Getting your money's worth out of college

Among the good advice in the Good Book is the following: "Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many years." What this means is that kindnesses performed today very often return to your benefit much later. I have been teaching here for forty years, and despite all the trash you read about me on the Internet, I have from time to time been kind to students, including on occasion students of the species tarde florens. These are people who, though they seem to have great difficulty finishing a senior thesis, in later years show great skill at amassing huge piles of cash.

Some time ago, when I was looking for a little money to help finance a good work that the University should have bankrolled but wouldn't, I followed my standard practice. I identified a relevant wealthy person whom I had taught, though not very much, more than twenty-five years ago, then showed up on his telephonic doorstep tin cup in hand. When I say "a little money" I mean a few hundred dollars. After listening to me for about seven seconds, my former student interrupted me to offer a few thousand dollars. He could hear that I was taken aback by the surplus generosity, but he said he really wanted to help because the thing we were doing was such a good thing. Nor was he willing to agree that he was offering a "large sum". Recognizing that he was dealing with a fiscal infant, he tried to put the matter in simple but memorable terms. "What you may not realize," he said, "is that it costs people eight hundred dollars an hour just to talk to me."

In point of fact I had not realized that, but once I learned it my mind simply wouldn't let it go. After all, I myself talk to people all the time. Furthermore and very generally speaking I regard my conversational abilities as falling within that large and acceptable middle ground bounded by the medium and the mediocre. Surely, I, too, ought to have an official hourly schmooze value, and I ought to know what it is. So, summoning the calculator in the drop-down menu beneath the apple, I put in a few rough-and-ready facts: my salary for a semester, the number of classroom meetings per week, the number of students per class, and the number of weeks in the semester. I discovered that the Trustees of Princeton University thought that during the semester just ended I was worth $9.83 per hour, per student. That was a figure that revealed good news and bad news. The good news is that I pull in well above minimum wage. The bad news is that I get $790.17 per hour less than what a Philadelphia lawyer gets. Oh yes, I realize there are "other factors," but the figures I give here are accurate within a margin of error of plus or minus two hundred percent.

I then approached the question from what I imagined is the student perspective. How much does a student have to pay to get $9.83 worth of Flemingtonian wisdom? This involved a different set of figures: the comprehensive fee, average number of courses taken, average number of meetings per course. What an undergraduate has to pay to the Trustees of Princeton University to hear me expatiate on the subject of the "Lesser Ambigua" of Maximus the Confessor for one hour (actually fifty minutes, but it seems like at least an hour to the student) is $93.81.

Regular readers of this column may recall my reservations, reported in a different context some months ago, concerning the Marxist theory of "surplus value". Even so I make the suggestion that you might want to look into what is a fairly dramatic increment of "added value," alias ripoff, going into the big piggy-bank in Nassau Hall. You might even—and this is a more radical suggestion—decide to blow off fewer lectures and preceptorials during the coming semester. Indeed, you might go so far as to consider attending a professor's office hours for a purpose other than asking for an extension. I do recognize that there is such a thing as snooze value as well as schmooze value, but in a well-ordered undergraduate economy, the former divided by the latter should render a fraction no greater than about .425. Besides, the most competent Princeton students I have known have all been accomplished "multitaskers", finding little difficulty in snoozing while I am schmoozing. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.