Featured in WSJ

About a month ago, I was contacted by Charlie Wells, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, who indicated that was interested in writing an article about Pasporta Servo for Esperanto Day (ie, Zamenhof's birthday on Dec 15). I agreed to be interviewed, spoke with him a couple of times, and provided some pictures and links to additional resources. I think the article, One of the Perks of Speaking Esperanto? Free Lodging Around the World came out quite nicely.

In the article I talk about how I didn't advertise that I was an Esperanto speaker when was a new faculty member. I got a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) comment by the Dean who remarked that he was honored he "knew my secret", so I replied with something I've been thinking about for several years:

I've actually seen it as part of a larger problem in faculty culture. I think it starts in grad school -- at least it did for me -- when advisors pressure students to focus on their dissertations to the exclusion of all else. In many environments, it seems to become almost taboo to talk about anything you're doing that's not related to your academic work. This carries over to faculty when they begin their careers: faculty culture tells new faculty that they must present carefully redacted pictures of themselves: they can talk research and grant proposals and, maybe, teaching -- if only to say how much work it is. The result is that faculty present only one dimension of their lives to their colleagues, and the culture at the University suffers because people don't want to admit to their other passions and interests.

Some people have claimed that I never made a secret of being an Esperanto speaker and I suppose there's an element of truth to that: I didn't go to any great lengths to hide it. I just didn't bring it up. I didn't try to do anything professionally with Esperanto until around 2004, when I decided to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship using Esperanto. I wrote a proposal that I thought was pretty good that was focused on using Esperanto for a class on global problems, but it never went anywhere. Nobody (but me) liked it: It wasn't focused enough on Esperanto to satisfy esperantists and had too much Esperanto for everyone else. But writing the proposal was what got me involved with the Esperanto community again.