Doctor Esquire

If I were to write an autobiography, I’d entitle it No More Doctors. Once upon a time, I was supposed to be a doctor. Everyone else in my family of Indian-American immigrants has gone into medicine or engineering. Those fields are stable and lucrative. They involve science and years of education. But I had a unique passion that separated me from the rest of my family, a passion for the written word.

I read everything I can get my hands on, from news in The New York Times to cookbooks like Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything to self-help books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. When you read an author’s writing, you have a guest pass to his or her mind. To read voraciously is to understand other people, how they think and what makes them tick.

First I got my Juris Doctor degree, planning to become the first attorney in my family. I also got a Master of Arts in journalism that solidified my writing enough to help me pass the bar exam in Missouri after initially failing New York. 

When I got a job as an Adjunct Professor of Media Law at the University of Denver, something really clicked. I discovered a passion for teaching law. I enjoyed introducing undergraduates to new ideas, explaining difficult concepts to lay audiences, and demystifying legal jargon. My students saw me as some kind of role model because many of them had never met an attorney before. I ended up inspiring a number of my students to go on to law and graduate school, and they turned to me for recommendation letters. I served Twizzlers in office hours and Hershey’s Kisses at exam review sessions to get students to relax and open up to a mentor about whatever they were going through. I suspected that teaching was my vocation, my life’s calling.

So I decided to embark on a Ph.D. in Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The subject of my dissertation, The Problem of the Whiteness of Wealth, is the disparity in wealth between white Americans, African-Americans, and other minorities in America. The history of the black-white wealth gap is entrenched in slavery and its after-effects. These effects include the Jim Crow laws, the sharecropping landownership system, discrimination, Congress passing unfair tax laws, the almost-tenfold wealth gap, and attempts to fix it with affirmative action. I am identifying a chief socioeconomic problem of the modern era and proposing targeted solutions.

The faculty members on my committee, including Chair William Freivogel, Dr. Walter Metz, Dr. Sandra Davidson, Dr. Chifeng Dai, and Father Joseph Brown, were fabulously helpful in honing my research and writing. My dissertation support group, composed of Alicia Utecht, Hannah Travis-Judd, and myself, the three doctoral students affiliated with Newman’s Grad Student Young Adult group, motivated me to be productive in coffee shops on lazy Monday mornings. The tutors in Morris Library’s Writing Center proofread all my chapters and provided constructive feedback.

I dedicate my dissertation to the memory of my late father, Kuria Tharakan. After seeing me stumble through law school and through the bar exam, he would be very surprised to see me attaining a Ph.D. today. Ultimately, I chose to become a doctor, like the others in my family, after all – a Doctor of Philosophy. Since I am also a Juris Doctor, call me Doctor Esquire!