The Chicago Accommodation

Diary Entry: October 16, 2024

I was still lingering in Pigou’s classroom this morning, the intellectual ether of his lecture slowly dissipating, when a fellow student approached my desk. An invitation materialized — Chicago. A brief, welcome escape from the academic cloister. It did not, naturally, arrive from Pigou himself, but from this colleague. I accepted instantly. The prospect of breathing different air, even for a day, felt essential.

Then, the inevitable snag. The calendar, that rigid tyrant, revealed my JSD seminar standing squarely in the way. A conflict. I was forced to petition the seminar professor, deploying my most reasonable tone to ask for a small miracle: could our sacred intellectual endeavor possibly be shifted? Perhaps to the afternoon — two, or even three o’L’clock?

To my profound surprise, she agreed. A simple, uncomplicated “yes.” No bureaucratic sighing, no performance of profound inconvenience.

Buoyed by this rare instance of institutional flexibility, I approached Pigou. My request of him was simpler: I merely needed a room, some quiet hovel on campus from which I could digitally materialize for this rescheduled seminar. He, too, consented. He would “make a room for me,” he assured me, as if requisitioning a high-security bunker rather than an empty office with a reliable internet connection.

Two professors, two affirmative replies. The path to Chicago, it seems, has been cleared by a rare and suspicious alignment of academic goodwill. One almost wonders what the catch will be.