How I wish to measure my life and career

Introduction

One distinguishing feature of my career, it that I have lived and worked in many different countries, something I always chose to do out of my own initiative. In fact, two thirds of my working life I spent in the Global South. I lived in some of the poorest countries in the world, some ravaged by civil strife, where child mortality is high and life expectancy short. In some of these countries, polio, cholera and leprosy are still common. Sadly, in Papua New Guinea for example, even tribal warfare and witch burning are still regular occurrences and widely reported in the newspapers. In a few weeks, I will be starting a new professional challenge in a neighboring European country, a few hours' drive away. For me a minor transition.

Lecturing about research support at universities in 2010 in Turkey

Friends and family often ask me why I am moving again. The short answer is that I always seek decent, meaningful work and respectful employers so that I can contribute to my community and society at large. However, the longer answer is more complex. Looking back, the main reasons for moving about can be partly attributed to "Fortuna" or fate, partly my decisions to leave when prospects seemed dim, and partly due to my value-based choice for meaningful work and making a difference in the world.

To identify and pursue meaningful work, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your career goals. You can create a "goal tree" that consists of initial, intermediate, and final goals to help you identify your career aspirations. This will help you realize more profound ideas and purposes and give you a sense of direction in your career. Evidently, this requires some idea of what you will be doing in the mid- and long-term. It is also important to find the meaning in your work and to have a purpose that drives you. Without a purpose, life can become hollow, and your career can lack direction. My purpose is to contribute to societies development, which means to help increase its levels of prosperity, health, and education, by understanding better the role of business and technology in the development process.

During my own life time, I have had the opportunity to work in various countries and take advantage of some remarkable technological innovations that have made frequent changes of jobs and locations possible: first cheap air travel, the personal computer and the internet, and of course now the smart phone and machine learning. However, it is crucial to find stability in your career. It is also important to be valued and respected as a professional, which can be challenging in some countries.

Therefore, pursuing meaningful work and having a clear sense of direction in your career is essential to making a positive impact on others and society at large. It is also important to find stability and be valued and respected as a professional. By reflecting on my career and the reasons for my moves, I hope to inspire others to pursue meaningful work and find purpose in their careers.

1- Defining Success

When it comes to measuring my life and career, I don't rely on the size of my wallet, the quantity of my possessions, or societal status. Instead, I focus on the positive impact I have on others, particularly through the work of my students, and how they contribute to prosperity, education and health in their communities. Growing up in a family of educators, I have always valued the importance of teaching and mentoring. From being a concierge to a high school teacher, professor, and even Vice-Chancellor, I have stubbornly stuck to working in education, which is always bound to be a long game. Below I will briefly share personal stories of my family members who shaped my values, as well as highlight the significance of finding purpose and meaning in life to positively impact others.

Education runs deep in my family. My great grandmother, grandfather, grandmother, and even my Dutch grandmother were all educators at some point in their lives. This background has greatly influenced my perspective on the value of education and the impact it can have. Let me focus on the stories of my grandfather, mother, and father to illustrate this further.

Giovanni Battista, my Italian grandfather, not only briefly served in an Italian heavy machine gun unit on the Monte Grappa as an officer during World War 1, but dedicated his life to freedom and education. His maternal grandfather, Diomiro Pollettini, a teacher who fought with Garibaldi in the Battle of Bezecca in 1867 did the same.  In the trenches he told his Sardinian soldiers stories from Virgil’s Eneid, and brought a pocket edition of Dante’s Divina Comedia. Despite earning two silver medals for courage during his service, he didn't measure his life by his accolades or the hundreds of publications he wrote. Instead, he focused on creating a group of scholars with similar interest, who would carry forward his approach to studying classical language. His exceptional knowledge of ancient languages landed him a professors post when only 28 years old at a private university in Milan, and later he became Dean, and Vice-Rector at the University of Bologna. He played a crucial role in internationalizing this university after a period of isolationism under fascism.

My mother, Laura, shared the same passion for learning and teaching. She was an outspoken advocate against fascism, racism, discrimination, and violence. As a university lecturer, she published numerous articles and books, dedicating much of her time to mentoring and guiding her students. After retirement however she really spread her wings and published half a dozen or so significant scientific publications on the history of Italian literature in a European perspective. Her impact was evident when a dozen of her "paper children," as she called them, showed up at her funeral. Her dedication to education and her work for Italian migrants in the Netherlands earned her high recognition from the Italian state.

