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Deirdre McCloskey

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Posted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

I rise at 5 a.m., dressing hurriedly in the Beloit guest house (I time it: 25 minutes from rising to leaving; my black cotton knit from Land's End is so easy; I make up quickly, no foundation or powder these days, I reflect, since the hormones have taken effect). Janie the dog and I drive back to Chicago through the tangle of commuting traffic. It takes more than three hours, worrying all the time about the morning's Slate deadline: 9:30 Midwest time. I try to avoid the tangle by taking local streets but as usual get lost and end up taking longer, arriving with relief finally at my office at the University of Illinois to write the column. Just in time, like a Japanese auto factory. Professors are not deadline people.

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This day I am to be looked over by the Department of Economics. I resigned from the University of Iowa last week, for a rising pile of reasons: Chiefly, the administration at Iowa was neglecting me (professors always feel neglected, because their jobs don't trigger a hierarchy of praise, and most university administrators are idiotically stingy with praise anyway). The administration has known for six months that I was being courted by UIC and its new leaders (the amazing Stanley Fish is my new dean at UIC, for example) but has not lifted a finger, I reflect bitterly, to keep their big-deal professor. Anyway, I need to get into my pension fund to pay for the new loft I am buying downtown, and you can't do that without quitting.

It's over, as we say. I get a pain at heart. I've been at the university in the sweet state of Iowa for 19 years, three as Deirdre, 16 as Donald, the father of two Iowans. I loved the place, I think, as I climb the stairs to the Econ. Dept. Yet to love is to lose, eventually. Though that's no reason not to love. Now I love Chicago, my city, hog-butcher, stacker of wheat, freight-handler for the nation.

A group of people from Economics take me to lunch to discuss my future. They are thinking: Is she still an economist? After all, she does English Department stuff and Philosophy Department stuff and Lord knows what other weird stuff. Not our stuff, they think. I try to persuade them that I really am an economist. I'm good at that persuasion, trained at talking the talk for so long. I drop names of the Many Famous Economists I Have Known. But I try gently to get my new colleagues to grasp that I don't want to be "just" an economist. I can't use the word "just," since it would be insulting, as though the only respectable career for an academic were to wander further and further from her field of training, making paths back to the home base only occasionally. Dabbling in Latin and Greek (the Department of Classics might honor me at UIC with an adjunct position, and I am thrilled). Criticizing economics from the English Department. Changing gender. Jesus, what is she?

The seminar after lunch is thronged with faculty and graduate students. I need to show that I'm still an economist and economic historian, but I've not had time to prepare the lecture. Oy. I substitute classroom energy for pre-class preparation, my usual trick. This time it works, and I deliver a display of diagrams and math and quick reasoning that says, "I am an economist." Early on I worry about the somber older men who do not like Professors Who Perform. One of them leaves, but he had courteously said he would have to, and I make it all right to the end and the good discussion. I am struck as I always am by how productive of new ideas this strange academic chatter can be. A "lecture" sounds to outsiders like a transfer of data from one mind to another. No. When done well it is a conversation, an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. Lord, I love it, I say to myself as the audience claps with evident appreciation. There's the praise.

I rush to the end of a lecture by Alasdair MacIntyre, an Irish-American philosopher I admire and know slightly. I can say "Alasdair" as though he was a friend. Stupid, of course. Then I go with Janie in her bag to the reception at the Newman House, then a dinner with a colleague in economics and a visiting fireman-friend, then to Oak Park, and so to bed.

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Posted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1999, at 9:00 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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