Talking with the plumber

Deresiewicz explained that his years as a student at Columbia and a teacher at Yale had left him at once knowledgeable about languages and literatures and detached from the everyday working world. He went on to build an artful argument about the ways in which elite institutions make the students and faculty who populate them not only unable to converse with ordinary people, but also uninterested in doing so. In his view, the richest and most esteemed colleges and universities have worsened the divisions in American society, even as they have sought for more diverse student bodies.

These are serious problems, which I have discussed in earlier columns and which Andrew Delbanco pursues in more depth in his recent book “College: What It Was, Is and Should Be.” But Deresiewicz’s essay struck me with particular force for another reason. I had spent some time on the day I came across it talking with Dave, who has fixed a wide range of problems in our house — and in all the other ones we’ve owned — back to the 1980s. It’s never been hard to talk to Dave, a man of wide interests, but we most often talk about the house and the things he’s doing to it. Those conversations interest me as much as they do Dave, and not just because he’s saving our house from what a friend calls “water, the enemy of mankind.” They interest me because I have spent a lot of time working with my hands and hanging out with people who did so for a living.

It all began at my elite boarding school, where I studied English and history, mastered Greek and Latin and learned how to use power tools accurately and safely. The school allowed those who were interested to spend one term a year not doing a sport but instead building sets for the spring musical. I enjoyed doing this enormously and went on to do more of the same as an apprentice, and then as a paid carpenter, at a one-week-stock summer theater in Wisconsin (motto: “Summer theaters and some are not”). Once we had the two-week musical up and running and weren’t pressed for time, we did renovations on the theater’s crumbling houses: I learned not only how to make, size and paint canvas flats, but also how to install drywall and hang cabinets.

All this experience came in handy back at school, where I was far from the only one who liked to work with his hands. Another resident in one of my dorms, the nephew of a famed stock car driver, played a starring role in disassembling a teacher’s car and reassembling it in an unexpected place — but I draw the curtain of charity over the rest of that incident. In later years my practical knowledge provided me with an extracurricular activity and a way to earn money while at college (you’re reading the words of someone who once ran the lights for a Donovan concert), as well as a steady job at the University’s summer Shakespeare theater.

Most importantly, it brought me in contact with others who liked this kind of work, some of whom are still friends, and one of whom is my wife of going on 40 years. She makes props in a studio in our house and teaches future theater professionals at Rutgers, and she has furnished our house with a spectacular range of fake rare books, musical instruments and more. Not surprisingly, she too has a lot to talk about with Dave.

My own days of carpentry lasted into the ’80s, when I rebuilt the windows of our first house and added a deck to it, to the surprise of many colleagues. I’ll never forget the great Natalie Zemon Davis’s reaction, “Tony, I thought you were a luftmensch!” These days I don’t have the time. Though I miss working with my hands, at least my wife no longer complains about my losing her chuck keys.

I’ve never lost my interest in the ways houses and other structures are built and maintained. But after reading Deresiewicz, I find myself wondering if my experiences belong to a departed world. Back in the day, many of my fellow students spent their summers earning money by doing hard physical work, from working on the Chicago roads (a much-envied job because it paid so well) to waitressing. Have internships and summer travel opportunities completely replaced those older ways of spending the summer, at least in elite private schools? I hope not — at least for the sake of those who, like William Deresiewicz and me, become professors. Scholar doesn’t rhyme with dollar. Come the day that they buy their starter homes, they’ll be a lot better off if they know how to earn sweat equity, and even more so if they have some skills. And if they have to call a plumber, they’ll have no trouble talking with her.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.