I went on a vacation to escape academe, or, in my case, the job of observing it. I looked forward to not having to worry about conference programs, campus visits, and interviews. I packed shorts instead of a suit. Of course, summer vacations are part of the rhythm of many academic lives. Professors often flee classrooms and head to coasts, mountains, and lakeshores. Students head out from dorms to become interns, caddies, and camp counselors. I went to Croatia, seeking some adventure, cheap wine, swims in the Adriatic Sea, and visits to World Heritage Sites. But I only partly succeeded in escaping the university world.
I started out determined to be unplugged. I shut off the ability to get data on my cell phone. I let my wife post the daily photographic updates to Facebook. I mostly stayed out of work e-mail, scanning subject lines. I sent a few personal e-mails to friends I have neglected during a busy time at work, trying to re-connect with them. My tweets were few and far between and were about calligraphy and jazz, not “student mobility” or curricular reform.
My vacation did not take an entirely anti-academic or Luddite turn, however. I found myself with my pen and journal, scribbling down ideas for future blog posts and tweets. I was reminded of the pleasures of condensing thought into tight forms.
My wife and I made our way up and down the Dalmatian coast by bus and ferry. We visited a jewel box of a medieval town called Trogir, an urban center for 2,300 years, where sleek white yachts now park alongside a promenade and European café life flourishes. In Split, we saw Diocletian’s Palace, once the retirement home of a Roman emperor, still a residence for about 3,000 people, with their laundry strung out on clotheslines in ancient courtyards.
We cooked in rented apartments some nights, and had liters of red wine and epicurean restaurant feasts of sea bass, stuffed squid, and gelato on others. We stumbled on the many arts festivals in the region, listening, on different occasions, to the Croatian Navy band, a guitar duo, a rock band, and a club disc jockey playing in front of a cathedral, next to two men juggling torches.
On the island of Hvar, my wife and I hiked up to a fortress overlooking the main town’s harbor. For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, island residents have sought safety in that site, defending against invaders who sought control of a good naval base. The fort was elaborate, with multiple levels, a prison, and a few cannons. “Who built this place?” my wife asked.
In my guidebook, the answer was not clear.
That incident set me to thinking about the power of simple questions, good tools for journalists and scholars alike. Once I interviewed Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel-Prize winning Polish poet, and fumbled around asking about the influence of Catholicism on his work. Later, I realized the question I should have asked was “Do you believe in God?”
At a press conference on a gene that might sometimes inactivate the X chromosome, I once sheepishly asked “Why is this important”? But I shouldn’t have been embarrassed. I needed the answer to that question to write an effective report on the research.
During my Croatian trip, I got other brief reminders of university life. On a bus in Dubrovnik, I listened to European and Chinese Ph.D. students compare degree-completion times. In a souvenir shop, a mathematics student from Zagreb working on her summer job helped us out in Australian-accented English. It turned out she had grown up in Adelaide, but had returned to her native Croatia. “You have a beautiful country,” my wife said. The young woman smiled.
As we prepared to fly back to Washington, I found myself talking at the airport gate to a Georgetown professor, an economist who studies industry strategy. A well-traveled marketing guy for Siemens, the German engineering company, also chatted with us. I was reminded of a blog I wrote about “employer branding.” We all swapped business cards. For a couple of minutes, it felt like the halls at an academic conference.
I started writing this essay on the plane back, enjoying it just as much as a swim in the Adriatic. Writing can be the act of remembering what you are passionate about, the act of discovering and developing what you think. One can almost hear the sharpening steel and the knife, scraping together in the mind.
Once again, I find myself writing about “higher education,” an abstract and bland term. It is easy to forget that the central force behind it is the power of asking simple questions, of understanding the forces of history, of creating new knowledge, then storing it and passing it on.
