It’s a new year in academe, and we mark the occasion with convocation, gathering the scholarly community to welcome our initiants and rededicate ourselves to the shared pursuit of truth. Every year I nod enthusiastically to the wisdom bestowed from the dais: Be curious. Ask questions. Forge relationships. Seize opportunities. And for goodness sake, show up to class. 

And yet, I can’t help but feel there is advice our students need to hear but is left unsaid. Were I to deliver a convocation address, my advice would be this: Go dig a ditch.

As I was growing up, there was a saying in our family: “Get your education or you’ll be digging ditches for the rest of your life.” Many in my extended family, the men in particular, made a living by breaking their bodies. They labored in a wide range of industries, but the thing they have in common is worrying that their backs will give out before their retirement accounts do. 

These elders wanted something better for my generation: the kind of comfort that comes from achieving financial security through desk work. And so, at a time when our broader society assured everyone that a college degree was the meal ticket to a seven-course life, my loved ones took it upon themselves to characterize working-class labor as the punishment for a failing grade.

The admonition – Get your education or you’ll be digging ditches for the rest of your life! – was nevertheless incongruent with my kinsmen’s relationship to their own work. Every errand in my dad’s ‘84 Ford Ranger was also a local tour of his craftsmanship: “I replaced that roof,” “I did that siding job,” “I built that family-room addition.” 

That pride in the product of a hard day’s work is not the only hitch in my family’s story. The promise of economic mobility by degrees is no longer guaranteed. Eldest among my siblings, I’ve accumulated the most wallpaper with a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees, followed by my youngest brother holding an associate’s and our two middle brothers having left college to pursue some combination of manufacturing and military service. The dirty secret is that they are all either earning more money than me or are on their way to doing so. (The youngest, a heavy equipment mechanic seventeen years my junior, got a larger bonus by winning his company’s holiday raffle than I received by earning tenure and promotion.) All the while, they are doing literally earth-moving work while I await a pink slip from ChatGPT.

Then there’s the matter of ditch-digging itself – the meanest of menial labor – exhausting, dirty, literally de-grading, at times even dangerous. On the surface, ditch-digging seemingly offers nothing to the life of the mind we’re all here to pursue. 

My loved ones took it upon themselves to characterize working-class labor as the punishment for a failing grade.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover an entire syllabus on ditch-digging, beginning with canals that irrigated the Fertile Crescent 6,000 years ago, hydrating an agricultural revolution to which we owe 90% of the calories we still consume today. 

It didn’t take long for our forebearers to recognize that if you can dig ditches to move water, you can move other stuff on the surface, spurring the history-shaping technology of modern-day canal transportation. There’s no better teacher of the mechanical advantage of simple machines than liberating a hunk of granite from Pennsylvania red clay: screw = auger, wedge + lever = shovel, wheel + axle + fulcrum + lever = wheelbarrow. 

Digging is so critical to military survivability that it has its own chapter in a 2009 NATO technical report, and the biomechanical demands of digging inspire innovation from the earliest simple machine – the digging stick – to today’s autonomous flying excavators. 

But I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing digging to your robot replacement just yet, lest you miss an encounter with the earth’s most wondrously biodiverse environment: the soil, home to nearly 60% of known species on the planet. Woven through that biome is more than four million fiber optic route miles of bundled glass threads thinner than a strand of hair that move the data that moves the world as subterranean pulses of light. 

Agriculture, biology, physics, physiology, engineering, industry, and information technology: civilization is built on a tapestry of hollowed ground that exists thanks to the noble work of ditch-digging.

But let’s not merely intellectualize ditch-digging. One of the risks you run in pursuing your education is developing a habit of holding the world at arm’s length as a specimen to be pinned down and studied rather than an invitation to experience. I don’t just want you to think about ditches – I want you to seriously consider digging one, should the right opportunity arise. 

It’s only by digging a ditch that you’ll come to realize that work which appears strictly physical can actually present intellectual challenges. Ditch-digging, like other forms of labor, is really a series of problems to solve, and the more back-breaking the labor, the more challenging the problems, and the more important the quality of their solutions. 

You’ll also discover that as you carve into the earth, the earth carves into you: working is the original working out, and physical labor like ditch-digging involves complex functional movements that the best HIIT routine can only approximate. Ditching exercise can also be good for your diet: a lucky digger will ingest incidental amounts of soil caught under her fingernails or flung into her face, at which point some beneficial bugs will migrate from ground to gut, joining the microbial community comprising half-to-90% of the cells making up the average human and affecting everything from our metabolism to our mood. I know you are here to do amazing things with your mind – those worthy goals are only furthered by nurturing your body.

The degree isn’t a ladder rung, but a fork in the canal. It doesn’t guarantee ascendancy, but it does create opportunity, giving you options you wouldn’t otherwise have.

I feel blessed that ditch-digging is something I can do for fun and not survival. Like the Nobel prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney, I traded in my heritage of manual labor to earn my keep with my mind. In his poem, “Digging,” Heaney memorializes his family’s roots in tubers and turf while explaining he exchanged his spade for a pen: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” When a colleague noticed that the letter labels are worn off of nearly half of my laptop keys, I told her that was my equivalent of callouses on my hands; that just because I work with my mind, doesn’t mean I don’t work hard. 

And if, like me, you’re here thinking that a college degree is a rung on the ladder of economic mobility, I want to offer you a different metaphor: the degree isn’t a ladder rung, but a fork in the canal. It doesn’t guarantee ascendancy, but it does create opportunity, giving you options you wouldn’t otherwise have. 

Look at the person next to you: current studies suggest that one of you will land a job that requires your degree, and the other will not. And – assuming you haven’t dug yourself into a student debt-hole – that’s entirely ok. You can’t waste a college education by earning money in an unrelated field. The only way to waste a college education is by reducing it to a means of making money in the first place.