OPINION: Greatness, Goodness, or Wisdom?

By James Lyons Walsh | November 10, 2025

Still image from the short video “Danger to Student Mental Health” shot September 8, 2025 on the podium, between the Performing Arts and Physics Buildings. 

Photo Credit: James Lyons Walsh

How does it make you feel when your university tells you to unleash greatness? Do you worry that greatness might charge off and get into mischief, maybe even landing you in court by biting someone? Do you ever lament the size of the bag you need to carry to clean up after greatness, when you could’ve been walking goodness instead?

Seriously, do you ever worry that you might not have any greatness to unleash?

I used to worry about that. My goal since I was about eight years old, back in the late 1970s, was to become a great physicist. Do people go into physics aiming to be good, rather than great? If so, they’re better than I was. I got my doctorate at UAlbany in 2020, but greatness had ceased to be my goal many years before.

Studying physics isn’t the only pursuit that brings on a maturity beyond mere adulthood. I hear parenthood can do it. I imagine that most art students who set out to be great eventually decide to be good. Greatness is far from a guarantee of goodness, and which of the two is in shorter supply? For which of the two is there a need, rather than a callow ambition?

I was thinking about these things recently, and about a senior in physics who died around final exams week in the spring of 2019. I was preparing to make a short video about the marketing poster hung steps from the Joseph Henry Physics Building and in sight of the Fine Arts Building. It advertises UAlbany’s graduate school with the tag line, “Pave the way to greatness with an advanced degree… 150+ graduate programs.”

I didn’t know John Carlos Garcia-Mendez. I don’t know why he took the walk across the podium, switching his major from fine arts to physics. I don’t know why he disappeared from campus or why his body was found in the East River. I read what his mother said about his worries over not graduating on time, but no one knows all the reasons anything happens, not even the person central to the event. I tell you this as a theorist who still works occasionally on fundamental physics and is therefore sensitive in general to issues around the limitations of our knowledge.

However, as a person fully trained in adolescence education at The College of Saint Rose back in the aughts, who has been certified to teach, unlike the great majority of UAlbany professors, administrators, and, I assume, marketers, I can see in that poster a clear threat to mental health, albeit one of a kind that abounds in our society. As a person who was once induced by ambient cultural messages to chase greatness myself, I know that exhortations from authority that promote folly, including the intentional pursuit of greatness, can be compelling.

So what am I suggesting, besides a campus dialogue on whether the university should engage in so much marketing? The fact is that greatness has its uses. I like the verdict of Zombie Marie Curie in the famous XKCD comic strip from Randall Munroe, a physics major who spurned graduate school to become an arguably great cartoonist and science communicator:

But you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

On the other hand, greatness and $7 will buy you a cup of coffee. Most people I talk to in Albany about their city’s great native son Joseph Henry start out having no idea who he was, despite Henry’s standing among the foremost scientists of the 19^th century and legacy as a key figure in discovering the laws of electromagnetism, which form a large part of the foundation for our global technological civilization. Try asking your physics professor the full name of the building in which they have an office. I’ve witnessed one of them unable to recall Henry’s first name.

For all these reasons, I’m suggesting that the UAlbany community focus on the cuteness of the Great Dane and the greatness of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and of strategy in warfare, among other things, and the other of UAlbany’s household deities. The motto that’s appeared with Minerva on the university’s seal since 1913 is “Wisdom for its own sake and for the sake of teaching.”

A rational system gives Minerva command over Mars, enabling the goddess of strategy to tell the god of war when and where to fight. Let’s worship wisdom instead of greatness and use that wisdom to decide when and whether to unleash anything else.

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Since receiving his physics doctorate from UAlbany in 2020, James Lyons Walsh has written to promote the survival prospects of our global technological civilization against multiple threats, including the thoughtless pursuit of perpetual economic growth in rich countries. His essays have appeared in the Times Union and Albany Student Press, and he is a prolific letter writer. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of Vermont, received a certificate of advanced study in adolescence education from The College of Saint Rose, and completed the Complex Systems Summer School of the Santa Fe Institute.