HowTo: be in the snob-free zone

My cousin Sherwin’s way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: care only about one’s work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one’s work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned — through, of course, one’s work — a good seat. Judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time. One of the reasons I liked him so much is that he brought all this off without any contortion of his essentially kind character.

That is Joseph Epstein, writing about Prof. Sherwin Rosen, in his essay In a snob-free zone

There are also some more of interesting information about Prof. Rosen in Epstein’s article:

… He was instead immensely winning without any of these qualities, and in part because he didn’t seem to care about status at all. He enjoyed owning sporty cars–a white Audi sports coupé was his last–and drinking good wine and listening to classical pianists and playing jazz piano himself, but he made no fuss about these things. He made no fuss about anything, in fact, except economics. He judged his colleagues by their skill at their discipline, and, apart from their characters, nothing else. My guess is that he judged himself by the same criterion.

He once told me that he was offered something called an Albert Schweitzer Professorship in New York, which would have almost doubled his salary, but he said that, even though he could have used the money, he couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t because he needed the bruising intellectual combat that his colleagues at the University of Chicago Department of Economics gave one another. It wasn’t pleasant, but, he felt, he needed it. When one of his best students did not land a job in one of the better-regarded universities, he told the student that it was a good thing, for it would take him outside all the worry about prestige and throw him back on his talent as an economist, which, if his devotion was such as to bring out his potential, would in the end result in his being made offers by better schools. Which, the student said, is exactly what happened.

Take a look!