Diving off the blocks

When I applied to college, women weren't admitted to Harvard College. Girls who wanted a Harvard education had to apply to Radcliffe College. The ratio of Harvard students to Radcliffe students in the class of 1979 was set at 2 1/2 to 1, having been allowed to rise gradually from the 4 to 1 ratio of a few years earlier.

In my sophomore year, one of my roommates asked if I could swim. She had been talked into swimming intramurally for our dorm, Quincy House. The student who talked her into it, whom I'll call K, had been a competitive swimmer in high school. To swim intramurally, K needed to put together a team of four (for the relay), all affiliated with  Quincy House. She already had three: herself, my roommate, and the secretary to the House "Master". The latter two weren't serious swimmers and hadn't swum on a team. The Master's secretary wasn't a student, but the powers-that-be had declared her eligible, to help us get to four.

While I like to swim, I wouldn't say that I'm good at it. Not only had I not swum on my high school's team, but I hadn't even realized my high school had a swim team (it didn't have a pool).

K took me to the pool to try to teach me what I needed to know. I wasn't successful at learning the butterfly. I think we eventually decided I'd be the one to do the crawl. 

K told me I'd have to dive off the starting blocks. I climbed up on the block, looked down at the water, and said, "No way! I'm afraid of heights. I can't do this." K tried cajoling and berating me, but neither one got very far with me; I can be quite stubborn. She resigned herself to letting me dive from the pool's edge.

We probably didn't do very well at the swim meet, but we had fun. It was nice that Quincy House was represented at the women's swim meet.

Quincy was one of the largest Harvard Houses. If we could barely scrape together an intramural women's swim tean, I wonder what the other Houses did.

In my senior year, I saw a call for female swimmers for intramurals, on a Quincy House bulletin board. In a fit of nostalgia I decided to take part, thinking that I'd be doing a good deed by helping them put together a team of four.

To my surprise, a ton of sophomores and juniors showed up. I asked around, and was told that these were mostly women who usually swam on the varsity team, but weren't on it that semester due to injuries or other reasons. I was embarrassed by how much slower I was than everyone else.

What changed between my sophomore and senior years? The year after mine was the first class with "gender-blind admission" (though the gender ratio took years to equalize, perhaps at least partly because Harvard continued to aggressively recruit from prep schools that were still heavily male). When the Harvard and Radcliffe admissions offices merged, it wasn't an equal merger. Essentially, the Radcliffe admissions office was devoured by the Harvard one. Radcliffe had admitted students almost purely on the basis of academic ability. Harvard College, and then the merged Harvard-Radcliffe admissions office, looked for a mixture of academic and athletic prowess. How heavily they weighed athletics hit home for me when I compared my tall, strong, athletic teammates during my senior year with the Radcliffe bookworms in the class of 1979 and earlier.

Clueless?

 I was surprised by how many friends and colleagues were getting divorced in their fifties. The reasons all seemed the same. Here's a composite from real conversations, that captures the essence of many of them:

My first contact was with him:

Him: "I was taken completely by surprise. I thought our marriage was fine."

Later, I ran into her:

Her: "The marriage had been going downhill for a long time. For years I told him that things needed to change or I would leave. I told him what I couldn't put up with. He wouldn't listen. It was as though I were talking to a wall."

The next time I saw him:

Me: "You said you were completely surprised. But she says she's been telling you for years that there were problems, and that she would leave if things didn't change. Are you saying that's not true?"

Him: "No, it's true. But she never left, so I didn't believe her."

I'm reminded of this when I think about some of the reactions to women who point out things that are illegal or problematic. When the media paid a lot of attention to a story about sexual harassment by a Berkeley professor, someone worriedly told me, "But Alice, a lot of what he did were things many of us have been doing for years."

I wanted to say (and I should have said), "Yes, we've been telling you it's wrong and should stop, but you wouldn't listen."

I'm continually astonished by the willful cluelessness of those who say "If only you had said something sooner, we would have done something about it before it came to this!"

We did say something. Over and over. (Some of my own examples are in the stories I've been posting.) We tried every possible way to tell you.

We tried being polite.
We tried being direct.
We tried being subtle.
We tried being angry.
We tried being professional.
We tried pleading and crying.
We tried being funny.
We tried being witty.

They (you?) told us we were prudish, or uptight, or overreacting, or stupid, or nagging, or lying, or crazy. They (you?) were dismissive or angry.

Some of the "surprise" at this year's protests against racism and police brutality toward Blacks strikes me as a similar kind of cluelessness. They (you?) didn't realize that the U.S. has a long history of racism? They (you?) didn't notice the years of discrimination, segregation, police brutality, protests, riots, media reports, books, and other writings that came before?

Is such cluelessness innocent and harmless, or has it been part of the problem? And what should we do about it?

How I won a tennis trophy for losing a chess game

Only three ninth-graders showed up to compete at the chess meet for junior high school kids from Queens in 1972. There were lots of seventh- and eighth-graders.

The two ninth-grade boys played each other in the first round. The winner advanced to the second round, where he played me. Other kids gathered around to watch us play, and teased my opponent about how embarrassing it would be to lose to a girl. That wasn't fun for either of us.

I lost the game.

We had to wait while the seventh- and eighth-graders went for a few more rounds. Meanwhile, the judges declared me the second place winner for the ninth grade.

