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Deirdre McCloskey

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Posted Friday, Dec. 3, 1999, at 9:30 PM ET

At 10 in the morning, I work through the tangle of broken elevators down to the ninth floor and the History Department, to speak to its chairman, an amiable British man, long American. We discuss my potential appointment in the department, and then our shared enthusiasms for Chicago and for cricket. The only sporting interest to survive my gender change is the sweet British game, white on green, the click of bat on ball. The chairman notes that it's a Man's Game--the dangerous, heavy ball hurled at speed, hit to fielders standing within yards--and I agree, though with a different perspective. I look at it from the outside, as something men do.

Then at 11, I go further down the building to Stanley Fish's office on the fourth floor to negotiate the offer. Do professors spend all their time rushing about Doing Business? Do they teach and read and think? Yet the business between Stanley and me gets done in a conversation of ideas. We discuss the theory of academic politics and then Milton (John, not Friedman): "of man's first disobedience … and all our woe." We read a scene in "Paradise Regained" in which Satan tries to trick Jesus. We slip between thinking and doing for two hours, and end with a contract. It's the way of the bourgeoisie, mixing work and pleasure, calculation and poetry: Walk with me, talk with me; what news on the Rialto? We conclude that I am to be a multi-disciplinary professor of the "human sciences," a phrase we both like. French in origin, it means the study of who we are, and covers the humanities and social sciences, from bourse to poetry reading. History. Economics. English. Others.

I stop at the Classics Department's Christmas party on the 12th floor. The hideous brutalist building, University Hall, houses most of my interests, from the College of Business Administration to the Department of Classics. When the elevators are working, the building is ideal for intellectual life among the disciplines. I hate academic departments (I say to people in departments all day long, trying to persuade them): The departments break up teaching and thinking, typically to service a dull-normal science which kills intellectual progress. The chairman of classics is welcoming. I am a classics groupie, following the Latinist Band. In German they call classics Altertumswissenschaft, literally, "ancient's science," or "the study of the ancient world." One of those human sciences. I determine to take more Greek next spring. Everyone needs more Greek. To get more human.

I then drive up to Evanston, arriving late to a seminar in economic history. Janie, my dog, wanders around the room looking for crumbs and head-scratching, and the humans try to help the man sharpen his argument about the history of self-employment in the United States this century: a decline; shockingly lower rates for blacks; no change in the black/white ratio; and so forth. It's good economics--not an existence theorem or t-statistic in sight, just getting the data and asking intelligent questions about who we are, economically speaking. Part of those human sciences.

I drive over to a pizza place in Evanston and eat an entire "small" stuffed pizza, Chicago-style. I've not eaten all day: The three remaining pieces of turkey bacon early that morning; for lunch a Tootsie Roll (less fat than most; but the sugar?). This is not a good way to diet, dear, arriving famished. And a pint of Guinness. "Guinness Is Good for You," the British ads used to claim, so I think of it as food. 'Tis, thinks the economic historian as she blows her diet to pieces: One-third of the medieval grain crop went into beer. Monty Python and the drunken peasants.

I stop at Great Expectations bookstore in Evanston. Jay is not there, but the former owner, Truman, is, and tells stories as I pretend to look at the books. I buy a book on the attitudes of single women who do not spend their evening weeping alone over a TV dinner. Instruction, and my own life.

Janie and I drive to Lakeview, the trendy neighborhood 30 blocks north of the Loop, to attend a two-hour meeting about legislation to keep gender-crossers from being murdered. I've met some of the dozen people at the few other "trans" meetings I've been to this fall. It's good to do, my Christian duty. But it's not my life: My life is among women, and men; my life is among the disciplines, and within them; my life is alone, and with friends; my life is with Janie, and with humans; in Chicago, and in Europe.

Fifty-seven years old. Have I gotten it right? Keep working on it, dear. Less pizza. More Greek.

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Posted Friday, Dec. 3, 1999, at 9:30 PM ET
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Deirdre McCloskey teaches economics, history, and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Crossing, a memoir of her sex change (click here to buy it).
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