*This dream is a post-project artifact, courtesy of Emily Steinberger.
“My mom told the story that her father said that they would spend money to send my uncle Tom to Penn State. But my mom, as a woman, could go to the local school. And going to college, it’s a great privilege anyway, but that really affected her. And so she pushed that forward. And she she did get her masters of divination and became a pastor, so had an advanced degree.
She stressed the importance of education and reading and learning broadly about all these different things. And she was really, really proud. Well, I got into Cornell and I got my Ph.D. That’s what drives me – my mom’s desire for the strong women to achieve things.
This room reminds me of the people who came before. I’m lucky to have some artifacts from my grandfather. And when my mom and my grandmother died, I inherited things from them as well. And I work in here – this is my my home office, which is an incredible luxury. But it reminds me that the work that I’m
doing here is because of them.
“This room reminds me that everything that I have, it’s because of them.”
And they again, they suffered. They worked. They grieved. They lost. They died. And it brought me here. None of my grandparents got to see this house or this room. They don’t know that’s here. My mom passed away a couple of years ago, so she doesn’t know it’s here. My dad has Alzheimer’s, so he doesn’t always remember that I have this room. But I do. And this room reminds me that everything that I have, it’s because of them.
I go back to my grandfather, who was born in Canada and then they immigrated to the U.S. after an illness devastated the family. They lost a lot of people, so they came to Connecticut. And my grandpa Ben was very scrappy.
He didn’t have much, but he met and fell in love with my grandmother, and my great grandfather — my grandmother’s father — told my grandfather that a foreigner cannot marry his daughter, so he had to become a U.S. citizen. And then World War II hit him. So he enlisted… and through that became an American citizen.
So he survived the war, ended up marrying my grandmother, and he still doesn’t have a lot of education. He didn’t hold highly skilled positions. He lived to have three children who grew up, got married, had children. They had good careers. He got to see that.
And so that was his American dream, to build that for the rest of us. So I think about the American Dream as making those connection, building something that’s, yes, good for you, but good for others.
I think about the myth of the American dream that, you know, you can come to America and through hard work and independence, you can achieve anything. And that’s lovely, and while that could potentially happen, I think our experiences are bounded by the systems and structures and the people with whom we interact.
So it’s never purely independent. It’s never without a bit of luck, without in someone else’s interaction or intervention. I think that myth the American dream is myopic. Because it’s much bigger than any person.
I teach organizational behavior and we teach how organizations are built to be stable. Any significant change is slow to happen. If we look at America as a large organization, which may be a simplification, but overarching the structure is there. So if we think about that, the change to society is going to take so achingly long.
But there are all these conversations that are growing and becoming more mainstream where there’s people, more people questioning economic disparity and race disparity and gender disparity and saying, how can we address this in our structures? Like we have this American dream, we have this idea that people can be successful and build things and be entrepreneurial.
But we have structures in place that stop that. And that’s not going to go away soon. But we have to have those conversations now. Otherwise, the change is never going to happen and it’s going to be incremental. It’s going to be despairingly slow. But I don’t think that should stop us from having those conversations and demanding that change takes place.”