Professor Julian Worthington would like it noted that the leather chair in his office was here when he arrived.
“It’s actually university property,” he says, touching the armrest with the mild defensiveness of a man who has recently written about extractive capitalism.
Worthington, a tenured humanities professor earning just over $200,000 a year at prestigious Eastborough University, studies inequality, precarity, dispossession, and the moral failures of affluent societies. He has spent much of the semester thinking about how difficult this work has become for him personally.
“There are mornings when I open an article about food insecurity and I just have to close the browser,” he says. “Not because I don’t care. Because I care too much.”
He pauses. His office has three windows.
Worthington says his heightened sensitivity to global suffering became clear during a recent faculty retreat, when a colleague mentioned that hundreds of millions of people live on very little income.
“I remember thinking: My God, I am one of the people who knows that.”
He describes this as a turning point.
Since then, Worthington has tried to build “ethical practices of discomfort” into his daily routine. He no longer orders lunch from the most expensive restaurant near campus on Mondays. He has also begun flying premium economy rather than business class to conferences “when the flight is under six hours.”
His graduate students have noticed the change.
“He’s definitely more conscious now,” says one. “Last week he told us his second home was ‘more of a family place than a property.’”
Worthington rejects the suggestion that there is any contradiction between his material circumstances and his scholarship.
“That’s exactly the kind of simplistic binary we need to get beyond,” he says.
He has recently been invited to give a keynote in Geneva titled “Living Otherwise: Refusing Comfort in an Age of Radical Inequality.”
The conference hotel is five-star. Worthington sighs.
“That’s the system,” he says.