I was about to tell them that we needed to use the third round time period for a runoff between me and the loser of the first round, to decide who really deserved second place. Then I hesitated. Wasn't that the job of the loser of the first round (if not the judges themselves)? It dawned on me that he might not want to risk the humiliation of losing to a girl; he'd rather finish third, and tell his friends that the judges cheated him. I rationalized that if he was too dumb or egotistical to ask for a third round, it wasn't my job to help him. I said nothing, and I've felt terribly guilty about it to this day.

If I remember correctly, the awards ceremony (for various sports, not just chess) was some weeks later, in the evening. I had to walk up on stage so the judges could hand me a rather large trophy. They apologized for the fact that the statue on top was of a man swinging a tennis racket---they didn't have any chess trophies so they gave me a tennis trophy instead. I averted my eyes when I passed the boy who got the third-place trophy.

A few weeks later I received in the mail a little engraved gold plate stating that Alice Silverberg had won second place in Queens in ninth grade chess, with instructions on how to glue it to the trophy's base. My parents and I weren't able to pry the "first [or was it third?] place in tennis" plate off the base of the trophy, so we glued the chess plate on top of it.

When friends asked me why there was a tennis player atop my chess trophy, I told them the story of how I won a tennis trophy for losing a chess game---partly as a funny story, and partly to shame myself for my bad behavior.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed playing chess with my older brother's friends. At first they thought it was cute, and they were happy to be the older and wiser teacher. But as I got better and started to beat them, they enjoyed it less. They didn't like losing to a much younger girl, even if it was only on rare occasions. 

I quit chess in high school. It wasn't fun to play with boys who felt it was humiliating for a boy to lose to a girl, and who got annoyed with me if they lost.

(revised December 28, 2020)

Frozen Hair, and Toilets in the Dark

There were three ceiling lights in the women's room on my floor of the old Math building at the Ohio State University. When a light bulb burned out, it didn't get replaced. The room had no windows, so when all three light bulbs died, it was pitch black. How did the janitors clean the women's room in the dark? I imagined them wearing spelunkers' head lamps as they cleaned the toilets. I wondered why they never reported the burned out light bulbs to the maintenance department. I learned that was my job.

The hair dryers in the women's locker room at the gym had a worse problem. There weren't many of them, and at one point all were broken. The winters in Columbus, Ohio were cold enough to freeze my hair. I wondered whether frozen hair breaks like icicles. Fixing the hair dryers seemed like a worthwhile cause.

I reported the problem a few times, but nothing happened. I eventually phoned the maintenance department. The man at the other end told me that of course they couldn't send a man into the women's locker room to fix it. I asked why they couldn't send a woman. OSU didn't employ any women who could do maintenance. Couldn't they hire a woman? No, women weren't competent enough at fixing things. I pointed out that if this was a job that could only be done by a woman, then they should hire a woman to do it, and train her if necessary. He was unimpressed.

The eventual solution didn't involve hiring women in the maintenance department. My recollection is that it involved erecting plywood walls to form a long temporary corridor from the locker room entrance to the hair dryers, for the repairmen to walk down. I don't know how they built the corridor while maintaining privacy for the women in the locker room, but the rights of women might not have been their top priority.

How I learned about the John Birch Society

 Soon after I arrived at the Ohio State University, I taught linear algebra. The person assigned to be my mentor, whom I've elsewhere called Nick Machiavell, had taught the course a lot, so before the term started I asked him for advice. Nick advised me to give the final exam on the last day of class, rather than in exam period. He said the students prefer it. Since Nick was an experienced instructor for that course, and he was my mentor, I dutifully took his advice. I wouldn't have done it had I known it was against the rules.

Three of us who were teaching different sections of the same course at the same time arranged to give the same exam on the last day of class. I was the one who got in trouble for it.

The Vice Chair for teaching who hated me (see my tribute to John Hsia), called me into his office and berated me for scheduling the final exam on the last day of classes, rather than during finals period. If the Vice Chair had told me that a student had complained, I'd have been happy to find a solution that worked for the student. But the Vice Chair refused to tell me whether a student had complained, or he had simply found a syllabus on the floor and he wanted to give me a hard time about it. He brought in his sidekick, Joe Cool, the department bouncer whose job seemed to include intimidating women, so they could do a "good cop, bad cop" routine on me.

They accused me of scheduling the exam so that I could go on vacation during exam period. I told them it wasn't true and I would be in town working for the whole exam period.

When I pointed out that two of my colleagues were doing the same thing, and asked why they weren't treating my colleagues the same way they were treating me, they asked me for my colleagues' names. Their hostility, and the way they angrily badgered me to name names, smelled sufficiently like McCarthyism that as a matter of principle I refused to divulge the names. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but I didn't want to rat out my colleagues and get them in trouble.

The Vice Chair insisted that I give the exam in the final exam period. He didn't care that some students had already bought plane tickets to leave town before then. I thought this solution at that late date was unfair to the students, so I went to the department chair to ask for a better resolution. We weren't able to agree on a better one.

The Acting Dean seemed nice---we had bowled together at the welcome picnic for new faculty---so I thought he might be a reasonable person to turn to. I phoned his office to make an appointment. His secretary told me, "He can't see you on Tuesdays, since that's the day he has his John Birch Society meetings." This felt like an odd thing to say, since I hadn't asked to see him on a Tuesday.

After we hung up, I told the story to a colleague and asked him, "What's the John Birch Society?" He explained it to me. 

We couldn't figure out why the secretary had brought up the John Birch Society. Was she trying to tell me that the Acting Dean was not sympathetic to working women, and wouldn't rule in my favor?

