Gary Becker Interview (page: 8 / 9) Nobel Prize in Economics	Print Interview

You left Columbia after the campus disturbances of 1968. Could you tell us about your reaction to that turbulent period?

Gary Becker: I was very upset about that. Not so much by the students. You have young students, I can understand that. They were doing things, some of them that I didn't think were appropriate for a university. My colleagues really bothered me a lot. I felt they didn't stand up and show a clear enough light for what a university should stand for, and that would guide a lot of the students who really were unhappy also about what was going on. They didn't have sufficient guidance from the faculty, which was terribly split, including my own department. I was for a much more firmer stand, that universities should not be intimidated, and should not allow free speech to be kept down. Faculties are very used to discussing and not used to action, typically. You spend endless hours discussing and taking all sorts of views. So the faculty at Columbia was very split, my department was very split, and I was very angry at a lot of my colleagues for that, even senior colleagues who had brought me in. I was relatively young at the time, and I thought they would be the ones to take the leadership. I had to take the leadership. It was draining on me, and that, combined with other factors, led me to believe maybe I should be leaving Columbia, although I had been happy there up until that point. That's when I began to look around. Harvard made some inquiries, whether I wanted to go. I told them I was interested, but they finally sort of came back and they weren't that interested. Chicago had been interested in having me come back for years, and I kept putting them off. I finally decided to accept that.

So you thought your colleagues should have taken a firmer stand in support of free speech. You saw the situation at Columbia primarily as a free speech issue?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Gary Becker: I was a strong advocate of free speech, and that protest can go on, but you shouldn't intimidate lecturers and so on. We had several buildings occupied. You'd try to lecture and they tried to break into classrooms. That's what happened at Columbia and some other places at the time. I thought that was intolerable at a university. My colleagues probably deep down thought so, but they were unwilling to take any actions or express these thoughts. They wanted these students to like them, and sometimes you've got to do things that not everybody likes. That's what bothered me a lot. And particularly, as I say, it's not the students that bothered me so much. I mean, I felt the faculty should be more mature then the students, and they're older. Students were under a lot of peer pressure, even those who didn't want to go along with it, and they had to deal with them. So I never held it against any of my students, even those who participated actively, but I did hold it against a lot of my colleagues for doing that. And that was an important factor, as I said, in why I left.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

How long had you been there altogether?

Gary Becker: Twelve years. I'd been there quite a while.

Did you have a family by then?

Gary Becker: Yes, I was married. I had two children at the time. In fact, I got married when I was 24, so at that time our two children were teenagers.

That's a hard time to pack up the family and move.

Gary Becker: It was a hard time. The two girls were willing to leave. My wife -- this was my first wife -- was more reluctant at the time, but she finally decided to go.

Aside from the fact that your research was not accepted as significant for a period of years, were there other major setbacks in your career?

Gary Becker: Well, my first wife died at a young age, so that was a personal setback, but it certainly affected me personally and career-wise.

How old were your children then?

Gary Becker: It was shortly after we moved to Chicago, a year or so after we moved to Chicago. So Cathy was about 12, Judy was maybe 13 or 14. They were 11 and 13 or something like that. Professionally, I would say my main setback, if you call it a setback, was the fact that the areas I'd worked on took a long time to be recognized as major areas. Aside from that, my career went fine.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I didn't have a lot of universities interested in me. I've never gotten offers from the major institutions, aside from Chicago and Columbia. But I didn't consider that a setback. Chicago and Columbia were fine places, and I felt, well, that's the price of working on things that aren't so popular. So I accepted that. I didn't like it that my work wasn't received so well, but again, as I said earlier, I had this inner faith that I was right and they were wrong. I mean, I'll put it bluntly, that's what I felt. As did some of the people I respected so much, my teachers who had confidence in me, and a few other people, and that gave me further capacity to go on. So given my inner faith that what I was doing was important, it seemed obvious to me these are important problems and that I wasn't just a crazy man. There were some quite respected economists who thought I was doing important work, even though the bulk of the profession didn't. But that was enough for me. That kept me going. Everybody gets a little depressed, but I never went through any major depression over the fact that my work wasn't being accepted. I felt it will turn out to be that way. So I coped with my personal difficulties, with my wife's death. I remarried, a very fine marriage, my wife is here now, and she had two children who I'm very close to. So I sort of feel I have four children now, the two sons through her first marriage and my two daughters. So my personal life improved a lot. And finally, my work began to be accepted much more, I'd say sometime starting in the mid-'80s.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

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