My father and his father, Alva Thomas Bradley, at work on the farm.
Updated: Sunday, November 14, 2010, 1-:48 a.m.: Several (although likely not all) typos corrected.
Opportunity: It’s not nearly as evenly distributed as you might think.
I have a wonderful life. I am married to my best friend; I have wonderful children; and I have a great job.
Much of this owes to the fact that I had the ridiculously good fortune to have been born in the late 20th Century in America. But it doesn’t have nearly as much to do with that narrative would have you believe.
I will always believe that I have disproportionately benefitted from being born as a white male. I didn’t always believe that, of course.
My father’s father completed the fourth grade. He drove a truck for Sinclair Refining, and he operated a family farm for much of his life.
My father, his son, made it to the ninth grade before heading to the South Pacific to serve in the Army. There, however, he met an officer who implored him to get an education (my dad and I have not had this conversation in years, but I am pretty sure his name was Turner). That was not enough. DNA may have given him the talent, and his commanding officer may have provided the motivation, but the G.I. Bill provided the means.
If you’re scoring at home, that’s a government program. An entitlement, if you will. One that by some estimates is the most profitable investment that the U.S. government has ever made.
Progressively better
My father as a young man.
My dad trained to be a television engineer, but the FCC mandated a freeze on TV licenses, so in 1949 when he graduated, dad (also named Sam Bradley) headed for KCHS-AM in Hot Springs, New Mexico (later named Truth of Consequences).
Dad climbed the career latter, eventually eschewing radio for the more lucrative field of advertising but not until he had built his own radio station, KSLI, and served as president and general maanger.
My life was easier. By the time I was ready to be enrolled in school, my parents’ fledgling agency was making money, and we had moved to the Kansas City suburbs.
But Kansas City public schools are and were a complete mess.
So they invested money that they didn’t have and enrolled me in Pembroke Country Day School. It was perhaps the defining moment in my life (read more about that here).
There I received a world class education, and those early years provided the foundation that has served me so very well.
Never one to make things easy
Despite having every opportunity and advantage, I am both blessed and cursed with an overwhelming suspicion of authority.
Rules chafe my soul, and my tendency to rail against them as a young man caused problems.
When I was relatively young, my dad made me watch Scared Straight, a remake of a late 1970s documentary about kids and prison. As I recall it, they took a bunch of inner city kids into jails to scare them into staying out of trouble.
Well, this narrative fit well with my existing personality traits, and I have always been terrified of going to jail We’ll never know what proportion of the variance is owed to the documentary, but I never wanted anything to do with jail or prison.
So, looking back, my teen and pre-teen years were largely devoted to getting in an much trouble as possible without ever getting into real trouble.
I lived on the line. But I knew where it was, and I never crossed it.
In hindsight, I did a remarkable job. We were about as obnoxious as kids can possibly be without ever even seeing a pair of handcuffs.
Authority always wins
Even though we managed to stay out of big trouble, my general mischievousness combined with my contempt for authority began to accumulate.
And by my sophomore year in high school, my hijinks were compiling.
Early in the academic year, I joined some friends for a joyride off campus during a break in classes. We got caught, and it was against the rules. Only seniors were allowed off campus.
I got in trouble for perhaps the dumbest thing I have ever done, which I shan’t belabor here. Suffice it to say, not everything they do in professional wrestling is, indeed, fake. I was stupid. I could have hurt someone, and I regret it deeply. I don’t regret my punishment, however, which was to go to the University of Kansas Medical Center library and look up what the potential health consequences might have been. That visit just might have planted a seed.
Many months after my first off-campus foray, we ventured off campus again. I was actually pretty paranoid about this, and I had an admirable track record of towing the line. But it was spring, the weather was warm, and the open road called.
We got caught. First time in months. But we got caught. At least I got caught. I cannot even recall my co-adventurers.
And all of this is a lesson, too, as I had supplied an axe to grind to the teacher who turned me (us?) in.
So I got a one-day in-school suspension — the first and only in my life — and this poured gasoline on my anti-authority fires.
Didn’t even know who Timothy Leary was
Today, just about two decades later, I am powerfully humbled by how right I thought I was. I thought that I had the world figured out.
I was convinced that I had the world pegged.