The Acting Dean's advice was to label the exam on the last class day as a "midterm," and give a dummy exam in finals period, worth zero points. That would follow the letter of the law (while being a waste of time). I politely told him that I thought it was absurd. 

But at least he was trying to be helpful, unlike the Vice Chair. I don't remember what I did about the exam, but I do remember that the students, the Acting Dean, and the Department Chair thought that my solution was fair.

Nick, my "mentor", told me that my mistake was that I had followed the rules by announcing the exam date during the first week of class and listing it on the syllabus.

On the bright side, finding out about the John Birch Society turned out to be good preparation for living in Orange County, California, currently a hotbed of anti-mask pandemic activism.

Princeton's Affirmative Action Plan

You can choose whether to read this story or listen to the podcast:

The course catalog for the Princeton graduate program in the early 1980s included a statement that read something like "Princeton University has filed an Affirmative Action Plan with the Department of Education. You can see the plan in the Office of the Provost." When I read this, my reaction was "Princeton has an Affirmative Action Plan? What could it possibly say?" From what I'd seen, it looked to me as if women weren't welcome at Princeton. The idea that Princeton actually had an affirmative action plan was surprising to me.

Unable to suppress my curiosity, I phoned the office of the Provost and asked to see the plan. The secretary who answered told me that the only place I could see it was in Firestone Library. I dutifully trotted over to Firestone Library. There was no Affirmative Action Plan in the card catalog, and the librarians didn't know what I was talking about. So I went back to my office to phone again. The secretary now claimed that the plan was in the library's basement. After several trips back and forth between Firestone Library and the phone in my office, I eventually found, hidden in the depths of some level of the basement, a few disorganized sheaves of striped computer paper (the kind with holes down the sides) that contained cryptic, undocumented raw data. Each sheaf was labeled something like "Number 9 of 25" but there were only a few such sheaves; most of the data was missing, and it certainly wasn't a "Plan".

I was getting increasingly frustrated, and the Provost's secretary was getting increasingly hostile. In one phone call she asked me for the names of my Department Chair and my PhD thesis advisor. She made it clear that it was not in my best interest to pursue this.

Well, they hadn't accounted for the fact that I was a Silverberg. We're very stubborn, even when that's not in our best interest. Trying to prevent me from seeing the Plan only made me more curious to find out what they were trying to hide, and I kept pressing. I hoped that my father, a newspaper reporter who had taught me about investigative journalism, would be proud.

I reminded the Provost's secretary of the wording from the graduate catalog, which made a promise to the Department of Education that anyone at all could see the Plan in the Office of the Provost. She told me that wasn't possible; there was none there for me to see. Surely the Provost had a copy of his own Plan. Could I please see that one? Finally, she relented, and said I could only see it that afternoon. Checking my watch and seeing that it was about 4:30 pm, I rushed over to the Provost's office.

The hostile secretary gave me a large tome. She wouldn't let me photocopy any of it or use the empty table, but she grudgingly let me sit in a chair. I balanced the tome on my knees. 

Around 4:45 pm, she told me I had to start packing up to leave. She wanted to close up early for the day. Rushing through the pages, I tried to absorb as much as I could of the gist of what Princeton called its Affirmative Action Plan.

Somewhere, I still have the handwritten notes I scribbled down. I'll blame the pandemic for why I can't find them. But here's what I recall from memory.

My recollection is that the "Plan" was written with the help of Princeton's Statistics Department, and had three parts. The first part analyzed the data that the university had collected on the gender and race of its students, using a standard statistical analysis method that they were expected to use for this purpose. The university did not fare well under this analysis.

I recalled the bureaucratic paperwork process at the beginning of each academic year. Grad students were given cards on which we had to check off things including our race and gender. I remembered that I once tried to leave the race and gender boxes blank. The person who took my paperwork looked at me, shuffled through the cards until she got to the gender and race card, saw the blank boxes, and checked off "female". Annoyed, I hung around to see what she did when other people handed in their paperwork. When white men handed in their paperwork, she didn't bother to look at their race or gender boxes to see if they were blank. I walked back up to her and asked her about it, but she just shrugged. It looked to me as if Princeton wanted to make sure it got credit for all its female and minority students (but didn't bother to get accurate figures on white male students). Even fudging the figures, Princeton had a hard time making the numbers look good.

So Princeton took it up a notch. Part two of the "plan" analyzed the same (suspect) data using a different statistical method. The results still didn't look good. (It wasn't possible to make that data look good.) But it looked better.

Part three was the tour de force. In part three, the Department of Statistics came up with a brand new way to analyze data, never before used, that it created just for this data. Much of that section was a sad attempt to explain why this was a legitimate thing to do. In the end, Princeton looked a little better using this brand new method created just for this data, though not much. It all seemed like a waste of the Stat Department's time.

What struck me wasn't the questionable behavior of the university administrators (something with which I had already grown familiar). It was that the Statistics Department was in cahoots with the university to "cook the books". I expected better.

Princeton did away with its Statistics Department in 1985, the year after I graduated. Curiously, a 2013 history of the short-lived department didn't know the cause of the department's untimely demise but speculated, "It seems likely that it died of `natural causes.'" I don't really think it was killed off to cover up the department's involvement in that shameful report, though I did feel that it was a suitable punishment for its complicity.

Princeton University's Escort Service

In other stories, I've alluded to the day (April 5, 1983, to be precise) when the Princeton University Math Department's external advisory committee gave grad students an opportunity to meet them in a group. I've mentioned that the committee ignored my serious concerns, but got enthusiastic about my joke list. 

