A Day in the Life

Many of you have probably noticed that higher education is having a rough go of it right now. There is a new headline almost every day about the Trump Administration’s battle with Harvard. I think that many of the criticisms being leveled at universities have merit, and we need to clean up our act. At the same time, I also believe it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I know this will sound self-serving (and it is!), but I think one of the problems is that it’s hard to explain the value of what a university professor does outside the classroom. Most everyone understands the teaching part. It is the research and public engagement parts of the job that are much harder to explain. For example, I spend a lot of my time outside the classroom these days studying, analyzing, and writing about the U.S. biofuels industry. It is hard to quantify the impact of all this time and effort, but I believe it is valued by the biofuels and energy sectors. Otherwise, I don’t think I would receive invitations to speak at industry conferences like the Fastmarkets conference that was held earlier this month in Chicago.

The conference had an official photographer, and the Fastmarkets team was kind enough to share the photos with me. I was on a panel with an industry consultant named Paul Niznik. He posts on X using his alter ego, Rinny the Gopher, a hard-drinking but very smart rodent when it comes to energy markets. I have had a lot of interactions with Rinny over the years online, but this was the first time I had ever met him in person. While the subject was serious, I hope you can tell that we had fun working together. One of the attendees at the conference, Sarah Havala, was an undergraduate student I worked with at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Sarah is doing great work in the food industry, and nothing makes a professor prouder than seeing their students do well.