Una buena reflexión para profesores universitarios

O al menos a mí me lo parece...Dani Rodrik se va de Harvard al Institute for Advanced Study, y su razón fundamental es la siguiente:

I imagined remaining at Harvard. I could predict more or less what I would be doing five years from now if I stayed – the kind of papers I would be writing, the courses I would be teaching, the meetings I would be attending, the debates, intellectual or otherwise, I would be having. 

A research career can serve both as scaffolding and as trap. My views on globalization and development have evolved – and, I’d like to think, become more sophisticated – as my work on these topics accumulated. But sometimes I do get the feeling that I am repeating rather than renewing myself – that I am chewing over the same material over and over again. 

The IAS opens for me a new page. It removes any conceivable excuse for becoming stale. I don’t imagine I will stop working on my usual topics. But my intellectual trajectory is now infused with an added element of uncertainty and flux. And this excites me more than anything else in my research career for quite some time.

La verdad es que, a mí al menos, me da que pensar. Yo no soy Dani Rodrik, ni mucho menos, y sigo valorando mucho la oportunidad de dar clase a alumnos estupendos. Pero eso de romper con la rutina, de replantear la investigación, de tener tiempo para hacer todo esto...será que últimamente de eso mismamente ando escaso lo que me lo hace tan atractivo.