What were the more serious concerns that I told them about? Here's one.

Some of the backstory is well told in a New York Times article that appeared on November 29, 1981

(http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/nyregion/princeton-uneasy-in-wake-of-rapes.html) under the headline "Princeton uneasy in wake of rapes". Highlights include:

Since the beginning of the fall semester in early September, two teen-agers and a Princeton graduate student have been raped within a mile of the campus.

Prospect Avenue, the tree-lined home of the upper-class eating clubs, was the scene of two of the assaults - the rape of the graduate student on Oct. 22 and the attempted rape of a Princeton faculty member on Oct. 14.

The graduate student was riding her bicycle along Prospect Avenue shortly after midnight when she was struck by a car, knocking her to the ground. The driver stopped and offered to take her to a hospital, but then forced her into his car at knifepoint, bound her with electrical tape, drove her to a nearby field and raped her.

The article goes on to state that a student proposed that the university create a shuttle bus service.

"We're doing all in our power to make the Princeton campus as safe as it can be," said Alfred Terry, assistant director of security. Others are not so sure. "The university has been dragging its feet about putting locks that work on the women's bathrooms, installing emergency phones and changing the esthetic lighting to effective lighting," said Kathryn Carver, a senior and member of the student-initiated Rape Task Force.

"It's a shame that the university only gets responsive when the body count gets high enough," Miss Carver said.

Two pages later, the New York Times carried a long piece about sexual harassment that didn't show Princeton in a good light (https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/nyregion/handling-sexual-harassment.html) and gave the impression that Princeton cared more about its image than its students.

Princeton hated the adverse publicity. At first, I took the University at its word that it wanted to make the campus safer. But everything it did seemed to show that it did indeed care more about its image than its students. Below are some of my attempts to hold Princeton accountable.

The university did indeed create a shuttle bus service. The nearest stop to the math department was on the street near the front entrance to Jadwin Hall, which faced the football stadium. When it rained, the bus was full (of male students) so the driver wouldn't let me on and I had to walk home. More worrisome were that one never knew how long one would have to wait on the street in the dark, and the courtyard I had to walk across to get from Fine Hall to Jadwin Hall was unlit. My complaints about this led to the following:

The jig is up

 I've been waiting to tell stories about my Princeton experiences until I wasn't angry about them, and could write with compassion and understanding, or at least with humor. I'm afraid that's not likely to happen anytime soon (despite my best efforts at a Buddhist monastery). But perhaps my Princeton stories, such as the one below, will help to explain some of my later decisions.

I was admitted to Princeton with a graduate fellowship from the university, which Princeton took away after I was awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Like several mathematics students in the years ahead of me, I planned to use my NSF Graduate Fellowship to spend a year studying in England at the University of Cambridge, deferring my arrival in Princeton for a year. Princeton insisted that I funnel the NSF fellowship through them, since Cambridge tuition was less than the fellowship stipend, and Princeton planned to pocket the difference.

However, in my year, Cambridge significantly raised tuition on foreign students. When I forwarded Cambridge's bill to Princeton, Princeton balked. They didn't want to pay, since they wanted more of a cut. This went back and forth by snail mail throughout the year. During that time, the exchange rate turned against me, by a significant amount. What Princeton finally paid was less than Cambridge's bill. I argued it for years with both Princeton and Cambridge.

When I was a Harvard-Radcliffe undergrad, an advising office told students to always take advantage of our rights, by requesting and obtaining our records. You never know what information you'll find, and information is power. 

Sometime during my argument with Princeton about the debt to Cambridge, I asked to see my file in the Dean's office. The staff were reluctant to show it to me, but they eventually gave in. I wasn't allowed to photocopy anything, but I was permitted to take notes by hand, while balancing the file on my knees. A note from the math department Chair to the Dean about the Cambridge debt included the line "The jig is up." It pointed out that I was on to them, about their attempt to hold onto funds that they should have forwarded to Cambridge.

Even with this smoking gun, Princeton refused to pay the remaining balance.

Eventually I got tired of being in Cambridge's bad books, and I paid the debt myself.

The Playboy

The Playboy was in his 70s. I knew he was a playboy because he told me so. He boasted that he had never dated anyone older than 25 until he met his wife, whom he had met and married about 7 years earlier. He claimed she was 10 years younger than he was.

We were flying across the country, seated next to each other on a plane. I was on my way to a funeral. I flew first class since the airlines were no longer doing bereavement fares, and first class was the only thing available at short notice on frequent flyer miles.

The Playboy's father was a self-made man who built his company from scratch, and the Playboy inherited his wealth and the company. A mini-Trump. The Playboy knew he would never have to work a day in this life. From the beginning, he decided that the only thing he needed to know was how to talk to women (and get them to sleep with him). In college he attended no classes, and jumped around from one college to the next, flunking out of each one.

On his second cell phone (the one he keeps secret from his wife, which serves as his "little black book") he showed me photos of some of his girlfriends, including the one he was going to meet at Legal Sea Foods in Boston on Friday night, for dinner followed by sex at his hotel.

I made a derisive remark about how his young girlfriends were basically prostitutes who were giving him sex for money and presents. He chastised me for being so judgmental. They were nice, ordinary young women, he insisted. One was a schoolteacher. Everyone was having fun and getting something out of it. Nothing wrong with it.

The flight attendant overheard more than she wanted of our conversation. She glared at us disapprovingly.

The Playboy proudly boasted that he had never read a book in his life, and didn't intend to. He hastened to add that he knew how to read---he read contracts for the business.