My father, Kees, a brilliant theoretical physicist, instilled in me a love for technology and a commitment to honesty and integrity. As a university lecturer, he taught a challenging course on Newton's classical mechanism with lots of mathematics, inspiring countless students with the beauty of maths and physics, including myself. Like my mother a member of the silent generation and teenager during World War 2, he emphasized the importance of staying informed about international news and being aware of the world around us. His influence shaped my appreciation for facts and critical thinking.

Interestingly, despite the educational achievements of these family members, they did not amass the family’s wealth. In fact, many actively diminished their family's wealth. It was my Dutch grandfather, Ernst, and my Italian great grandfather, Bortolo, who worked in the postal office, that ensured a better future for their children. They acquired properties through hard work and built strong relationships in their communities. This reflection on my family history taught me that it is better to combine wealth-building with meaningful work in education. However, for this to happen it is crucial that the work in education is stable and not precarious.

In short, I therefore measure my life and career not by material possessions or societal status, although I do not mind pursuing either occasionally, but by the positive impact I have on others, especially my students. As a young professor of education in Maastricht once remarked: “We're not there to teach anyone, we're not there to train anyone. We are there to help them develop. And that's not prescriptively. So it's really about relations and networks and connections that you have to build on the basis of trust, and that takes time.” My family's background in education has shaped my values and reinforced the importance of finding purpose and meaning in life. By sharing these personal stories, I hope to inspire others to embrace meaningful work and make a difference in the lives of those around them.

2- What have I achieved so far?

Looking back on my life and career, I am filled with happy bewilderment and amusement. I have lived long-term and worked in 10 different countries, and completed work assignments in over 40, acquiring considerable experience and developing communication, teamwork, and leadership skills. While uprooting one's family to go where the work is seen as a badge of honor in the USA, it is often viewed as an act of treason in Europe. I have driven motorcycles, cars, and boats in many of these countries and explored coral reefs and shipwrecks while scuba diving. Although I did not father any biological children, I was adopted as a father by 10 sons in Papua New Guinea and 2 daughters, and I feel honored by their choice. Imagine if nothing of this would have happened, and if I had been offered a tenured position at a university after my doctorate, does the world really need another ivory tower historian?

As someone who had mostly an academic career, I probably should be proudest of my 50 plus academic publications. Of course, I am proud of my book with Cambridge University Press which underlines the important of the state not being captured by private interests and taking a strategized approach to the widespread adoption of new technologies. This is an important finding both for the railway as the machine learning age. 

I am also happy I published across several disciplines, with one journal article in an economics journal and another one in an engineering journal. I am also proud with the number of my publications, because only for half a dozen of years of my almost 30 years career, or so I had “normal” tenured academic roles combining teaching and research, where I had one day (20%) to do my own research.

Nevertheless, I am acutely aware of the total lack of societal impact of most academic publications, outside the small group of specialist to which they are directed. The policy documents or environmental audit protocols I wrote, the work as advisor for the Costa Rican Minister of the Environment, or with the European Commission, at least were more widely read, and may have done some good.

Throughout my lifetime, I have been fortunate to take advantage of extraordinary technological innovations, such as cheap air travel, personal and mobile computing, the internet, and now machine learning. These innovations have made frequent changes of jobs and locations possible, and also allowed me to work outside the confines of academia. As an early technology adopter, I sometimes got carried away by the opportunities these technological innovations offered. However, there is such a thing as too much international experience, and my life and career may be an example.

Going back to my moving about, I enjoyed working in Gent and in Antwerp in Belgium, where arrangements are clear and meritocracy is valued. I have also worked with great pleasure for US-based institutions in Central America, the Caribbean, and Italy. US higher education institutions have shown their true meritocratic nature by focusing on the value I could add, rather than who I was. Some of these organizations even offered me stable employment, which I chose to decline due to better opportunities elsewhere at the time.

Paradoxically, I have had the most trouble being valued or respected as a professional in the two countries of my parents' nationality: the Netherlands and Italy. I am not sure why this is. In the Netherlands, I worked for some wonderful organizations for several years, but apparently, the love and admiration were only one way. In Italy, frankly, I did not enjoy working for any of the four employers due to the chaotic circumstances and toxic organizational cultures, maybe that was just bad luck. Moreover, in both countries, the reforms of the labor laws meant that senior hires from abroad are offered a one-year contract at first, without any compensation for relocation expenses, which would come with a three-year contract. Penny wise and pound foolish. Fortunately, my new location in Europe has not yet reformed its labor laws in this counterproductive sense. Support for newcomers is offered regardless of their nationalities, and an open-ended contract can be offered at the outset for senior hires.

