Profiles

Current Profile: Philip N. Jefferson, Professor Swarthmore College

Every evening growing up, Philip Jefferson watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. “It was a ritual in our house. My dad would come home, tired from a day of work and turn on the t.v. No noise, no fighting. We all had to be quiet and watch the news.” It was the late 1970s and the economy, inflation, and financial news filled the screen. Jefferson was beginning to think about the future, and there were two things he knew. He didn’t want to be a civil servant like his father and he didn’t want to be a manual laborer. However, “whenever I saw bankers on t.v., they were very well dressed, so I decided to become a banker.”

A banker was a world apart from his working class neighborhood in Washington, DC, but Jefferson knew it would give him the security he’d need in life. He knew too well just how quickly life could derail when you lacked the luxury of second chance. “I understood early on that it’s a very thin line between coming out ok and slipping down a slope. Read his Profile