How woefully wrong I was.
But stubborn has always been something I do well.
So I decided to drop out of high school after the 10th grade. An elite, expensive private school, and I was ready to walk away. I was convinced that the “system” could not be changed from the inside, and I was convinced that I could change it from the outside.
Again, how stupid I was.
Of course, my parents, friends, and loved ones waged an epic battle to show me the error of the ways.
But I was stubborn. And, hey, my dad quit high school, and he had a big house, nice car, and a successful business.
I repeat: I was an idiot.
So fall 1989 began my time as an outsider. Fighting the system from the outside. Sixteen and stupid with my own apartment.
I took a job running delivery for a message service in Kansas City, and as I love to drive, this was fun for a week or two. You see, in addition to hating authority, I hate repetitive tasks.
To his credit, my amazing father reached out to me. Despite my attempts to poison the blood between us, my father and mother encouraged me to come back to work for them at the advertising agency, where I had worked part-time since I was 12. I did, and we remain close to this day.
Didn’t see that coming
Not long after I returned to the family business — where at the time I saw my career playing out — fate caught up with me.
Unethical, despicable people reneged on business deals with the agency, and it crumbled. Make no mistake, that agency fell at the hands of liars and thieves.
But if my dad had been through the rigors of an MBA program, I’m guessing he would have done things differently. My father is the most decent person I know. He trusted people. And I can only imagine that his kind of optimisim would have been bludgeoned out of him in an MBA program. But that’s just surmising.
So all of a sudden, I needed a Plan B and fast!
There were some life lessons along the way, but rather than fighting the system, I realized that I needed an education.
And that’s where we return to opportunity. In 1991 in America, if you had any modicum of ability and a little money to pay, there were educational opportunities for you.
Thus, at the same time I would have if I hadn’t dropped out, I looked to enroll in college.
Not growing up in a college family, I literally knew nothing about it. The University of Kansas was just down the road, so I gave them a call (remember, no Internet in 1991).
I had missed the deadline to apply. So I called Johnson County Community College, and so began the great adventure of my lifetime.
Here again, opportunity was important. I had the good fortune of living about 12 miles from one of the top community colleges in the nation. And I happen to have tried to correct my mistakes in an era before rampant tuition inflation.
Give or take, my first semester’s tuition was about 100 hours of work at minimum wage. Money was tight after the agency folded, but this was doable.
For comparison, although JCCC is quite affordable today, tuition is about 155 hours of minimum wage, according to their Web site and some simple division. I’m not sure I could have afforded that.
Great Western adventure
Shortly after beginning at JCCC, my dad took a job in Phoenix. So in July 1992, we moved. My future wife moved with us, but that’s a story for another day.
Again, amazing opportunity shined upon me.
My dad found a place to live, which, it just so happened, was four miles from Paradise Valley Community College, a then basically brand new facility with great instructors.
As I had missed the KU deadline, we had missed the Arizona State deadline. So I headed to the affordable PVCC and got a great education. Again, we were lucky to have an opportunity at our feet.
When we had amassed all of the credit hours we could at community college, we set off for New Mexico State, not for any academic reasons but for rainbows, sunsets, and because my dad had lived there a half century before and had instilled a love of the Land of Enchantment.
There I continued to take advantage of the American educational system, which allows one to rise to the height of their own abilities.
And although my dad had very little information to offer about the specifics of college, he always espoused a love for education, so I intuitively felt that it was important.
My community college classes were small, and kind professors were willing to talk to me. I asked a lot of questions. I found out what it meant to earn a Ph.D., what a dissertation was, and a lot about navigating higher education.
I found mentors in Las Cruces who were willing to help an eager student, an eagerness that I understand so well today as a professor myself.
Better to be lucky than good
But all of this was built upon a foundation of opportunity. My excellent education during those early years taught me well. I’m ridiculously adept at standardized tests, and when an NMSU mentor encouraged me to take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), I had little time to prepare but still did very well.
Those GRE scores (and my 3.93 college GPA that was altogether unlike my dismal high school GPA) were my ticket to the world in a system that still values ability.
Four years and three months after I graduated from NMSU, I enrolled as an Ivy League doctoral student at Cornell University. I transferred to Indiana, but that, too, is a story for another day.