Despite the challenges, I have made a positive impact in many of the countries where I have worked. For example, while teaching environmental economics and policy and working for the Ministry of the Environment in Costa Rica, two of my doctoral students created the first wastewater charge decree in the country. In Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, one brilliant student convinced the local owner of a fish processing plant to install a water filter, greatly reducing the use of chlorine for washing lobster tails and reducing pollution. In Turks and Caicos Islands, working for a US-based University organization, through her research using jellyfish as a bio-indicator of pollution, a brilliant student managed to convince the local fish processing plan owner to reduce the use of chlorine by installing a water filter. We also wrote a paper together, but I am more proud of the filter. 

In Papua New Guinea, for example, my assistant set up "internet in a box," a system that makes teaching materials available to students in schools that lack reliable power supply and/or internet access. What is remarkable is that I did not spend a lot of time supporting these individuals, except trying to encourage and create favorable conditions for them.

My time in Papua New Guinea from 2012 to 2018 with my wife was challenging but ultimately rewarding. I had my 15 minutes of fame there, when students celebrated my return after boycotting classes for 5 weeks. I had been kept out of the country by the PNG government for my efforts of establishing good and transparant governance at the university. 

I initiated many projects that were "firsts", such as becoming the first university in the world to provide campus-wide broadband internet through the O3B satellite system, and use Ubuntu on all students' laptops.

In an effort to improve the governance of our university, we became the first university from the South Pacific to sign the Magna Carta Universitatum in Bologna. 

Signing the MCU as Vice-Chancellor

Surprisingly, I also managed to balance the budget of the university by rigorous cost cutting, and obtained the first-ever unqualified, clean financial audit in the history of any public university in the country.  In the university community in Lae, however, most staff members resented how I had rocked the boat, and only the students were in support of my strategy. The university council managed to dismantle the student representative council, and then used this to undermine my position and authority.

Nevertheless in PNG, my wife, also an educator, and I were adopted by another well-known neigbouring community: Busamang village, about an hour away by boat from Lae. This village is famous because an anthropologist lived there for decades and wrote a number of books. I facilitated some students and lecturers to do fieldwork there, but I also worked directly with the men and women. The women needed better health care, and to ensure no project partners would die, I would bring a suitcase full of medicine every month with antibiotics and other essentials. Fortunately, there was a fantastic nurse in the village, Anne Boleyn, who trained other nurses and midwives, and I am sure she saved several lives, and delivered several babies with the supplies we brought. She also built her own clinic because the official clinic had never been opened due to funds disappearing due to corruption. I also promised the community to give a lesson at the village school, so I will need to go back. The challenges these communities face keep me grounded now when I meet people who complain about rich, white-people's problems.

With Busama children who are now not learning English at school

In conclusion, my international experience has been both challenging and rewarding. Despite the obstacles, I have made a positive impact in most of the countries where I have worked. I have learned that finding purpose and meaning in life is crucial to making a positive impact on others. By sharing my personal reflections, I hope to inspire others to embrace meaningful work and make a difference in the lives of those around them.

3- Measuring progress: ‘Fortuna’ and opening doors

When measuring impact indirectly and being precariously employed, one starts to experience the futility of plans. As General Eisenhower famously said, "Plans are useless, but planning is essential." The Romans believed that  Fortuna, the  goddess of fate or destiny, can change one's environment in unexpected ways. This in turn, requires a high degree of adaptability. Julius Caesar, who won almost every battle he fought, frequently invokes her. The Romans believed that by having a bias for action over being passive and complaining, Fortuna would favor you, and doors would open. 

A certain path dependency is related to my experiences. As a European, once you leave your tribe, you are made to pay a price. First, there was strong resistance from my Master's thesis supervisor for me to study abroad. For me, however, it was a no-brainer since the Dutch doctoral programs at the time were in a state of disarray, and on average, only 5% finished their thesis within 4 years. This professor refused to write a recommendation letter for my application to the highly competitive and prestigious 3-year doctoral scholarship. I won it anyway because the selection was meritocratic, and they ignored his omission.

After finishing my doctorate in 1994, the only Dutch professor in economic history in the country almost panicked when I asked him about a post-doc position over lunch at the European University Institute in Florence. He admitted that I was one of the more promising historians of my generation, especially having secured a publication contract for my thesis with Cambridge University Press. The things he responded, however, made no sense, but I understood I was not welcome. Therefore, I closed this door because, at the time, I had other, better prospects. After many decades and comparing my fate with other Dutch graduates from this institute who went back, I know I did the right thing by not returning to the Netherlands at that time. 