I told him the story of Fermat's Last Theorem and explained the mathematical statement. I had managed to explain it to two young Japanese children with whom I didn't share a common language, so I knew I could explain it to him. Mathematics is a universal language. I told him the story of 1729, Hardy, Ramanujan, and the taxi cab, and showed him the 2 ways to write 1729 as a sum of 2 cubes. His trip included a planned reunion with his high school buddies. He said they would never believe that he spent the whole flight having a great conversation with a math professor, that he got a math lesson, and that he enjoyed it. He was looking forward to telling them all about it.

He was, in fact, quite charming.

The Playboy spoke fondly of his wife and seemed to love her. However, when he was on the road she phoned him every night to make sure he wasn't running around behind her back. He was furious that she didn't trust him. I reminded him that she was right not to trust him. He was convinced that she had no idea about his liaisons, and it was terribly unfair that she doubted him.

As an afterthought, he decided that it wasn't a problem that he told me about his girlfriends, since I didn't know his name. I didn't point out that during our conversation he had dropped his first name twice and his last name once, and his name was partly visible on the boarding pass in his seat pocket.

I knew I had to convince him to read a book. What to pick? It would have to be short and sweet, and at a child's level. Enticing and easy to read. But I also wanted something that would teach him a lesson. Even better if it were profoundly disturbing. I told him that as his teacher, I was giving him one assignment. It was to read "The Little Prince". I assured him that it was short and had lovely pictures.

A little sleuthing online afterwards not only gave me his wife's phone number, but also revealed that his wife was his age, not 10 years younger. I wonder whether she lied to him, or he lied to me. Could she have fooled him for that long? 

I fleetingly considered contacting the wife to let her know about the rendezvous at Legal Sea Foods on Friday, as a show of female solidarity, but I decided that would not be helpful (plus, the Playboy had enough resources to retaliate against me). 

I didn't contact the Playboy either, but it would be nice to know whether he did his homework and read "The Little Prince".

"Now I understand why it's trivial"

I first heard about R in the Princeton math department Common Room, when the head of the graduate admissions committee told a group of us about the students who applied that year. He said that R's application was amazing, with glowing, over-the-top letters of recommendation.

R was incredibly clever. So clever, that whenever I told him about a theorem I had proved, he immediately informed me that my result was trivial and the proof was obvious.

After R became a professor, he invited me to give a seminar talk at his university. I wondered why he had invited me, if he thought that everything I did was trivial. I decided to use the talk as an opportunity to prove to R that I could do something that wasn't obvious. So I chose to talk about a problem a co-author and I had solved where the answer was unexpected. The proof wasn't hard, but it wasn't obvious; it was a little tricky.

During my talk I asked the mathematical question, and before I gave our answer I polled the audience as to their guesses for the answer. The question was whether a certain set associated to an elliptic curve is always infinite, always finite, or whether it depends on the curve, and in that case, with what distribution? Everyone except R ventured a guess. I prodded R to commit to an answer. I wasn't going to let him off the hook. He said he had no idea. When I (rather unfairly) pressed him further, he gave a wrong guess.

At the dinner after the talk, I explained to R that I had noticed that R invariably told me my work was trivial and obvious, and that my talk was a set-up designed to prove to him that not everything I did was trivial.

R told his side of the story, which was that once he understood a proof, even one he had come up with himself, it seemed to him as if it should have always been obvious, and anyone (including himself) to whom it wasn't obvious was just being stupid. 

At the end of the dinner, R turned to me and in all seriousness remarked "Now I understand why it's trivial." I burst out laughing. R had thought about the result during the dinner, and now believed it was trivial. I wish I had asked him to elaborate, since he might have found a more conceptual proof, and I would have learned something from it.

While I had always liked R, despite his snap judgments of my work, my feelings towards him got much warmer due to a conversation we had after I moved to Orange County, California. I ran into him at the annual math meeting, and complained about my difficulty adjusting to the SoCal culture. I told him how I had been part of several small social groups for years, and yet some of the people didn't know my name, and the ones who did usually didn't care enough to even say "I noticed you haven't been coming here for the past year. We missed you. I hope everything was OK." They didn't seem to care whether I was alive or dead. In a very heartfelt way, R told me, "If you died, I would care, and it would make me very sad." It was a sweet thing to say, and reminded me that mathematicians, for all our flaws, are a community of people who care about each other.

The Threat

I was seated next to the university President at dinner, when I visited a large state university. A Dean sat across from us. The President and Dean were talking about people and university politics that I and others at the table weren't familiar with. The rest of us sat quietly, and felt left out. Trying to transform the conversation into something of interest to all of us, I began to ask questions.

The President and Dean were heatedly regaling us with the crimes of a Professor who represented the faculty union. The President claimed that the Professor had threatened her, and that his behavior was unreasonable, unethical, and illegal. I asked for details.

The threat was that if the university didn't do something that the union wanted, he would tell the faculty about it.

That was the "threat"? The President explained that by threatening to tell the faculty that she wasn't meeting his demands, the Professor was threatening her. She took it personally, and she was outraged.

I told the President that if I were her, I would be glad to know what would happen if I didn't do what the union wanted. To me, it didn't seem like a dangerous threat, it seemed like useful information that could inform her decision. He was simply pointing out what leverage he had. I thought she should be grateful to him, rather than angry.

But the President had become so invested in demonizing the Professor, that she wasn't willing to try to see things any other way.

