pour their ideas out for us: https://t.co/kscEE497RD
Alan Krueger taught me a lot about pain. That people are in a lot of pain when they are unemployed, and searching for a job was their most painful part of the day. That men w/out work reported a lot of pain & took a lot of pain relievers. [1/3]
“I’m angry at the universe,” said Jodi Beggs, an economist and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School. She had read Krueger’s work as an undergraduate and had interacted with the scholar a couple of times. Last year Kruger contacted Beggs out of the blue because of something she’d written, just to let her know about a research consortium that might pique her interest. “Fancy professors just don’t do that,” Beggs said in a phone interview.
After hearing of Krueger’s suicide, Beggs used Twitter to implore people to talk more about mental illness. “We need to stop thinking that professional success shields people from depression and the like,” she wrote. And “we need to remember that economists are still people, with all of the messiness that that entails, even when they appear hyperrational regarding economic matters.”
Though the field has improved in recent years, Beggs said, economics can still feel like a place where no one wants to admit anything that seems like a weakness or a personal failure. “I do feel like there’s a lot that doesn’t get addressed, doesn’t get discussed,” she said.
The field also has an intense “bullying culture,” said Betsey Stevenson, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who had known Krueger since she was in graduate school. “There are conversations that need to happen in economics about how we treat each other,” she said in a phone interview.
Academe, in general, can be an unforgiving place, said David Clingingsmith, an associate professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University. It’s a very competitive environment, in which people can be reluctant to bring up their own struggles, he said in a phone interview. That’s partly why when Clingingsmith wrote a Twitter thread about Krueger’s death, he also wrote about understanding his own brother’s suicide.
A suicidal crisis “has nothing to do with how loved or accomplished someone is,” he wrote. “We should mourn Alan but not take the circumstances of his death within ourselves,” he wrote. “There is no message in it.”
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Reaching Out
For Bruce Macintosh, Krueger’s death was a reminder of how isolating academe can be. Macintosh is a professor of physics at Stanford University who was employed at a national laboratory, not a university, until about five years ago. That culture was totally different, he said. At other workplaces, Macintosh said, you interact regularly with peers and supervisors, who are paying close attention to you and your work.
This special report examines the challenges that students, academics, and colleges face in dealing with physical disabilities as well as conditions that are less visible.
“There’s nothing like that in an academic environment,” he said. “You can shut down completely for a year, and no one will notice,” as long as the grades get turned in.
It seems, Macintosh said, as if there should be multiple layers of support within a university department to help faculty members who experience depression or other forms of mental illness. But certain barriers still exist between professors and the resources they need.
A 2017 survey of 267 faculty members with mental-health histories or mental illnesses found that most respondents had little to no familiarity with accommodations at their institution. Even fewer reported using them.
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Some survey respondents said they chose not to disclose their mental illness to their institution because they were concerned about losing credibility, or becoming the subject of gossip or ridicule, said Amber O’Shea, a co-author of a report on the survey and an assistant professor of rehabilitation and human services at Pennsylvania State University.
But universities can take important steps to become more open, welcoming spaces, said Mark S. Salzer, a co-author of the report and a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Temple University. Departments can help professors with depression modify their work schedules so they don’t have to teach morning classes. Department chairs can send biannual emails that remind professors of resources that they might have heard about only once, at orientation.
In the wake of Krueger’s death, economics professors reminded one another to reach out to their colleagues for support.
“If someone has positively shaped your life and work, let them know,” Susan M. Dynarski, a professor of public policy, education, and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote on Twitter. “No one is too famous or accomplished to be lifted by your kind words.”
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.
