The Dad Bod Theory of Education

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories that make me feel better about myself.   

Recently there was one about “Dad bods”—a term for bodies that are reasonably fit but not fully optimal in the way of body fat percentages, six-pack abs, and a lack of any evidence of drinking a beer now and then. My own Dad bod has decent aerobic and core strength for my age, but it definitely only sports a one-pack and is insistent about popping back over 200 pounds whenever I manage to push it lower.  

Me and My Dad Bod at a beach

Imagine my gratification when the New York Times’ sports section reported that three of the world’s most elite athletes— Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes and two of the very best players in the NBA, Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić— have Dad Bods!      

Also, some women from Clemson University—the ones who supposedly invented the term—claim to prefer Dad bods. That’s old news and I’m sure they like versions that are decades younger than mine, but perhaps we could adapt the idea in age-appropriate ways. 

Since this article doesn’t need me to summarize it, my goal here is to extrapolate, inquiring whether its findings ramify beyond sports and sex to the life of the mind and the health of our schools. We could debate whether this should be our priority amid everything else happening this week, but it does relate to ongoing Republican efforts to demoralize and degrade public education.   

How Can Dad Bods Be Elite Bods? 

First, how can we explain Jokić being MVP despite having “no muscle definition” and scoring somewhere between mediocre and average on a range of physical benchmarks that the NBA normally uses to weed players out before inviting them to try out? When an outfit that evaluates NBA prospects met Jokić they noted a beer belly and “the worst vertical jump they had ever recorded.”   

The explanation is that Jokić is like “a Swiss Army knife.”  He scores “B-minus to B level in everything”—many “second-order metrics” and “hundreds of variables that rate things like force production, loads and joint extension.” Despite not jumping well or being notably powerful, he “grades out above average in almost everything.” Meanwhile, Dončić is “so-so” at most metrics except “going full speed and then stopping,” while Mahomes (like elite baseball pitchers) keeps some body fat on purpose because it helps him throw better. 

In short, they have an all-around skill set to build from— after which, of course, lots of practice and mental toughness come into play.    

 From Dad Bod to Dad Brain

Could this be relevant for what makes an exemplary scholar in academia?—or, shifting down in expertise, for championing a broad quality education for students preparing at many levels? It’s gratifying to imagine that this could be true.  

I started out, long ago, flat-out curious about learning a wide range of things. The more I read, the more things opened up ahead and the faster I could move through them, with steadily deepening appreciation. Insofar as our schools do not prioritize and promote this sort of growth that feeds on itself—or worse, if they alienate students and steer them away from it—I consider this a fundamental and tragic failure.

This failing can't be measured in terms of the “investment value” of learning to think and write, as if there were no more to our short time on earth except maximizing a pile of money. If it really were so simple we would not spend so much on SUVs, sports, or travel. Let’s be clear, all those things could also be declared useless and targeted for austerity. We are asking about what is worth paying for. However, writing well (if you’re a worker) or having well-educated workforce (if you’re a boss) has value even when measured purely on economic grounds. There are good reasons I was taught to be proud of our country’s high levels of literacy and fine research schools, especially compared to more impoverished parts of the world. Now it seems like we’re trying to catch up with these countries in a race to the bottom.  

Emphatically, I've watched higher education get worse during my lifetime, choked out by competing priorities. Republican policies and propaganda are surely not the least guilty, but there are plenty other people to blame, too, including superfluous deans who despise Trump as they suck up resources and crush students’ and teachers’ joy. We can also find pure greed inside and outside of Trump World in the form of saddling students with outrageous debt. Rising costs and predatory debt means that—although there is no shortage either of engaged students or excellent classroom niches still reasonably sheltered from the storm—more and more young people cannot afford to take advantage.  

I won’t get into much more analysis here, since this problem has many layers. Things do vary a lot across different scholarly fields and from school to school. Some of my earlier pieces go deeper into parts of the whole, especially this one and also this other one and this additional one.  

Weeding Out the Unproductive Dad Brains

Part of my question is what sort of scholar can survive a war of all against all in the academic job market. By the time I retired, I was advising all but my most brilliant and motivated students that their dreams of finding a good niche on a university faculty—that’s as opposed to the proliferating contingent faculty appointments that barely pay a living wage—was probably false hope. It was too much like dreaming about making the Olympic team and afterward leveraging a life-time career from it. Winning such a competition can be equally alienating as the routine of an Olympic gymnast, barely eating while stuck in a gym eight hours a day honing some hyper-specialized skill.     

Can a scholar be some sort of “Swiss army knife” and still thrive? When the race is like an Olympic trial and even the smallest disadvantage will cause even the best athlete to miss the cut, the odds tilt sharply against scholars if their (perceived) diffuse interests mark them as “unproductive” compared to dozens of competitors.  And note well, this is emphatically not about who would be the best teacher.    