A Tribute to John Hsia

My Ohio State University colleague John Hsia recently passed away. John was very kind to me. He was generous and nice.

Here's one example of his generosity and kindness. When I arrived at OSU, one of the Vice Chairs assigned me a horrid interior office with a connecting hole to the men's room (see the November 5, 2018 story). After I put up with it for most of an academic year, near the beginning of spring quarter John presented me with a key. Our colleague Joe Neisendorfer was taking a new job at the University of Rochester, to start in the fall. Joe wasn't teaching in the spring quarter, and had moved out of his office early. John suspected that I would stay in my vent-for-the-men's-room office forever, if we left it up to the Vice Chair (who seemed to relish demonstrating his power over me---stories for another day). John took pity on me, and asked Joe to give him his office key, so that John could give it to me. Joe kindly agreed, and I moved into his office before the Vice Chair could assign it to anyone else. The Vice Chair hated me for it, since we had gone around him. But it was worth it to get a room with a view (and no men's room fumes).

If only there were more people like John Hsia.

Leveling the playing field?

For years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been sending grant proposals out for peer review. In addition to writing an evaluation, reviewers rate the proposals “Excellent”, “Very Good”, “Good”, “Fair”, or “Poor”. Proposals need very high ratings to get funded.

X was usually a great guy, and I had a high opinion of him. So I was surprised when he told me that when he reviews proposals written by women, he gives them lower ratings than if the same proposals had been written by men. He told me that he assumed that NSF gave preference to proposals from women. By downgrading them, he believed he was leveling the playing field.

I don't know whether NSF was really giving preference to women in the 1980s or 1990s when we had that conversation, or whether it does now. But no one ever told me that they downgraded proposals by men to level the playing field in the 1960s or 1970s or earlier, when discrimination against women in reviews and elsewhere was blatant.

Mathematicians for Equal Opportunity

This article has now appeared in "Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics", Association for Women in Mathematics Series 28 (2022), Springer, 49-53. 

Princeton’s AWM Newsletter wars

I first started reading Newsletters of the Association for Women in Mathematics in Harvard’s Cabot science library when I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s. I wasn’t an AWM member, so I read the library’s copy of the Newsletter. Harvard’s history of sexism and discrimination (see for example my 2006 AWM Newsletter article Women at Harvard: Remarks at the AWM Panel “Lawrence Summers: One Year Later”) was blatant and persistent (in fact, though I attended Harvard, I wasn’t admitted to Harvard College, which only admitted men; women applied to Radcliffe College, which had a complicated and evolving relationship with Harvard), so the subjects covered in the AWM Newsletter, and the AWM’s efforts to end discrimination and counteract prejudice, struck a chord with me.

When I was a grad student at Princeton in the early 1980s, the sexism and discrimination were worse and the formal barriers to women were more recent and more extreme, compared to Harvard’s (see for example Nancy Weiss Malkiel's 2016 book “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation). Since the rent that Princeton charged me for graduate student housing was greater than the income from my graduate fellowship, I decided that I couldn’t afford the AWM dues ($5/year for students, back then) that would have given me a free subscription to the Newsletter.

I got the bright idea: “Harvard’s science library got the AWM Newsletter. Surely Princeton’s could too. That way, everyone can read it.”

I went to Princeton’s math/physics librarian with my plan. He was furious. “The AWM is a union!” he exclaimed. He told me that subscribing to the Newsletter would support a union, so he wasn’t going to do that.

Taken aback, I pointed out that his library received the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and all the AMS journals, and I argued that the AWM was no more a union than was the AMS. Perhaps overreaching (hey, I’m from Queens), I claimed that the AMS at the time was a union for men, in that speaker invitations, committee memberships, prizes, etc. favored men, so it was only fair to also subscribe to the AWM Newsletter. And the AWM Newsletter is much cheaper. I might have pointed out that it’s “for” and not “of” in “Association for Women in Mathematics”, and anyone can join. My arguments probably increased his anger. He was unswayed.

Not giving up, I next went to the department Chair with the suggestion that the math department get an institutional membership in the AWM and contribute its complimentary Newsletters to the library. Some months later I saw him in the hallway and asked for an update. He told me that the faculty had decided against it, on the grounds that the department didn’t want or need it, and it was too expensive. 

In my last year at Princeton, a “visiting committee” of mathematicians came to the math department to gather information and advise the department. The department had to give grad students an opportunity to sign up to meet with the committee. (Afterwards, I learned that the chair sent some grad students to the meeting to report back to him on who complained.) Among my suggestions for improvement, I asked that the library or department get the AWM Newsletter, so that everyone would have access to it. When they said I should ask the department, I told them I already had, and explained why the request was denied. When they asked how much an institutional membership costs, I replied “$25 a year.” They laughed at the low price, and several of them spontaneously and flamboyantly opened their wallets and threw bills on the table, in a symbolic gesture. But they soon picked up their money and placed it back in their wallets.

I learned later that the Princeton library received the AMS Notices and Transactions not through a library subscription, but by piggybacking off the individual member subscription of a professor who gave his complimentary copies to the library (a practice frowned on by the AMS). Someone on the faculty was an AWM member and there was some talk of his giving his Newsletters to the library, but I don’t think it happened, and I can’t imagine that the librarian would have accepted it.

Encouraging fairness, transparency, professional behavior, and accountability

Sometime in the 1990s a colleague told me that she decided not to nominate me for a position in the AWM leadership, because I didn’t support some of what the AWM does. Indeed, while I am very supportive of the AWM’s mission to promote equal opportunity, I have qualms about AWM programs that are restricted to or favor women or girls.

