Sweet tweets

The smallness of a world containing seven billion people … or at least my particular corner of it … never ceases to astonish me.  A few years ago the University’s Chief Development Officer, Paul Chesser, mentioned in passing that he had recently been in California, where he had met someone who knew me: Nancy Broden.  Nancy was once a B.A. student in Carleton, receiving an honours degree in art history.  She then moved to the graduate program at the University of Victoria, where I supervised her Master’s thesis on the Pala d’Oro, the wonderful medieval confection of gold, enamel and gems which sits on the high altar of the state church of San Marco in Venice.  It was an excellent thesis, and one of which we were both proud; indeed I cited it in one of my own articles on San Marco a few years later.  But I had not seen Nancy in a very long time; our paths had last crossed when she graduated from U Vic in 1993.  So, Paul’s remark was indeed a surprise, and I asked him to connect the dots.

One of the things that occupies the time of Chief Development Officers is visiting alumni who have been successful, and Nancy Broden has certainly done that.  It turns out that she was one of the first employees of a small firm, based in San Francisco, which went on to achieve some success.  Indeed its net worth was estimated last week to be somewhere in the area of $10 billion.  Its name is Twitter, and Nancy holds the position of Design Lead on the Revenue Team.  All I could say was “Wow!”, and I took the initiative to contact Nancy myself, to ask if she would be willing to contribute some thoughts to the alumni page on the art history website.  She was most happy to do so, and here is part of what she wrote: “I could not have segued between careers without the solid liberal arts training I received from the Art History faculty at Carleton. While I rarely – OK never – have the opportunity to discuss the architectural plans of Byzantine churches with my colleagues, every day I synthesize seemingly disparate facts and data points in order to come up with coherent design directions. Curiosity and persistence got me pretty far, but I got much farther with the critical thinking skills I honed at Carleton.”

This year FASS has adopted as its theme “The Power of the Arts”, and that includes celebrating the power of the B.A. degree to prepare students for whatever life brings, including in this particular instance a career at Twitter.  I am delighted to report that Nancy will be back on campus on Friday September 20^th, as part of “Throwback” weekend, and she and I will be engaging in a public conversation based on the thoughts expressed in her website posting.  Anyone who may be interested in hearing her speak is most welcome to attend – the River Building second floor Theatre at 7:30, followed by a reception.

I hold firmly to the view that the last thing you should think about when you choose your major is what job it will lead to.  Frankly, at age 18 none of us have any real idea of what our future will hold.  Not a clue! The best advice I can offer to undergraduate students is to find one’s passion, and in pursuing that passion hone one’s “critical thinking skills”.  Much the same point was made by Tony Chambers, a faculty member at OISE, speaking on Steve Paikin’s The Agenda show on September 10^th.  The theme of the episode was whether the B.A. degree offers sufficient return on the investment of time and money, from a purely financial outlook; but Prof. Chambers countered that this was really the “wrong conversation”.  Education is not about economic outcomes, and most of its many benefits simply lack a dollar value.  To paraphrase a commercial that we all know well: Learning skills that will last a lifetime … priceless!

And for those who remain unconvinced of that, those for whom money really is the #1 concern, perhaps it is worth remembering what the Stats Can National Household Survey reported last week:  two thirds of the top 1% of wealthy Canadians possess university degrees.