The teacher who changed your life

A long-standing philosopher and university rector is sitting before a camera to speak about thresholds. They ask him what it means to cross one and, before responding with his own thoughts, he does something very few adults do: he quotes his professor. "As my master Rafael Alvira used to say, one can only return home. All other places, you just go back to." Higinio Marín says this, like someone opening a door that has been well-oiled for decades. Later in the journey, he will do it again: he had a professor who said that the only thing a philosopher cannot utter is "that's it, nothing more."

There lies the measure that no questionnaire captures. A professor changed a life when, decades later, the student still begins sentences with "as my master used to say." The master might not have been famous; it is enough that he left inside a phrase that still works.

This piece is a tribute to those teachers, on both shores of the language. In Argentina, they were celebrated just a few days ago: on September 11, 1888, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento died in Paraguay. He was the president during whose six-year mandate some eight hundred schools were founded, as remembered by the museum that bears his name; a conference of ministers of education meeting in Panama in 1943 made that date the Teacher's Day of the continent. For the entire world, the date is October 5: World Teachers' Day commemorates the Recommendation that the ILO and UNESCO adopted in Paris on that day in 1966. This year marks its sixtieth anniversary, and UNESCO has chosen as its theme the protection of the status of the profession in a rapidly changing world. A good occasion for a question that is almost never asked seriously: how many had that professor? And, above all, what does having them depend on?

Fourteen out of every hundred

In 2014, Gallup and Purdue University surveyed more than thirty thousand American college graduates to find out what college experiences still carried weight in adult life. We already shared in this notebook the most famous finding of that study: where you studied hardly matters; how you studied matters, and only 22% had a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals. What we had not shared is the complete figure. Gallup asked about three things at once: a professor who made them excited about learning, a professor who cared about the student as a person, and a mentor who encouraged them. Those who answered yes, with conviction, to all three were 14%.

Fourteen out of every hundred. For that group, according to the researchers themselves, the odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did the odds of flourishing in all dimensions of well-being that Gallup measures. The data was collected between February and March 2014 with a margin of error of less than one point, and it is one of the most solid aggregate measures of something we all knew by hearsay: the professor who changes a life exists and leaves a measurable mark. Its flip side is less pleasant. Eighty-six out of every hundred did not have them, or do not remember them as such.

Four years later, the same polling firm, now with the Strada Foundation, revisited the issue with another five thousand recent graduates and a new question: when there was a mentor, who was it? The answer should be hung on the door of every faculty. In 64% of cases, a professor. The next category, university staff, did not even reach 10%. And a detail that is read carefully here, as it could lend itself to triumphalism: of the professors who acted as mentors, 43% taught arts and humanities; 9% taught business. Perhaps the humanities invite that relationship; perhaps also those who study them are the ones who seek it most. The figure does not settle anything, but it paints a picture.

The lottery is biased

It is worth saying now what these data do not say. They are memories: graduates looking back and rating their professors from the life they have today. Those who flourish tend to remember with more tenderness those who helped them; those who do not, tend to forget them. The correlation is firm and the causal arrow, as always, more timid than the headline. No honest person can promise that an attentive professor doubles anyone's well-being.

And there is a piece of data from the 2018 study that is more uncomfortable than all the previous ones. Among white graduates who had a mentor, 72% point to a professor; among minority graduates, 47%. Among those who were the first in their family to attend university, the figure also drops. The life-changing professor is not distributed at random. It is a lottery, and the lottery is biased. It goes more to those who arrive with the code of the place learned at home, to those who know they can go to the office, to those who do not feel like they are asking too many questions. The others, who are often those who would need it most, pass through the university without anyone looking at them closely.

No one is blaming the professors. A system is being described that leaves the most important encounter of the university to the chance of the hallways. And from there comes the question that sustains this piece: can a university make that encounter stop being a matter of luck?

What a professor cannot delegate

José María Torralba, an ethics professor who has spent years leading great books seminars with groups of fifteen or twenty readers, shares a scene that marked him in one of his classes on the journey. At a conference on how to educate young people, a speaker had just explained that the educator's task is to help people grow. The floor was opened for questions and a professor with students in his charge asked to speak to doubt aloud: is it really possible that I, with my training and age, am capable of educating another person? Because educating in that deep sense means entering into their intimacy. Torralba confesses that the question made him doubt too.

The answer was found in Natalia Ginzburg and in a 1962 essay titled, like the book, "The Little Virtues." The Italian writer argues that children should be taught the big virtues and not the little ones: generosity before saving, frankness before cunning. And she adds the idea that Torralba highlights and which serves here as a definition: education is nothing more than a certain relationship and a certain climate in which feelings, instincts, and thoughts flourish. A climate made only of little virtues, Ginzburg warns, matures without anyone noticing toward cynicism or toward the fear of living.

If that is educating, the question of that professor has an answer. No one shapes anyone, but anyone can be the climate for another for a semester, and a climate is remembered for a lifetime. This is what the 1966 text asked of teachers when speaking of "personal responsibility for the education and welfare" of their pupils, with a revealing exception: that Recommendation stopped at secondary education. University faculty were left out and it took thirty-one years, until 1997, to have their own text. As if in the university, responsibility for the person were a private virtue of some professors and not a condition of the profession.

The class of this day

Higinio Marín returns, because he has the phrase that describes the 14% professor from within. He speaks of how the meaning of a life is played out in what one has in front of them now and not on a distant horizon, and he illustrates this with his own profession: one becomes present in what one does when putting in the effort, he says, "entirely free and gratuitous, lavish," so that the class of this day turns out to be his best. Lavish: spending more than the task requires. The professor who is remembered is remembered for that. He prepared for thirty students what would have sufficed for three hundred. He stayed behind when finished. He asked once, without an agenda, how everything was going.

In Sarmiento's years, eight hundred schools were founded, and the number is astonishing. But the generation that named a day after him did not remember the buildings: they remembered the teachers who filled them, one by one, with the class of that day. Institutions are founded by decree. Climate is not.

Ally, not auditor

A few weeks ago, we shared here how TheNomba understands the figure of the professor-mentor: the university's own professors sign up on the platform as mentors to their students, with their tracking panel and their notes. On Teachers' Day, it is worth saying why it was designed this way. It would have been easier to bring in external mentors. The opposite was decided because the data in this piece leaves no other honest way out: if the encounter that changes a life occurs in a classroom and with a professor from the institution in two out of three cases, the last thing a university needs is for someone from the outside to take it away. What it needs is for that encounter to stop depending on luck and hallways; for it to have an hour, a reason, and a deep conversation.

That is what a humanities itinerary can offer the professor: no audit of their work and a good excuse. The student who arrives at the office because they have just read Aristotle on friendship, or because a class on wonder has stirred something in them, no longer asks too many questions: they bring Ginzburg's climate with a schedule. And the professor who used to stay behind when finished finally has an official reason to stay. The rest they do themselves, as they always have. No one promises that everyone will flourish this way; no one can. What can be done is that the 14% stops being a coincidence and starts being a decision.

There remains the tribute, which is what is fitting today. Anyone reading this has a name in mind since the first paragraph. Perhaps they were not the most brilliant of the faculty; almost certainly they spent too much. If they are still alive, this is a good day to write to them. And if whoever is reading this teaches, the question is more uncomfortable and more beautiful: of how many students are you, right now, the name?

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.