When I recently was made an AWM Fellow, I came across the citation for me on the Internet. It began “For her outstanding research in number theory and deep commitment to the promotion of women in mathematics . . .” My immediate thought was “But that’s not accurate and I don’t want it on the website!” I asked for “deep commitment to the promotion of women in mathematics” to be replaced with “deep commitment to the promotion of fairness and equal opportunity”. Everyone graciously agreed to change it.

The explanation I gave for my request was: 

“I very strongly believe in and I have devoted much of my attention towards the AWM mission ‘to promote equal opportunity’. I have always had qualms about ‘the promotion of women and girls in mathematics’, and I have qualms about many women-only initiatives, since I don’t believe that 2 wrongs make a right, and I don’t believe in ‘separate but equal’. I’m also concerned that such initiatives will hurt women in the long run.”

I would like professional organizations and communities to be more welcoming and inclusive, not less so. And does the AWM really want to be in the business of deciding who is female and who isn’t? The AWM’s programs and prizes that are restricted to or favor women or girls seem incompatible with the AWM’s commitment to equal opportunity and equal treatment, and incompatible with the AWM’s Statement of Welcoming Environment, announced in 2013, which says in particular “the AWM is committed to the promotion of equality of opportunity and treatment for all AWM members and participants in AWM-sponsored events, regardless of gender, gender identity or expression, ... or any other reason not related to scientific merit.”

How does favoring women hurt women? It breeds resentment that will eventually backfire against women, and it devalues women. It reinforces the pernicious stereotype that women are intellectually inferior, and can’t achieve at the same level as men without extra help.

Especially problematic is when one favors one’s own group. Favoring people who remind us of ourselves has been part of the problem. It’s something that the AWM in its early days fought against. I think that all of us should be wary of promoting policies or advocating for programs that favor our own group, or that disproportionately favor ourselves.

One justification for programs that are restricted to or favor women is that such initiatives will help women achieve a “critical mass” of at least 30% of the community, which will enable women to have a voice. However, there will always be groups that (unlike women) are only a small minority of the population as a whole. Shouldn’t we learn how to treat everyone fairly, even when they belong to a group that is too small a percentage of the general population to expect to achieve a critical mass? Small groups are at a disadvantage when larger groups get favored for whatever reason.

I strongly believe in fairness. I support efforts to eliminate discrimination and artificial barriers, to make people aware of unconscious (and conscious) bias and help them counteract it, and to hold people accountable. When I give (wanted or unwanted) advice to people in positions of power, I sometimes say: 

• Many problems could be avoided if people simply behaved professionally.   (We like to think that our colleagues are our friends. But we have a professional relationship with our coworkers, and we have an obligation to behave professionally. Sometimes, all it takes  for people to improve their behavior is to ask themselves “Is this professional? Is this ethical? Is this legal?”) 
• Train faculty in best practices for hiring, promotion, admission of students, and teaching.   (My university has “best practices” for hiring, but there are faculty, hiring committees, and department chairs who aren’t aware of them.) 
• Put in place good practices, policies, and rules, and hold people accountable when they violate them.   (People need to have good options for how to get problems fixed. And they need convincing evidence that if they report a problem, things will get better rather than worse.) 
• Make the rules of the game clear, don’t change the rules in the middle of the game, and ensure that we all have an equal opportunity to play the game and win (whether the game is a promotion, position, prize, grant, or other professional reward).   (There is often an “inner circle” with access to information that the rest of us don’t have. The people in the inner circle know the rules, and know which rules and deadlines they can break and get away with. That gives them an unfair advantage. I’ve often seen this with hiring, when the public criteria given in the job ad are quite different from the secret criteria, or the real criteria for the job. People in the right circles know the real criteria and have an advantage.)

The AWM and other organizations play an important role in helping the mathematical community achieve these goals. I would like such efforts to continue and to increase.

By the way, despite my friend’s concerns about my compatibility with the AWM, in 2005 the AWM Nominating Committee informed me that I was “enthusiastically suggested as a candidate for the AWM Executive Committee”. I ran in the election, with the following statement:

“I believe that the reason I was asked to run for the Executive Committee of the AWM is my strong interest in working towards equal opportunity.  We can work to accomplish this by increasing fairness and openness in our profession. We are not there yet, and have a long way to go. I believe that making information widely accessible will help the mathematics and academic communities move away from the traditional old boy network way of operating. I hope that the AWM will play a supportive role in helping the people in our communities learn to behave professionally, fairly, and legally. I would like to see the AWM become a helpful resource for departments and universities that would like to change the way they do business so as to insure that (1) the best people are selected, and women and minorities are not overlooked, and (2) all of their members are treated fairly, supportively, and with respect.”

I was elected, and served. The AWM has been welcoming to diverse viewpoints, and I hope it stays that way!

Mathematicians for Inclusion

The 50th anniversary of the AWM might be an appropriate time to think deeply about the AWM’s purpose and goals, and revisit its programs, and perhaps even its name, as it moves into its next phase.

With the proliferation of gender identities, I wonder whether “women” is still a useful label for a professional organization, and whether a more inclusive title should be considered. Should the name “Association for Women in Mathematics” eventually be replaced with “Mathematicians for Equal Opportunity”? Or “Mathematicians for Inclusion”?

I would prefer that the AWM be about fairness and justice, not about being for one group. Is the AWM a union, or a social club, or a professional society? Was the Princeton librarian right? 

