Academic’s life of poverty shows how little society values its thinkers
US$10-an-hour part-time professor of philosophy at American university forced to live like a monk, friend says after his death; recent report found a quarter of part-time academics in US receive public assistance such as food stamps
When visitors walked into the dilapidated boarding house where Dave Heller lived, the smell alone could transport them back to their college days.
“It smelled like grad student,” jokes Charlie Fischer, a friend. “Like years of boiled noodles and rice.”
Except Heller was 61 years old and a philosophy instructor at Seattle University in the northwestern United States. Yet he lived in a room in a tenant group house in Seattle’s University District, with nothing but a bed, a fridge and his library of 3,000 books.
When he died earlier this year from an untreated thyroid condition, Heller was making only US$18,000 a year teaching philosophy on a part-time, adjunct basis, his friends say. That’s about one-third the median income for a single person in Seattle, and barely above the federal poverty line.
Dave was like an itinerant philosopher. There’s almost no role any more for people like him.
“He had a beautiful life in that he lived exactly what he wanted, which was the life of the mind,” Fischer says. “But it had a cost. It was sad to see how little value society places on what he did.”