Excellent breadth and depth in intellectual interests and skills— curiosity, relevant bibliographies crossing more than one discipline, a well-stocked toolbox of methods and cultural theory, and an aptitude for synthetic contextualization, comparison, and contrast— was what I assumed I should strive for, over many years of study, to prepare for teaching in a public university. This a major reason that Ph.D’s typically take longer than it takes to prepare doctors, lawyers, and MBAs. I do believe my breadth helped me land a good job— but did it help more than the same effort with a narrower focus would have helped? It's hard to say.  

Once I had my job, I was distressed when I was expected to teach units of survey classes about things I didn’t know well. Moreover, I didn’t think I should offer upper level courses at a top university unless I was publishing on their subjects. Accordingly I thought it was common sense, when choosing research projects and planning an interesting rotation of courses in my teaching areas, that developing this sort of publishing breadth went beyond something to take pride in. It was a basic minimum that I should be ashamed not to do.

Me and my Dad Bod in a classroom

Over time I discovered that many of my colleagues did not think this way. Rather I came to perceive that, in their eyes, I was falling amid various sorts of ineptitude. Was I a chump for not cutting more corners in teaching preps and giving too much feedback to students? Was I too unfocused to be a top scholar, since “generalist” expertise was non-serious? Was I letting down my team in a war of all departments against all other departments?  Even in settings when colleagues appreciated parts of my “army knife,” this seemed to come with executing a losing game plan toward the Holy Grail of maximizing publications and citations as the top expert in some fairly delimited area— a star who could keep his/her name in circulation by publishing variations on the same book over and over. 

In short, what I had at first been proud to consider commendable breadth, enabling minimum nuance when teaching and writing on specific foci, increasingly seemed like… well…being “B-minus to B” in a bunch of things my school didn’t want to pay me for. I’m not ashamed of my choices, and in most cases I would not undo them even if I could. But the incentives of our universities do not prioritize these goals. More often they weed you out if you prepare this way, and if you still get in the door they might penalize you.   

Why My Point Is Not “Poor Me, an Undiscovered Jokić”  

Yikes, does it sound like I’m whining, saying that I should have been voted MVP but instead I flunked a vertical jump test and never got drafted? That’s not the point. I never even wanted to play in the fastest lanes. Also, my breadth did help me, both to get me into lanes that were fast enough and to keep me interested in my life.   

Sure, I wouldn’t mind certain kinds of appreciation. It is a fact that many sub-sections in my books, as well as some of my barely-read articles, have stronger arguments than some of the far more famous books they comment on. Sometimes I am sad that these didn’t get more traction. Maybe if I had tried to be an A-plus player in one sport rather than half-decent at three, they would made more impact—although some of my arguments gained their value in the first place because of the breadth I brought to them. Anyway, enough of this—it’s not where I intended to go with this train of thought.  

Mainly I wanted to promote the idea that one need not be an A-plus athlete of academia—say, spending one's whole life becoming the world’s most cited expert on Bob Dylan or how dozens of rabbis interpreted two verses in Deuteronomy—to bring a recommendable all-around game.  

From Faculty to Students 

Let's circle back to students, who also need curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, historical knowledge for contextualizing and comparing, and persuasive skills in speaking and writing. Education for these goals is embattled today.    

No doubt, insofar as our culture narrows the goals of education to instrumental career paths—chosen overwhelmingly for cash payout—the approach I’m championing does come into question. It does cost money. If spend that money badly we will only alienate students instead of inviting them in. Just as some business models suggest firing a lot of staff and forcing customers to interact with call centers and chatbots, large parts of education are now exploring just how much of our kids’ first two decades we could force into comparably “efficient” hellscapes. Meanwhile the football team and its new stadium also cost money, as does paying A-list entertainers big money for concerts, as does helping our kids play a sport or a musical instrument.  What do we value enough to pay for, even if this doesn't maximize profit?  Why shouldn't our values include fewer tax breaks and corporate welfare schemes for billionaires? Why shouldn’t it enable a breadth of intellectual horizons and reading/writing skills? If we can pay for healthy food, why not pay for a healthy brain? Even on economic grounds this makes sense, not to speak of the common good and everyone's quality of life.

If our culture approaches this too instrumentally— as a dog-eat-dog battleground for jobs, as an instrumental marketplace to seek the cheapest version of some economic credential with the lowest effort, as a space for indoctrination by whatever powers control the government and/or the board of trustees—this is a huge loss.  

Let's go with the happy version of this rant suggested by the Times article. Perhaps one can be on the road toward “elite”— even if not to the NBA finals or an endowed chair at Harvard—with all-around intellectual breadth. Perhaps we could feel good about paying for this with time and money, just as we pay for basketball tickets, restaurants, and gym memberships. We don't need to be the sort of people who say “why go out if I can open a can of beans? Why pay for a gym if I can do pushups on the floor?  Why know anything if I can ask Siri?”  

Just as it’s more fun to have a body that can drink a beer now and then, without needing to be in the gym four hours each day, it is so much more enjoyable and interesting this way.