Keep an Open Mind, Work hard at Whatever you do and Life Can Get Really Interesting

Edward J. Dodson

[An essay submitted to but not printed by Crow's Nest, a publication for alumni of Shippensburg University, August, 2006]

Aristotle long ago observed that child is father to the man. Yet, in my own case, the first two decades of my life provided few insights into how I would ultimately come to live and what would become most important to me. As a teenager, I held aspirations of becoming a commercial artist. Instead, after high school I enrolled in a two-year junior college business program. Two years later, after working in the office of a trucking company, I finally returned to college, coming to Shippensburg in the Spring of 1969 with the vague goal of eventually teaching high school business courses. I finally completed my course work and a student teaching assignment by the end of 1972, receiving my degree with the class of 1973.

To be quite honest, I was far from a top academic performer. As things turned out, I decided not to enter the teaching profession. During the next four years I worked for a small firm that raised funds for real estate development. Although a low level position, I had the opportunity to learn a good deal about development and financing. From there I accepted an accounting position with another similar firm, where I was given some minor project management responsibility as well.

That firm eventually folded, but I was offered a position as a mortgage loan officer with a regional bank in Philadelphia. One of my responsibilities was to represent the bank on a board working to revitalize neighborhoods in the city. This was my first real association with people who daily faced serious financial and other challenges and who were fighting hard to prevent their communities from dying.

Nothing I had learned to that point helped me to understand why this was happening, not just in Philadelphia but in so many places around the United States. I decided that what I needed was a better understanding of economics. I hesitated from applying to graduate school. After seven years away from the classroom and now with increasing management responsibilities, I wondered whether I could make the commitment a degree program would demand. In one of those ironic moments that become life-changing, I opened the newspaper one day to find an advertisement for a “free” course in political economy at the Henry George School of Social Science. I vaguely remembered the name Henry George as an historical figure (he was a Philadelphia-born newspaper reporter and editor who taught himself political economy and became a major voice for reform at the end of the 19th century).

Henry George’s books opened my eyes to an entirely new and remarkably clear picture of the cause of widespread poverty, of business cycles, and the advance and decline of civilizations. In a very real sense, my education had only just begun. After a full year of study at the school, the director approached me about joining the faculty. Thus began a twenty-six year teaching experience during which I have been able to touch the lives and affect the thinking of hundreds of students.

Four years later I began work on a master's degree – not an M.B.A. or even in economics – but in liberal arts, then a relatively new degree program offered by Temple University.

My professional life also took an interesting turn. After merger with another (larger) bank, my entire department was eliminated. The nation’s largest mortgage loan investor, Fannie Mae, offered me a position as a credit manager, and I left the bank at the end of 1984.

I finally finished work on my masters degree in 1990, and not long thereafter moved within Fannie Mae to what became the Housing & Community Development group. Now, my work was focused on developing initiatives that would help revitalize distressed communities.

My involvement with the Henry George School brought me into contact with members of the academic community who strongly shared the perspectives Henry George had developed a century earlier. Their research confirmed (for me, at least) that the causes of modern economic and social problems remained, unresolved by all of the government programs enacted since the 1930s. Increasingly, I was invited to deliver papers at conferences on housing, banking, wealth concentration and related issues.

In 1995, I was honored to be asked to join a group of “Western” advisers invited by the Russian Duma to provide input on privatization measures then under consideration. Among this group were several eminent economists from the United States and Britain, as well as the former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsay Clark. That, certainly, was an experience I never could have predicted and will not soon forget.

After completing my graduate studies at Temple University, I began work on a book that, I hoped, would bring together all that I had learned about how the world had come to its current circumstances. The first two volumes of this book, titled The Discovery of First Principles, are published by iUniverse. A third volume is finished but not yet published.

At the end of 2004, I retired after twenty years from Fannie Mae to devote more time to teaching, writing and trying to have some influence over the direction of public policy change. When anyone asks my wife about me, her response is: “Ed is a save the world type.” She means that in a nice way, I think. Despite all of the terrible things occurring in the world, I remain optimistic because of all the really good people working very hard to make things right. So, I urge the current generation to keep an open mind, work hard at whatever you do and life can get really interesting.