When I did go back to the Netherlands in 2003, I was almost offered a lecturers job at a University college. This time I did not get the job because a former lecturer of mine, and a notorious alcoholic, needed to retire in his hometown. The price I had to pay.

Anyone who is treated with disrespect, meaning it is made clear his or her personality, religion, race, experience, or education is not valued, will naturally close the door on an opportunity and look for other opportunities elsewhere. The lesson society should learn is that by being exclusive rather than inclusive, the price it has to pay in the long run is much higher than the cost of accommodating newcomers or outsiders. It is their loss.

4- Where do I fit in?

Unsurprisingly, I have found myself fitting into communities that value learning, prioritize inclusivity and have an international outlook. These communities have been instrumental in shaping my experiences and impact.

Before we go into the importance of communities, let's discuss the concept of tribes. For thousands of years, humans lived in tribes, where rules were not the same for everyone and innovation was limited. The Romans, however, played a pivotal role in creating a rule-based society that promoted technological advancements. It is disheartening to see current nativists, exclusive tendencies in European societies, where migrants are unjustly blamed for issues they have no control over, and foreigners are marginalized in education and culture.

Tribes can be a perplexing concept for Europeans who are unfamiliar with them, although tribal, clanish or cliquish attitudes persist widely. From my experience, indigenous tribes often lack democracy, and individual opinions often hold little weight. The opinions of the headman, chief, or elders are the only ones that matter, and the law is not applied equally to all. On the positive side, some tribes are outward-looking and well-led. These tribes can adapt and innovate relatively quickly, and they tend to embrace people who are different. European societies could learn a great deal from these inclusive tribes.

I am continually amazed by the importance of leadership in any community or organization for curbing negative human traits such as selfishness, complacency, and envy. As you saw, I have experienced exclusion, even as a white male. Today, I have little patience for those who proudly embrace ignorance, indifference, and a lack of willingness to learn. These attitudes, which should have no place in our liberal, open societies undermine meritocracy and preclude organizations from becoming more inclusive.

In our increasingly diverse society, it is crucial to recognize the value of different cultures, backgrounds, and identities. Oddly, it was my reading at school of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condidata that impressed the power of cultural exclusivity. While the Romans gave citizenship to the tribal leaders whom they had conquered, the US armed forces today's work hard to create the cultural melting pot that sadly American society is not yet. Embracing diversity enriches humanity and allows us to come together to solve common problems. Building relationships with people from different cultures is essential for achieving community goals. By integrating aspects of different cultures into our activities and consciously incorporating inclusive and anti-discriminatory attitudes, we can create a more inclusive society. 

In conclusion, inclusive communities and diverse perspectives are vital for personal growth, societal progress, and for an educator to make a positive impact. By embracing diversity and fostering inclusive environments, we can create a society that values and respects all individuals, regardless of their background or identity.

Final Remarks

Apart from where do you live, another question I am frequently asked is about my favorite place to live. There are several place which my wife and I really loved: San Juan, Puerto Rico in the USA, Singapore, and Cairns in Australia. Without a doubt, the place where I felt most at home, however, is Busamang, a small fishing village in Papua New Guinea. The community there is well-led and inclusive, offering me friendship and a sense of belonging. In fact, my retirement plan consists of returning to Busamang, where they have promised to build me a hut and provide for me, although this is not a very practical option.

I consider myself extremely privileged that while I was teaching, writing or enjoying myself, driving up active volcanoes, hiking in the rain forest, scuba diving on coral reefs, and driving my boat to the remote islands of Papua New Guinea, I was not a tourist or hasty traveller. I had time to build meaningful relations with the people I met from all walks of life, and hopefully in this way contributed to more mutual understanding. I learned much more from them, then they ever could have learned from me.

Reflecting on my experiences, I hope that these notes have been helpful to you on your own journey towards well-being, self-fulfillment, and wisdom. Now, my wife and I have found a new home as educators in an apparently more meritocratic educational institution that has offered us stable employment, an internationally minded community, and the opportunity to contribute to a wider society. 

Being more experienced and a bit wiser now, I will focus on establishing these relations with my students based on trust, that really make a difference to their learning, and help them connect to the communities they want to be part of. I invite you to follow along as we embark on this new chapter, making a positive impact in our community and beyond. Together, let us continue to strive for a more tolerant inclusive and enlightened world. It is more needed now than ever.