Professor Sydney Engelberg was in the middle of teaching his Organizational Behavior course when all of a sudden, a baby started to cry.
Artist’s rendition. Image via Thinkstock.
The baby belonged to one of his students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
But rather than get flustered, or frustrated, or ask the student to leave, Professor Engelberg did something extraordinary…
He walked up to where the student was sitting with her daughter, soothed the baby, then picked her up and continued teaching the course like a badass.
Image by Sarit Fishbaine/Facebook.
According to Professor Engleberg’s daughter (translated from the original Hebrew): “It turns out that in all his lectures, mothers are welcome to bring and even nurse babies.“
As a grandfather himself, Engelberg gets something that too few people understand:
Being a new parent and trying to juggle school and/or work is hard. And expensive.
The United States has tried, at various points in history, to make child care more affordable for new parents, but it’s never stuck. And while this incident happened in Jerusalem (several thousands of miles away from the United States), the lesson still applies. In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama proposed subsidizing child care for working families, a sorely needed benefit for so many.
But while we wait for the wheels of politics to grind, we need more people in the world like Professor Engelberg. Like, right away.
