The announcement stunned the room. In a single moment, Columbia University shattered tradition—and rewrote what it means to be a professor. Michael J. Fox, armed not with a PhD but with decades of pain, grit, and world-changing advocacy, stepped up as its first Professor of Optimism and Resilience. This isn’t a celebrity vanity title. It’s a radicall… Continues…
What Columbia has done with Michael J. Fox’s appointment is more than a headline; it is a reordering of academic values. By placing a man who has visibly wrestled with Parkinson’s at the center of a new discipline, the university declares that surviving—honestly, imperfectly, publicly—is itself a form of scholarship. His courses on neuroplasticity and hope will not romanticize struggle; they will map it, interrogate it, and turn it into a usable toolkit for students who know, or soon will know, what it means to be broken and still moving.
In Fox’s office, resilience stops being a motivational poster and becomes a practice: laughing in the middle of fear, designing “impractical” joy, daring to imagine a future when the present feels unbearable. Columbia is betting that this kind of instruction can change not just how we study the brain, but how we carry our own lives. If they’re right, the real exam won’t be graded on paper. It will be graded years from now, in hospital corridors, research labs, and quiet apartments where someone chooses, against all evidence, to believe that tomorrow is still worth fighting for.