So I live in America, where an idiot 16-year-old can drop out of high school and enroll as a funded doctoral student in the Ivy League 12 years later.
And I’m not sure that this is that same America. I’m overwhelmingly confident that it won’t be in another 12 years.
Bootstraps are an opportunity, too
Me with three of my graduate students: Jessica Freeman, Wes Wise, and Nikki Toulouse.
It’s easy to want to tell my story as one of me being down and pulling myself up by my own bootstraps.
But I fundamentally believe that’s not the Sam Bradley story.
Instead, I am the grandson of a man who died before I was born. A man who believed in being decent and good. A man with a textbook example of what we call the protestant work ethic.
That man had a son, whom he named Samuel David Bradley II after his own father.
That boy was born in 1928 when American was about to plunge into the worst economic times of its existence.
He watched his dad work 12 hour days and still tend to the farm. He learned to work hard. And he doubled his father’s education.
As a child, he had the incredible good luck to visit the World’s Fair in New York, an experience that I believe shaped him. Technology was exploding, and my dad would later train to be a radio engineer.
My dad suffered the reoccurring news of his friends dying in World War II, and he enlisted the day that he could. Here, too, he had good fortune, being born just late enough to never face major hostilities.
In the Philippines, he somehow earned the admiration of his commanding officer. This was before the Civil Rights era, and it’s hard to imagine the exact same relationship would have existed if my dad had been African American.
And somehow, that commanding officer motivated my dad to continue his education.
And there’s no way that I’m a professor at a large research university if that bond did not take hold.
The G.I. Bill made that education possible. There’s no way my grandparents could have afforded it.
With an education, my father and mother moved into the middle class. They started a business.
My dad was 45 when I was born and dubbed Samuel David Bradley III.
He already had stumbled a few times along the way. But I inherited his name, his (and his father’s) work ethic, and his passion for education.
I had opportunity galore, and I still tried pretty hard to squander it. But opportunity so abounded during my formative years that I profitted despite myself.
I’m not dreaming
And it would be easy to think I’m yet another instance of the American Dream. But I say, “no.”
The American Dream is a nice story, but true rags to riches stories are so rare as to be nonexistent. It’s a fairy tale.
Instead my story is a story of three generations (really more), each approximately doubling the education of the generation before. There’s lots of hard work, but there’s lots of luck, too.
If my dad got stuck in the infantry rather than a communications office, my world would be different. Very different.
My parents had the capital to send me to an expensive private school.
All of which gave me the opportunities that I have today.
And that is an opportunity built upon entitlements (G.I. Bill) and government subsidies (the in-state tuition rates that made college possible for me).
Not only did I go to an expensive private school, my parents had white collar jobs, so we lived close to good community colleges. The type of community college that draws an (ironically) Cornell-educated engineer to teach a math class in the evening in Phoenix, Arizona. The type of community college that has small classes, so I got to know that instructor. The type of instructor who takes interests in his students and helped at least one get a good job in a new town to keep paying that tuition.
To believe that this story is about me is to miss the point entirely. This story is about opportunity. The type of opportunity that dies when we pull back public funding of higher education, as we are so dramatically doing now.
My daughters have an obvious leg up, as most of the adults in their lives have graduate degrees. They have an opportunity to understand college better than I ever did. They’ve been in more college classrooms than most freshmen (that’s a joke … kind of).
But for the Sam Bradleys of 2011, I don’t know what awaits. The cost barriers are far higher. Some projections of state funding for higher education in 2020 hit almost zero.
My parents greatly subsidized our cost-of-living during the undergraduate years. It would not have been possible without them. But we still paid our own tuition, and I guarantee you this: my wife and I could not have afforded to go to the university at which I work today. Not a chance. Tuition is far too high. Already. And given the budget crisis in Texas, it’s headed north.
The Law of Unintended Consequences lives at the forefront of my mind. And I’m direly afraid that we stand to ruin the very best thing about this nation: opportunity.
It makes me sad to think of all the stories such as this one that will never happen or be told.
Tagged as:
education,
opportunity
Photo: Students searching for their way on a college campus.
I'm a cognitive scientist and communication scholar who manages a psychophysiology lab at Texas Tech. I teach courses about the cognitive processing of media messages and research methods.