"They don't have a history of sending students to Princeton"

 

I once read that by the 1920s, every major mathematics department in the country allowed women to be PhD students except Princeton, which didn't grant PhDs to women until the 1970s. (Side note: female grad students at Harvard got Radcliffe degrees until the 1960s.)

One spring day in the early 1980s, in Princeton's math department Common Room, someone asked the Graduate Chair about the next entering class of graduate students. After he told us about one of the star students, we asked if Princeton had accepted any women. He told us of several women they thought about admitting but decided against.

A typical case was a student at one of the all-female Seven Sisters schools (he had trouble remembering which one). She had top grades and great letters of recommendation. Princeton rejected her because her college didn't have a history of sending students to Princeton for math grad school (not surprising since Princeton had been a men's school until recently). The Graduate Chair didn't know what these good letters and grades really meant, unlike those from all-male colleges where he knew the faculty and Princeton had an established network.

I learned from this that Princeton's history as an all-male university continued to skew its graduate admissions decisions for years after the university decided to admit women. In much the same way, the Ivy League's practice of recruiting heavily from historically all-male prep schools like Exeter and Andover continued to skew its undergraduate admissions for years after the universities went coed.

They knew the law and obeyed it

For years I had a recurring nightmare. Instead of being a professor serving on a qualifying exam or PhD thesis defense committee to grill a stressed-out graduate student, I was the student.

As I stood at the blackboard, the committee bombarded me with questions. But instead of mathematics questions, they asked:

"How old are you?"

"When did you get your undergraduate degree?"

"Where did you get your undergraduate degree?"

Once they satisfied themselves that I had gotten my degree at a sufficiently precocious age and from a sufficiently prestigious institution, they started in on more personal questions. I kept trying to bring them back to the mathematics topics I was supposed to be tested on, but they kept interrupting me with irrelevant questions. Every so often the committee would discuss how they felt about my answers.

The exam (and nightmare) ended with no math questions being asked.

While I never saw a real exam like that, the nightmare probably came from how the mathematical community evaluates people, and the contrast with what I had seen at IBM.

I spent the academic year 1988-89 on a fellowship at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights. One day, Don Coppersmith showed me the CV of an applicant for the fellowship, and asked for my opinion of it.

The first thing I did was calculate the candidate's age based on the birthdate on the CV. I remarked approvingly on how young the candidate was when he got his PhD.

Don snatched the CV out of my hand, and told me that they're not allowed to take age into account. He said it was a mistake that we saw the birthdate---HR should have removed it. 

Whenever anyone asks me about my year at IBM, I say "The main difference I saw between IBM and academia was that at IBM, they knew the law and obeyed it."

A quick way to reject a paper

The Annals of Mathematics is a journal headquartered in Princeton. While I was a grad student, an Annals editor stopped another professor on the third floor hallway in Fine Hall. The editor showed his colleague a paper that had been submitted to the Annals, and asked for his opinion. The colleague immediately turned to the page with the author's university affiliation. He remarked on the lack of prestige of that (large public Midwestern) university and concluded that, due to where it came from, the paper should be rejected since it was very unlikely to meet the high standards of the journal. The editor thanked him for his help.

The rules of the game

The next story goes well with my September 10 post "We'd love to hire a woman".

When you know the rules of the game, it's easier to win. But how do you find out the rules, and what do you do if the rules you're told aren't the real rules, or if the rules keep changing?

Lenore Blum was Deputy Director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. She found me in the MSRI library one day in May of 1993, and asked me to be on a panel of mathematicians to give career advice to a group of female undergraduate and graduate mathematics students from around the country. I told her that I'm not very good on panels (I'd much rather have time to reflect, than to feel pressured to give a quick response), so I declined.

But I attended the event as a member of the audience. Lenore was the moderator. The panelists were young female mathematicians who were visiting MSRI or nearby institutions. After the panelists had their say, Lenore turned it over to questions. When the questions petered out, Lenore called on the chair of the Berkeley math department, who was sitting next to me.

"Jack, could you please tell these students what they would have to do to become mathematics professors at UC Berkeley?" Lenore was asking for the rules of the game.

Jack's reply was something like: "They should enter Harvard at age 16, graduate summa cum laude, get a scholarship to study in England for a year, then go to Princeton for grad school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship."

The first thing that struck me was that Jack himself hadn't followed this path. The second thing that struck me was that the number of Berkeley professors who had followed that path was probably not far from zero. The third thing that struck me, in looking at the roomful of female students, was that it was already too late for any of them to follow that path. Was the quality of their future work irrelevant? I wondered to myself "are these really the rules of the game?"

Stunned, I almost didn't hear Lenore saying "Alice, could you please tell us about your career?" My first reaction was annoyance that Lenore hadn't honored my preference not to speak. But as I started to answer, I felt as if I were in a cartoon where a lightbulb turns on over my head. And I was impressed with how clever Lenore was.

I turned towards Jack, and answered Lenore's question. "I entered Harvard at age 16, graduated summa cum laude, got a scholarship to study in England for a year, then went to Princeton for grad school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship." 

You could have heard a pin drop. Then Lenore asked Jack, "Why don't you hire her?"

Jack asked me when I got my PhD, and based on my response, told me to apply to Berkeley in a couple of years.

I continued to work hard and publish. Two years later I applied for a position at UC Berkeley. I wanted the job, but I knew I wouldn't get it. So why did I apply? Because I didn't want them to have the excuse "But she never applied." I applied every year thereafter, until Paul (a Berkeley professor) told me not to apply; they were never going to hire me.

At least they didn't tell me that I hadn't followed the rules of the game.