I’m not objecting to freedom of association. I thought that Harvard was wrong to punish students for joining single-gender clubs (sororities, fraternities, etc.) that were not officially affiliated with the university. But I don’t think that government funding should go towards discriminatory practices, and I would like the universities, communities, and organizations that I’m a part of to be welcoming.

Rather than making decisions based on who our friends are, or on who reminds us of ourselves, or on quotas, let’s figure out what we’re trying to achieve, and what will get us there.

Gender Neutrality

In 1979 I needed to send a letter to someone on the University of Cambridge staff who signed a letter to me using the style "J. Smith". I realized that I didn't know the gender of the person I was writing to, so I couldn't write. At that time, the correct salutations were "Dear Mr. Smith," "Dear Miss Smith," "Dear Mrs. Smith," or perhaps "Dear Ms. Smith". For my letter, the gender of the recipient was completely irrelevant. I shouldn't have needed to know it. I don't remember what I did (an Englishman told me that Smith was undoubtedly male), but eventually I decided to adopt the style "Dear J. Smith" for most such letters. At that time it sounded jarring, and people thought it was strange.

I remember the separate "Help Wanted — Male" and "Help Wanted — Female" sections for job ads in newspapers. It was just "how it's done".

As a little kid, I felt strongly that we shouldn't use gendered pronouns. Everyone sould be called by the same pronoun. There already was a gender-neutral pronoun, namely "it". I didn't see why we couldn't use that. Someone gently explained to me that people would be offended if I called them "it". I didn't understand why. They were even offended when I referred to their pets as "it". Your pet is very cute. But do I really need to know your gerbil's gender? I'm glad that the "singular they" is gaining acceptance for generic he/she, though I'm not convinced it's the best solution when applied to a particular person. Perhaps we need a different word. I'm still rooting for "it".

I try to write in a gender-neutral way when gender isn't relevant (though I often fail, since old habits die hard). The more I do it, the easier it gets. Spending a short time thinking about it usually leads to a version that's objectively better written.

Recently I learned that a university changed the title of its "Men of Modern Mathematics" poster to "Women & Men of Modern Mathematics", and attached information about some female mathematicians. I was disappointed by this choice of title, especially with today's greater awareness of people who are non-binary. They could have changed it to "People of Modern Mathematics". Or better, just "Mathematicians". Or perhaps "Famous mathematicians" (given that the poster doesn't depict a representative sample of mathematicians). Personally, I'd rather focus on the mathematics, not the people.

At the Q&A after a Law School talk about same sex marriage (shortly before it was legal), I suggested to the speaker that proponents of same sex marriage encourage doctors to simply omit the sex of newborn babies on birth certificates. Why does the state have a right to know someone's sex? I don't see a compelling reason. (This is already a problem with intersex babies.) Is anyone really going to verify people's sex before issuing them a marriage license? That seems like excessive government interference, which is contrary to the views of many opponents of same sex marriage.

I'm amused by the anger of opponents of gender neutral language (as in the comments section of this article in the Washington Post). If the issue is as unimportant as they say, why do they spend so much time attacking it, and why do they feel so threatened? I'm hoping that with the proliferation of gender identities and pronouns, even these opponents will opt for gender neutrality as a simpler solution.

I don't like labels, and I don't want people to be tempted to treat me differently based on stereotypes or preconceived notions about certain groups. When my gender isn't relevant, I'd like it to be ignored. I joke that a major advantage of a PhD degree is so that we can address people with gender-neutral salutations, without needing to know their genders.

The Dispatch Test

The Dean gave a short speech to the faculty at a reception at Ohio State University's Faculty Club. One line really struck me. He said "We need to make it look as if we care about teaching."

I went up to the Dean afterwards and asked, "Do you mean `We need to care about teaching' or `We need to make it look as if we care about teaching'?"

The Dean replied "We need to make it look as if we care about teaching."

On a different occasion, the Dean told the math faculty that the Ohio State University made its decisions using the "Dispatch test". Administrators ask themselves "How will this look if it appears in the Columbus Dispatch?" which was the local newspaper. Not "is this the right thing to do?" but "how will it look in the press, if reporters find out about it?"

An official at my current university confided in me that the only way things will improve at the university is to go to the media, since that's the only thing the administrators will listen to.

How to get admitted to the Harvard Business School

One year, while I was visiting the Harvard math department, I was a member of the Senior Common Room at one of the Harvard Houses (i.e., dorms). Another member was occasionally on the admissions committee of the Harvard Business School. She told the following story.

The Harvard Business School received an application from an undergrad, let's call her C, from a very prestigious university that I'll call CountryClub U. The application form asked the applicants to relate the achievement of which they were most proud.

C's achievement was that she seduced the President of CountryClub U.  This was no small feat. She explained the obstacles in her path and how she overcame them. For example, President D was married and didn't want to have an affair. He especially didn't want to have an affair with a student. C found a way to become part of a group that played tennis with President D, and she used that to escalate the relationship. The story went on.

Another visiting professor and I listened in horror. At the end, we said "So she wasn't accepted to the Business School, was she?"

"Of course they accepted her!" exclaimed the storyteller, surprised by our reaction. "She decided what she wanted, had a well-thought-out plan, and followed it through successfully. That's exactly what the Harvard Business School is looking for!"

Later, someone I knew who was well-connected at CountryClub U told me that CountryClub U's Board of Trustees gave President D an ultimatum---either resign or end the affair. I think that C got the better deal. I never learned C's name, so I can only guess what she did after she got into the Harvard Business School.